Cephalopod size the original tissue samples—together with those of other similar carcasses—showed conclusively that they were all masses of the collagenous matrix of whale blubber (Pierce "et al.", 1995; 2004). Cephalopods of enormous size have featured prominently in fiction (see Garcin & Raynal, 2011; Barrère, 2017). Some of the best known examples include the giant squid from Jules Verne's 1870 novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and its various film adaptations; the giant octopus from the 1955 monster movie "It Came from Beneath the Sea"; and the giant squid from Peter Benchley's 1991 novel "Beast" and the TV film adaptation of
Captain Nemo the January Uprising; but Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire, and had Verne obscure Nemo's motivation in the first book. In the second book of "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", Nemo comes close to revealing his Indian ancestry, though this is not obvious except in retrospect, where he saves a Ceylonese pearl-fisher in the Gulf of Mannar. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was written between 1869 and 1870 and records the voyages of the "Nautilus" between 1866 and 1868. "The Mysterious Island" was written