9 'Amazing Facts' That Are Totally Untrue

1. There Was A Triassic Kraken That Ate Dinosaurs And Made Art With Their Bones

Well, were this a fact, it would certainly be an amazing one.

Back in 2011, a paleontologist called Mark McMenamin discovered the remains of an Ichthyosaur. Nothing unusual about that, but the strange thing was that the bones of the creature's spine were arranged in a oddly geometric fashion that looked a lot like the tentacle of a giant cephalopod .

McMenamin's theory was that they had been arranged like that by some kind of enormous prehistoric kraken as a kind of self-portrait. Modern octopuses are known to create "gardens" (yes, like the song), but these are more like piles of rubble than works of art.

So, was there a self-aware cephalopod preying on marine reptiles and creating grisly artworks on the sea bed? Probably not.

The "tiled" pattern formed by the vertebrae is actually a perfectly reasonable, stable way for the bones to arrange themselves on the seabed after the animal decomposed.

Sorry Cthulhu fans, looks like that one's still a pipe dream.