FRONTIERS OF ZOOLOGY Dale A. Drinnon has been a researcher in the field of Cryptozoology for the past 30+ years and has corresponded with Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson. He has a degree in Anthropology from Indiana University and is a freelance artist and writer. Motto: "I would rather be right and entirely alone than wrong in the company with all the rest of the world"--Ambroise Pare', "the father of modern surgery", in his refutation of fake unicorn horns.
Artwork by Sir Peter Scott depicting hypothetical Loch Ness plesiosaurs, 1975.
Submitted by Scott Mardis
The top figure in the original illustration was too dark and had to be left off.. I find these to be in good agreement with my general model except for the nonappearance of a midline-dorsal fleshy crest or fringe here, and the base of the neck has less of a taper to it in this version, which in my model performs the function of a shock absorber for the neck while swimming forward. For mechanical reasons something like that will be important to the functioning of a living animal. The small size of the head and the thinness of the forward portion of the neck are indeed close to the statistical averages here, a head two feet long and a neck a foot thick behind the head being typical proportions for a 40 foot animal (Halve that for a 20 foot animal, and at the current time I think 20 to 40 feet long is a sound estimate for the standard size in these animals. The smaller end of the size range would be the females and the larger end of size estimates would be the males, and more inexact estimates of the size at 150% to 200% of the standard are common in some areas, such as at high seas, where size estimates tend to be less accurate generally. That yields 30 to 60 feet long at 150% and 40 to 80 feet long at 200% of standard size estimations, and these correspond to the basic size range estimations for "Longnecks" and "Merhorses" as given by Bernard Heuvelmans in In The Wake of the Sea Serpents)
Statements made about sizes and proportions are the end products of an exhaustive study I made while I was with the SITU and had access to Sanderson's files: the statistical analysis included every known report of Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters at the time and the final results were submitted to the SITU in 1980 in the form of a 100 page report that was never published. I still have a draft of the 100 page report. The reports were taken all together as a whole and then again in various subcategories, including reports from each lake or series of lakes, and from geographic subsections of the sea and sea coast, and as an evaluation of Heuvelmans' categories from In The Wake of the Sea Serpents as measured one against the others. This study found a uniformity between most reports and a general agreement between the reports in each of Heuvelmans' categories, but resulted in the unexpected result that nearly all "String of buoys" sightings were probably due to wave effects, and that this category was the largest one for "Unknowns" worldwide. The results for the remaining sea-serpents in general, the Loch Ness Monster, Champ of Lake Champlain, the Heuvelmans category of Longnecks, and even the Patagonian Plesiosaurs, were all closely similar. Counter to Heuvelmans there was not any good reason to consider Longnecks to be tailless, tails still featured in about 10% of the reports, a proportion similar to the Loch Ness Monster reports: and while the longnecked section of Merhorses was also similar to the Longnecks, there were also clearly different kinds of Merhorses differentiated by the length of the necks. One subsection of Merhorse reports surprisingly turned out to be the proper size and proportions to match elephant seals after the statistics were compiled. "?LN?SE" reports also tested out as being mostly identical to the regular Longnecks statistically.
Scott Mardis sent me a pdf with information about the exceptional sighting by Kelly J. Williams at Lake Champlain in 1981, a sighting which included a photograph.
I take it the photograph shows the long shadow of a creature just below the surface and not breaking the surface. it would not be indicating positive evidence of what the body's shape specifically was, just indicating that a body was there. The really interesting part of this was the body shape drawn by the witness:
In comparing this sketch with my composite drawn from Loch Ness Monsters, then combining those statistics with the version compiled on Longneck sightings worldwide (which are also similar), I noticed a couple of notable features. The first is the rather obvious observation that the witness was even indicating a Plesiosaur-shaped creature specifically (and not a seal or anything else) and the second is that going by the size and shape of the head, the witness would seem to indicate the neck had a thinner more flexible part and a thicker base part that cannot bend as much. This pattern is what was predicted for Plesiosaurs and is substantiated bu other reports. It is NOT predicted by any of the pinnepeds-parallel-evolved-separately-into-the-shape-of-a-Plesiosaur theorists. This offers not only an internal substantiation of the Plesiosaurian-identity theory, it offers internal substantiation that the Loch Ness Monster and Champ both have the same sort of a neck which works the same way.
