Tentacle Mysteries

"Bold, funny, surprising, and painstakingly accurate, Tentacle Mysteries has enough fab facts to occupy nine brains! Whether you're a child or an adult, an ardent ceph lover or merely cephalopod-curious, you will love this book!"—Sy Montgomery, author of Secrets of the Octopus

Perfect for STEM bookshelves comes a fascinating celebration of cephalopods past, present, and future.

Did you know that Earth’s first giant animal—Endoceras giganteum—lived two hundred million years before the first dinosaur? Or that some of the most common fossils are not trilobites or tyrannosaurs but coiled seashells called ammonites?

These marvelous extinct animals belonged to the same group as modern squid and octopus: the cephalopods. Although cephalopods are twice as ancient as dinosaurs and every bit as fascinating, people have only recently started paying attention to them.

In Tentacle Mysteries, author and illustrator Danna Staaf brings readers on a time-traveling underwater voyage of discovery. Readers will learn:

• How cephalopods evolved over hundreds of millions of years (from shelled ancestors to modern octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses).
• How fossils and rock layers are used to reconstruct Earth’s past and major mass extinctions.
• How cephalopod “superpowers” work in simple biological terms (jet propulsion, ink, camouflage, buoyancy, hearts, blood).
• How science is done in real life and how different cultures have interpreted cephalopod fossils and “sea monsters,” and so much more!

Danna Staaf is a freelance writer and science communicator with special expertise in cephalopods. Her writing has appeared in Science, KQED, and Atlas Obscura. Danna’s interest in cephalopods began with a childhood visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she saw her first giant octopus. She has a Ph.D. in marine biology from Stanford University. Danna has created several science outreach programs for schools, including the popular biology program Squids4Kids. She has spoken at dozens of venues, including the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, public libraries, universities and schools at every grade level. She lives in San Jose with her partner, two children, a cat—and lots of cephalopod fossils. She is the author of Monarchs of the Sea and The Lady and the Octopus. Tentacle Mysteries is her first children’s book.