Excerpt from the book Animals Evolution Avoided. This book describes 40 animals that ought to exist but don’t, because I made them up.

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The Spectacled Squid is rarely seen by human eyes as it normally spends most of its life at depths of at least 5,000 feet in the world’s major oceans. Occasionally, parts of these squids wash ashore on remote islands in the Pacific. It’s thought that a complete Spectacled Squid has never been found, because Sperm Whales will have eaten most of the squid after it dies and before the body reaches the surface of the water.

From the pieces that have been seen, the eyes of the squid are about fourteen inches across with a red circle running around the outside of each eye, giving it the spectacled appearance. The tentacles can be 15 metres in length, almost a metre wide for most of their length, and each has a five-inch sucker at the very end. The eight arms can vary in length from two to five metres and are almost half a metre wide.

The most surprising aspect of this squid’s life is that it never swims in a straight line, but rather follows the path of a bell curve through the water. This can occasionally mean the squid will come quite close to the surface of the water before heading down to the very bottom of the ocean 20,000 feet or so below.

If a Spectacled Squid sees a boat or even part of a ship, the squid will attack and try and drag the object under the water using its two longer tentacles. This might explain why some trawlers disappear completely and are never found, especially in the Bermuda Triangle. Scientists believe that Spectacled Squids do attack large whales, weighing up to 50 tons, for food and so it wouldn’t be too much of a problem for this squid to drag a small trawler underwater.