A good fossil squid is hard to find. The invertebrates are too squishy to leave much behind, and only in truly exceptional circumstances do paleontologists get to see much more than the chitinous supports the cephalopods kept on the inside. Octopus are even more confounding. Without any remnants of an internal shell, the eight-armed quick-change artists are like prehistoric ghosts. But do not despair. The jaws of ancient coleoids give us reason for hope, and have just revealed a pair of prehistoric cephalopods that may have rivaled today’s ocean giants in size.

Described by Kazushige Tanabe and colleagues in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the two lower jaws were