Here are my statistical outcomes from doing my own analyses on Longneck reports worldwide, together with explanatory notes. The 40 foot long figure was the one obtained by Dinsdale and my data tends to reinforce that: but in sightings at sea the figures are typically at a 60 foot scale, or measurements 150% of these. I assume the difference is because the sightings at sea tend to be less accurate because the scale and distance cannot be made out as easily.
The reconstructions of the head were done independently of the video resulta below, which come here by way of Scott Mardis' comparisons and from the "Not Just Nessie" website.
The profile is very significantly the same wedge shape tapering down from back to front, with a wide gash of a mouth and the eyes placed about halfway along the length.
"Not Just Nessie": below is Scott Mardis' comparison to a Plesiosaur skull.
Above, Oudeman's SS reconstructions showing the heads as being much the same shape as the statistical averages reconstruction I made myself. I have put a lighter-coloured circle around the eye to make it show up better in this enlargement.
Below are two views from sightings of the Loch Ness Monster showing the appearances of the head from above and from in front too compare to the other comparable points of view from the other locations. The view of the neck overall in the drawing of a recent Periscope sighting at Loch Ness shows the longer forward section of the neck, much the same thickness throughout, and then the larger and thicker rear portion of the neck (Significantly also shown in the Surgeon's Photo) The same type of neck features in the Corinthian SS witness' illustration reproduced below.
The Cuba SS drawings chosen in the Sea Slug article actually help illustrate that the reported shape of the head is consistently reported in all of the reports from the different points of view.
These illustrations are from Heuvelmans' book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents and they are added here to illustrate the apparent head shape of Longnecks from several angles. The Southwold SS has a good view of the wedge-shaped head tapering down from back to front, and Mrs. Borgeest's sighting shows the very flat and wide "Snakelike" head from front-on. Heuvelmans remarks on both aspects (The wedge-shaped, taper-down profile is what is sometimes called "Horselike") in the case of the Corinthian SS it seems the Euryapsid openings in the back of the skull are taken for eyes (this seems to be a consistent misinterpretation among some witnesses and it is even possible that this area is marked with false decoy-eyes such as occur in many different kinds of animals. There is a quandary about sea-serpent eyes in that some of them have them prominently marked while the rest (Femalse and young) have the eyes coloured about the same as the rest of the animal and the eyes are not obvious. In the reconstruction composite above I have indicate the eye sockets as being fairly large and visible from all angles, but it is entirely possible witnesses are seeing false eyespots instead. Among their own kind the false eyespots serve to divert potentially damaging attacks from the real eyes when males are sparring. And my interpretation of the Corinthian SS is that it actually is a male surprised while sparring with another male, and the creature has a mouthful of the "Mane or fin" material ripped off of the other male. The position of the material makes it look more like it is coming out of the mouth rather than from the places where animals ordinarily have whiskers.
The head on this one is exaggerated by making it too long generally but it does show about the right overall shape as seen from above.The statistical norm would have it that the head would be much smaller in proportion to the neck, and more especially much shorter.
Depiction of traditional Scandinavian Sea Serpent. Same kind of head, I think the dark patches behind the eyes once again indicate the presence of Euryapsid skull openings such as are also indicated in many other sightings and artistic depictions.. Below "The Children of Loki"
with the big snake being the Midgard Serpent. The head is modeled after carvings of Dragons on Viking churches and such, also traditional, and once again the same type of head. [Traditionally the tongues are depicted as pointed, not forked) There is an earlier separate blog entry on Viking depictions of Longnecks and why they are Euryapsids, and other blog articles on various similar dragons heads the world over and back to the dawn of civilization, with specifications as to why they are Euryapsids, too. Snakes do not have skulls that are anything like a Plesiosaur's skull and they have no structure corresponding to a Euryapsid skull opening.
