Biologists who inspected the squid said it weighed some 550 pounds (250 kilograms) and stretched 26 feet (8 meters) from head to tentacle—about as long as a school bus.
But the beast might have been even longer when it was alive, because the tentacles appeared to be badly damaged.
“It’s a whopper,” Genefor Walker-Smith, curator at the Tasmanian Museum, told the Reuters news service.
Another giant squid bearing similar injuries washed up on a Tasmanian beach in 2002. Scientists at the time suspected that the wounds were the result of a raucous sexual encounter, suggesting that giant squid may breed nearby.
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