Sea monster

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses of "Sea Monsters", see Sea Monsters (disambiguation).
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
.

Sea monsters are beings from folklore believed to dwell in the sea and are often imagined to be of immense size. Marine monsters can take many forms, including sea dragons, sea serpents, or tentacled beasts. They can be slimy and scaly and are often pictured threatening ships or spouting jets of water. The definition of a "monster" is subjective; further, some sea monsters may have been based on scientifically accepted creatures, such as whales and types of giant and colossal squid.

Sightings and legends

Plate c. 1544 depicting various sea monsters; compiled from the Carta marina.
Sea serpent reported by Hans Egede, Bishop of Greenland, in 1734
A sea monster depicted in mid-Atlantic in Petrus Plancius' 1592 map of New France.

Sea monster accounts are found in virtually all cultures that have contact with the sea. For example,

St. John's, Newfoundland (1583) for England.[1] Another account of an encounter with a sea monster comes from July 1734. Hans Egede, a Dano-Norwegian missionary, reported that on a voyage to Godthåb on the western coast of Greenland he observed:[2]

a most terrible creature, resembling nothing they saw before. The monster lifted its head so high that it seemed to be higher than the

mainmast
. The head was small and the body short and wrinkled. The unknown creature was using giant fins which propelled it through the water. Later the sailors saw its tail as well. The monster was longer than our whole ship.

Ellis (1999) suggested the Egede monster might have been a giant squid.

There is a

Tlingit
legend about a sea monster named Gunakadeit (Goo-na'-ka-date) who brought prosperity and good luck to a village in crisis, people starving in the home they made for themselves on the southeastern coast of Alaska.

Other reports are known from the

Tropical cyclones
such as hurricanes or typhoons may also be another possible origin of sea monsters.

In 1892, Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, then director of the Royal Zoological Gardens at The Hague, saw the publication of his The Great Sea Serpent, which suggested that many sea serpent reports were best accounted for as a previously unknown giant, long-necked pinniped.

It is likely that many other reports of sea monsters are misinterpreted sightings of shark and whale carcasses (see below), floating kelp, logs or other flotsam such as abandoned rafts, canoes and fishing nets.

Alleged carcasses

gigantic octopus
.

Sea monster corpses have been reported since recent antiquity (Heuvelmans 1968). Unidentified carcasses are often called

DNA testing confirmed that an alleged sea monster washed up on Newfoundland in August 2001, was a sperm whale.[3]

Another modern example of a "sea monster" was

the Zuiyō Maru carcass
revealed a comparable phenomenon in decomposing basking shark carcasses, which lose most of the lower head area and the dorsal and caudal fins first, making them resemble a plesiosaur.

In May 2017, The Guardian published an article claiming a giant sea monster's corpse was found in Indonesia, and also published an alleged photograph of "it."[4]

Example

First fontana dei mostri marini, Florence, Italy
Second fontana dei mostri marini, Florence, Italy

Older reports

Sea monsters reported first or second hand include:

Newer reports

See also: Lake monster

In fiction

See also

References

  1. ^ Edward Haies: Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage To Newfoundland, 1583 In the fifth section after the notice "Footnote 11: Stephen Parmenius"
  2. ^ J. Mareš, Svět tajemných zvířat, Prague, 1997
  3. ^ Carr, S.M., H.D. Marshall, K.A. Johnstone, L.M. Pynn & G.B. Stenson 2002. How To Tell a Sea Monster: Molecular Discrimination of Large Marine Animals of the North Atlantic. Biological Bulletin 202: 1-5.
  4. ^ "Do sea monsters exist? Yes, but they go by another name … | Jules Howard". the Guardian. 2017-05-18. Retrieved 2022-01-28.
  5. ^ Adomnan of Iona. Life of St Columba. Penguin books, 1995
  6. BEC-TERO (in Thai). 2015-11-25. Archived from the original
    on 2019-02-02. Retrieved 2017-06-25.
  7. ^ a b c d "Monsters". Skrímslasetrið Bíldudal. 2013-04-09. Retrieved 2018-02-04.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sea monsters.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sea_monster&oldid=1220609227"