The original study was done between 1975 and 1980 in several revisions and the SITU archives should still have handwritten copies of the earlier drafts. The document was ultimately never published but these result are easily summarised and presented as they are here. The 1980, final version of the manuscript included "A Field Guide to Water Monsters" which was being submitted for publication in PURSUIT as a series of articles starting in 1986, but stopped when I moved out of New Jersey, and started up again for submission to PURSUIT in 1990 (Typed articles with illustrations provided, also ultimately unpublished, PURSUIT became moribund at about that point)
ADDENDUM:
"Joe Richardson" is becoming dreadfully tedious insisting that I explain every single instance of why a Euryapsid skull opening has to be a Euryapsid skull opening. I have said on numerous occasions, the matter is written up in earlier blogs on this site. "Joe" really must learn how to look things up in the provided index and do his own research. I refuse to spoon feed him any further and I refuse to repeat myself endlessly on matters where I have already answered him before. He has never shown me once that he even pays attention when I cite sources to him and he never seems to learn anything, he continues to re-assert the same tired old arguments even after he has been thoroughly refuted. "Joe Richardson" is hereby served notice that he is making an irritant of himself and his comments will be deleted until and unless he can stop sounding like a broken record. And once again, if you "Joe" do not have the anatomical expertise which gives you the authority to criticize or comment on Plesiosaurian anatomy, your remarks carry no weight as criticism or indeed even as any sort of a relevant argument.
Sir Arthur Henry Rostron was a lifelong believer in the existence of sea serpents and other forms of cryptozoology...
Sir Arthur Henry Rostron, the eventual Commodore of the Cunard Line, Knight of the British Empire, and rescuer of 712 Titanic survivors, was a lifelong believer in the existence of sea serpents and other forms of cryptozoology. In fact, he had seen one himself, exactly five years before his Titanic exploits won him the praise and admiration of the world.
In his memoirs Home from the Sea (pps 45-47) Commander Rostron tells how he was acting as Chief Officer on board the Campania [on April 26, 1907], when something remarkable happened -
“We were coming one Friday evening into Queenstown, when off Galley Head, I noticed something sticking out of the water. ‘Keep clear of the snag right ahead,’ I called out to the junior officer who was with me on the bridge. We swung away a point but gradually drew nearer so that we were able to make out what the unusual thing was. It was a sea monster! It was no more than fifty feet from the ship’s side when we passed it, and so both I and the junior officer had a good sight of it.
The 57-foot Long Sea-Monster Killed by Stem of the Armadale Castle [1905] Drawn by G.E. Lodge from a Sketch by Captain J.C. Robinson
"During a recent voyage of the Armadale Castle when the vessel was in latitude 3 deg. South, the stem’s perpendicular struck a large fish close to the head, and held it prisoner for about fifteen minutes. The monster was not less than fifty-seven feet in length, and must have been eight feet in diameter. It was beautifully marked, and Captain Robinson was sorry he could not lasso and preserve it. There was keen controversy among the passengers as to its species, some arguing for a whale, some for a shark. As Mr Rudyard Kipling was on board and saw the sight, it has been suggested that the creature should be called ‘Piscis Rudyardensis
[This was probably a whale shark the Armadale Castle ran into, according to Heuvelmans-DD]
So strange an animal was it that I remember crying out: ‘It's alive!’ One has heard such yarns about these monsters and cocked a speculative eye at the teller, that I wished as never before that I had a camera in my hands. Failing that, I did the next best thing and on the white dodger board in front of me I made sketches of the animal, full face and profile, for the thing was turning its head from side to side for all the world as a bird will on a lawn between its pecks. I was unable to get a clear view of the monster's features, but we were close enough to realise its head rose eight or nine feet out of the water, while the trunk of the neck was fully twelve inches thick.”
