As part of the National Shell Museum renovation process, our Giant Squid model will be receiving a facelift. The squid was added to the Museum’s Great Hall of Shell in the late 1990s, there is inevitable wear and tear, and so much more has been learned about the species (Architeuthis dux) in the last two decades.
The model will receive a new paint job, arms will be re-attached, and new, more realistic eyes will be added. Giant Squids may attain 40 feet in length, and their complex, vertebrate-like eyes can reach 10 inches in diameter (for comparison, a basketball is about 9.5 inches in diameter.) Coincidentally, last week Smithsonian Magazine published a brief online article about a Giant Squid eye preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Read the article here.
