Its name promises a bloodthirsty monster lurking in the abyss, cape and all. But the vampire squid from hell sucks no blood, lives nowhere near hell, and is not even a true squid. Few creatures so completely shatter the expectations their name creates.

This episode dives into a football-sized living fossil that survives in one of the most suffocating environments on Earth. We trace its discovery, its baffling anatomy, the brilliant biochemical adaptations that let it endure near-zero oxygen, and the surprising truth about what it actually eats, plus the modern threat it cannot escape.

• How the 1898 Valdivia expedition shattered the abyssus theory and pulled up the first specimen from the deep
• Why it is a phylogenetic relict, the sole survivor of its own order and an evolutionary orphan among octopuses
• The adaptatio ...