OK so this is one of my favorite kinds of stories, the kind where humans spend YEARS chasing something the ocean keeps hiding from them and then finally, finally, get the goods.

For basically all of modern history nobody had ever seen a giant squid alive. Dead ones? Sure. Washed-up ones, ones pulled from sperm whale stomachs, sad pale blobs on beaches. But the actual animal, alive, doing its thing in the deep dark? Never. The giant squid was basically the Loch Ness Monster except real, a genuine sea monster science could confirm existed but could not, you know, catch on camera.

So in 1997 researchers got creative. They strapped cameras to sperm whales. SPERM WHALES. Because sperm whales are basically the giant squid's only predator the idea was ride along with the thing that hunts the monster and eventually the monster shows up. Which is genius and also completely unhinged, like bolting a GoPro to a lion and hoping it walks you past a unicorn.

And... it didn't work. Not fully anyway. The whales dove, the cameras rolled, the squid stayed invisible. Seven more years of nothing while everyone involved presumably slowly lost their minds.

Then in 2004 a team led by Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan's National Science Museum dropped a baited camera line down about 900 meters off the Ogasawara Islands and there it was. A giant squid, all eight arms and two feeding tentacles, came up and attacked the bait. It hung on for over four hours. When they finally hauled it up part of a tentacle came with it, actual physical proof attached to actual footage.

The photos made news all over the world and you can read the full rundown over at MSN. Seven years of whale-mounted cameras and deep-sea lines, all for four hours of one animal refusing to let go of lunch.

And here's the part I can't stop thinking about. The giant squid can be up to 40 feet long. It has the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, eyeballs the size of dinner plates, evolved to catch the faint silhouettes of predators in water so deep that sunlight basically doesn't exist. It was never hiding from us on purpose. it was just living at crushing depths in permanent darkness, and we spent centuries telling stories about it because we couldn't follow it down there.

Kubodera's team later captured the first video of a live giant squid in its natural habitat too so the saga continued. Every time we get a better look the monster gets a little less monstrous and a lot more magnificent.

Seven years. Whale cameras. A bait line in the dark. And the ocean finally blinked. Just watch the footage, is all I'm saying.