Krakens were popular in the tall tales of marine adventurers. They remained there until the 1800s, merely fiction and speculation, until a humungous mollusk-ean carcass washed up on a beach in England under the nose of the British Naturalist Society. After that fateful event, the Kraken was no longer a myth, but a creature known to science as the giant squid, Architeuthis Dux. I still prefer the name Kraken. It has a much more ferocious ring to it, and seems to fit the diabolical intentions of this knitted creature much more than the timid and slow-moving Achiteuthis!