[This is the classic description of the forward part of the Longneck's neck; head two feet long, neck eight feet, together making ten feet, thickness a foot through, and pretty much the same thickness for all that ten feet, with the top and bottom outlines being almost parallel. Statistically this is backed up by the heavier part of the neck, another five feet or half again, but of a conical shape getting thicker towards the body. Together this makes the first 15 feet out of a typical 40-footer, and the proportions are remarkably consistent statistically at Loch Ness and the whole world over-DD]
RMS Campania
The junior officer in question, who is not named by Rostron in his memoirs, was one H.C. Birnie, who would himself have a distinguished career, going on to win a DSO for sinking a U-boat during World War One when Captain of HMS P-57. Many years later Birnie confirmed the whole of Rostron’s story to researcher R.T. Gould. Birnie added that when he was a child in 1894 or 1895, he and his father had seen on the beach at New Aberdour, Aberdeenshire, ‘a long snake-like thing’ extending from the water's edge to a rock some distance away.
Nine months before Rostron and Birnie’s sighting, the Illustrated London News had published a full page photograph of ‘A Curious Creature Sighted by the Steam-Yacht Emerald Between Madeira and St Thomas.’ It was an enlargement of a snap by a Dr Bowdler Sharpe
Sea serpents had been a favourite lore of the sea since a famous encounter by the HMS Daedalus in 1848. The creature seen was ‘enormous,’ some 60ft long, and ‘something like seaweed washed about its back.’ Captain McQuhae had drawings made immediately after it was seen, including one of its head, carrying an expression of perfect innocence.
Above and centre: HMS Daedalus and her extensive serpent; Below: Drawing by Captain McQuhae
Later the same year, a sea serpent was seen and sketched just west of Oporto by a naval officer on board HMS Plumper, on New Year’s Eve, 1848. And eight years later another celebrated case reared its head when the ship Imogene, to London from Algoa Bay, saw a sea serpent of 40 feet in length swimming on the surface of the sea on Sunday March 30, 1856. The weather was calm and clear.
A further sighting in South African waters may be cited, that of the Umfuli when nearing the Cape of Good Hope…
Top: HMS Plumper; centre: the serpent seen from the Imogene; below: sketch by Captain Cringle of the Umfuli
The year before Rostron’s apparition, the science of marine herpetology had taken a step forward when a meeting of the Zoological Society was told by Mr E.B. Meade Waldo and Mr M.J. Nicoll of a creature seen by them from the deck of the Earl of Crawford’s yacht, Valhalla.
‘These two gentlemen accompanied Lord Crawford as naturalists during his usual winter cruise. Both are well-known naturalists, and one is a member of the Council of the Zoological Society,’ wrote diarist W. P. Pycraft.
‘The story they unfolded to a breathlessly excited assembly of the Fellows is briefly this. When off Para on Dec. 7, 1905, at 10 a.m., they were standing on the deck of the yacht when their attention was caught by a curious sail-like object of some 4ft long and 2ft. high waving from side to side in the water. No sooner had they turned their glasses on to this strange object than there appeared a huge eel-like neck, some 6 ft. long, and as thick as a man’s thigh, and this neck was surmounted by a great turtle-like head and large eyes, now borne high above the sea, which was quite calm. It was dark colour above and silvery white below. After a few moments the head and beck were slowly lowered, and when level with the water were violently lashed from side to side, churning up the sea into a great sheet of foam, and then it vanished.
The Latest Glimpse of the Sea Serpent: A Scientist’s Sketch
This sketch is by Mr M. J. Nicoll. Naturalist to Lord Crawford’s expedition, who was on board Lord Crawford’s yacht, the Valhalla, when the sea serpent was sighted.
[The proportions shown in this sketch are much more accurate than in other later versions-DD]
Adverse winds caused the ship to beat about so that at midnight they were only twenty miles from the scene of the morning. This is noteworthy, because when Mr Nicoll came on deck after breakfast, one of the officers came up and reported that during the night he saw a strange commotion in the water. At first he thought it was a rock awash, but a most careful examination showed that it was a beast of some kind, travelling faster than the ship, which was then making only about eight-and-a-half knots. The officer hailed the deck and the lookout man, and thus got witnesses to this weird phenomenon. Thought the sea was calm, and there was a bright moon, nothing satisfactory could be made out due to the wash which the creature was making, but in its movements it resembled a submarine travelling just below the surface.’
