Kraken
The discovery of the kraken, now called the giant squid, is often cited as a cautionary tale for skeptics who are certain that a particular mysterious beast cannot exist. Until the late nineteenth century, scientists believed that this creature existed only in Nordic legend, where it was described as a many-armed sea monster of such enormous proportions that it was able to pull sailing ships down to the bottom of the ocean. In fact, whenever sailors would claim that they had seen a kraken, scholars would ridicule them.
For example, in 1861, when the captain and crew of a French gunboat, the Alecton, claimed that they had harpooned and killed a kraken near the Canary Islands but had been unable to get the body aboard their ship, members of the French Academy of Science implied that the sailors were liars or fools. Scientists also scoffed at the work of a Danish zoologist named Johan Japetus Steenstrup, who, in 1857, published a supposedly scientific description of a kraken based on an examination of animal parts that had washed up on various beaches.
Then, in the 1870s, several whole creatures fitting his description of the kraken washed up on beaches in Newfoundland and Labrador, and scientists were forced to acknowledge that the kraken was both real and large. One of the Newfoundland creatures was estimated to be 60 feet (18.3m) long and up to 10 feet (3m) across, with tentacles 35 feet (10.7m) long.
Today the kraken remains hard to find, and scientists are still not sure about its behaviour or how big it can grow.
SOURCE:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning