Too many and too few tentacles

"It is very rare in nature to find octopuses with extra tentacles, but in December 1998, a common octopus was captured in Matoya Bay, Japan, which had a whopping 96 tentacles.

The unusual octopus had the normal 8 appendages attached to the body, but each one of those branched out to form the extra tentacles. The specimen survived for five months after its capture, and even laid eggs, which hatched into normal 8 tentacled octopi. Upon its death, the 96-tentacled octopus was preserved and now remains on permanent display at the Shima Marineland Aquarium in Shima, Japan.

This was not the first instance of an over-tentacled octopus specimen being displayed in Japan...."

Read more - and see more photos! - at Cryptomundo.com

Looks like those guys should lend some of their extra tentacles to this guy...

Harryhausen producer Charles Schneer dies

Mon Jan 26, 2009 7:17am GMT

...Schneer had the idea of a making a film about a giant octopus that pulls down the Golden Gate Bridge and was introduced to Harryhausen by an Army friend. Harryhausen had honed his craft with Willis O'Brien, who, in the 1930s, was responsible for the most famous of all stop-motion creations, 1933's "King Kong."

Schneer and Harryhausen then made "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which gave Schneer his first credit as a producer. Keeping with Katzman's low-budget mantra, however, the film's octopus had only six tentacles instead of the customary eight.

As Harryhausen says in his autobiography "Film Fantasy Scrapbook": "Two tentacles less to build and animate during the long process of stop-motion photography did save quite a bit of time. And in Hollywood, time is money." ...

Read more at Reuters UK