Cephalopod Atlas: Stunning, Sensual Illustrations from the World’s First Encyclopedia of Octopus and Squid Wonders from the Ocean Depths

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Ravishing otherworldly wonders of the cosmos beneath the surface, from the first expedition to prove that life exists in the depths.

“While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie,” naturalist Sy Montgomery wrote in her breathtaking inquiry into how Earth’s most alien creature illuminates the wonders of consciousness. “To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege… an uplink to universal consciousness.”

A century before her, and decades before the great marine biologist, conservation pioneer, and poetic science writer Rachel Carson invited the popular imagination undersea for the first time through the valve of science — the fathoming that gave rise to the environmental movement — the German marine biologist Carl Chun (October 1, 1852–April 11, 1914) led a pioneering deep-sea expedition that upended, with the most spectacular findings, the long-held belief that life could not exist below 300 fathoms.

In the summer of 1898, Chun and his team embarked on what became known as the Valdivia expedition, plunging below 500 fathoms — depths the British-led Challenger expedition, which had laid the foundation of oceanography a quarter century earlier, had failed to reach — and emerging eight months later with marvels beyond the wildest human imaginings and the most daring scientific speculations, creatures too strange and otherworldly even for Jules Verne’s fantastical worlds: cosmoses of bioluminescent fish, swimmers navigating the inky blackness of the depths with senses other than sight, fleshy pulsating supernovae of crimson, gilled and frilled and tentacled wonders that seemed to belong to the “other spheres” Whitman imagined when he contemplated “the world below the brine.”

Chun spent the remainder of his life bringing the world’s awed attention to the unfathomed wonderland he had discovered, in twenty-four rigorously detailed volumes, some featuring arresting, almost erotic illustrations by the artist Friedrich Wilhelm Winter — none more arresting than those found in the 1910 treasure Cephalopod Atlas, a surviving copy of which has been digitized by the wonderful Biodiversity Library.

Among Winter’s stunning, sensual illustrations — which I have restored and made available as prints, benefiting Greenpeace and their inspired endeavor to protect the increasingly human-savaged habitats of these living wonders — is one of a creature Chun was the first to describe: a small, black cephalopod with branchial hearts and a light gonad that appears to shine just above its stomach. He named it Vampyroteuthis infernalis, “vampire squid from hell.”

Complement with an animated primer on what makes the octopus consciousness so extraordinary and a little boy’s disarming case against eating octopuses (I’ll take the PSA opportunity here to remind folks that “octopus” comes from Greek, not from Latin; the correct plural is therefore “octopuses,” not “octopi”), then revisit British artist Sarah Stone’s trailblazing natural history paintings of exotic and endangered species from the previous century, French artist Paul Sougy’s vintage scientific diagrams of plants and animals from the following century, and Sy Montgomery’s lovely contemporary meditation on how to be a good creature.

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