Claim:
An image shared in October 2025 depicted a real “little sea monster” that appears to have “teeth like a human.”
Rating:
Context
Although the squid may appear at first glance to have “teeth like a human,” in reality the feature consists of “circular, folded lips, of which only the upper and lower portions can be seen.”
In October 2025, a person on Facebook posted an image (archived) of what they described as a “little sea monster” with “teeth like a human.” The attached image showed a pinkish creature with tentacles around a circular center that appeared to have an open mouth filled with top and bottom teeth.
It wasn’t the first time people shared the image to social media with similar descriptions. It was also posted to Facebook in 2023 (archived) and 2013 (archived), Reddit in 2018 (archived), Threads (archived), X (archived) and TikTok (archived).
(Facebook account Marty Kim)
The image was a real photo of a real sea animal. However, those “human-like teeth” were actually lips.
A black-and-white version of the photo first appeared on the sixth page of a research paper published online in 2007. The researchers described the animal in the photo as a deep sea squid species called Promachoteuthis sulcus. It was one of three newly described species of cephalopods — a group of animals that includes squids and octopi — highlighted in the paper.
Two of the paper’s three authors, Richard Young and Michael Vecchione, put a full-color version of the photo on the squid’s page on the Tree of Life Web Project, a collaborative effort by biologists and nature enthusiasts to provide information about different groups of organisms.
Later in 2007, the pair of researchers updated the squid’s Tree of Life page again and expanded on the caption for the photo of its mouth. The new caption read, “The squid seems to have a set of dentures. The ‘dentures’ are the circular, folded lips, of which only the upper and lower portions can be seen. The lips surround the beaks which are not visible in this photograph.”
Beaks are common among cephalopods, including squids.
The researchers wrote that the photographed squid was the only specimen of its species found at the time. This particular specimen was found in March 1971 when a trawling vessel captured it from a little more than a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, but it wasn’t described until more than 30 years later in the hopes that the researchers might find another example of the species. Snopes could not find any documentation of additional specimens of this squid species found since the paper’s 2007 publication.
