The deep sea is made almost entirely out of wrong. It seems everything that lives more than a few thousand feet below the water's placid surface was concocted by the maddest of the old gods on his worst day. For example, this little miracle, which takes the worst and most repulsive features of both worms and squids and concocts something even more heinous than the sum of its already quite heinous parts.
Discovered over a mile under the surface of the Celebes Sea between Indonesia and the Philippines, this 4-inch cutie is technically known as Teuthidodrilus samae, but its friends call it the squidworm. If it had any. Which it obviously doesn't.
Seriously, look at that goddamned face. Why are there tentacles coming out of it, why are those tentacles as long as its actual body, and why are some of them curly? The answer to all of those questions is, of course, a faint, high-pitched scream.
Apparently one of the Great Old Ones took a selfie.
Well, almost.
Those face-tentacles actually serve a real purpose beyond ensuring that you never eat calamari again. Namely, helping the worm to breathe -- with an extra few tentacles reserved for eating delicious marine snow, which generally consists of "fecal material, dead animals, and cast off mucus."
Oh, and there are also six pairs of feathers buried in that hot mess that serve as its nose for reasons God forgot just as soon as the glue-high wore off. Scientists noted that squidworms have both "seabed-dwelling and free-swimming characteristics," meaning they inhabit the ill-defined space between the sea floor and the surface. A sort of oceanic purgatory, if you will. This suggests that the squidworm may be a transitional species, evolving as we speak toward securing a more permanent ecological niche, whatever that may be.
We're going to go ahead and assume it's your soul.
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