Bernard Heuvelsmans’ book, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (1968), contains two representations of Arthur Rostron’s sketches, which he discussed when interviewed by the Daily Mail at the time of the sighting, wherein they were reproduced.
Rostron told the newspaper in 1907: ‘There were two protuberances where eyes might have been, but I could see no eyes... It had very small ears in comparison with its enormous bulk.’
On Rostron’s sketches, these very small ears look like snail’s horns, similar to many descriptions of plesiosaurs and lake and loch monsters. When the Captain of the Campania heard about the incident, he asked Rostron what he had drunk at dinner. Neither the sketches nor Birnie's corroboration convinced him. In due course the Campania docked at Liverpool.
After shore leave, the Captain called on Rostron and raised the matter again. ‘Did you see it, Rostron?’ he asked. ‘Yes Sir,’ replied the religious Rostron.
In his memoirs, Rostron adds:
‘The previous evening when at home I was looking at the evening paper and was interested to read of an experience [that] a man had gone through in the Bristol Channel. He had been picked up in a boat in a very exhausted condition, drifting out of control, as he had lost oars and boathook. He told the story that on the Saturday previous, he had gone out fishing and in the evening had been attacked by a huge sea monster and had fought it off with his boathook and oars, losing them all. His description of the animal compared accurately with the one I had seen, and, as I saw it heading from the south of Ireland in the direction of the Bristol Channel, there was left little doubt in my mind that it was the same - and no longer any doubt in the Captain's mind that my monster had been real enough.’
If we look up the press reports however, for instance, the Liverpool Echo of April 30, 1907, it is hard to share Rostron's conviction when it was revealed that a Mr McNaughton says he was attacked by a monster ‘like a huge mummy with sunken eyes enveloped in a sort of hairy flap.’
He added: ‘The flabby monster seemed to leap out of the water as straight as an arrow for me. I hardly know what I did. I think I must have ducked and crashed the oar into the creature. At any rate I was flung violently into the water. When I regained the surface I managed to clamber into the boat. My terrible enemy was nowhere in sight.’
The incident appears to have happened only one or two days after and little more than 200 miles from Rostron’s encounter.
There was a small sequel that might be worth noting. When R.T. Gould, the researcher who much later quizzed Birnie on the incident, published an article on the sea serpent in The Times of London on December 9, 1933, a Mrs J.C. Adkins wrote in to say that she and her cousin had seen a sea monster at around the same time.
This beast, seen off Padstow on Cornwall's north coast, showed a long neck ending in a little head and a series of small humps above the waves. She could not recall the exact date, but remembered reading at the time of the sighting by Rostron and the Campania, which came hard on the heels of what she and her cousin had witnessed.
Just one month before Rostron's sighting - in March 1907 - the newspapers had reported that some Tenby fishermen trawling in the Channel saw ‘a monster fish, 200ft long, with four fins as big as sails,’ and that its ‘general appearance was that of a sea serpent.’
Even the North Atlantic provided sightings. A Dutch steamer, the Amsteldijk of the Holland America Line, met a strange animal in the summer of 1911. The location was noted as latitude 47° 30' N, longitude 27° 11' W. Second officer J.A. Liebau, noted in the log that the animal they saw on Saturday August 19 that year ‘was very probably a sea serpent.’
One doubter has written, however: ‘The sea serpent is a creature vainly imagined, a figment of the brain, a thing born of after-dinner orgies; it may even have a semblance of reality, but when analysed it proves to be nothing more than a school of porpoises playing at “follow-my-leader,” [or] a gigantic cuttlefish vainly waving its long arms in an endeavour to escape the grip of some hungry whale. On occasions, indeed, the sea serpent has turned out to be nothing more interesting than a floating spar decorated with a tangle of seaweed!’
The Times of London noted however in an Editorial in December 1933: ‘It is said that there exists a body of secret tradition among seafaring men, which by common consent they decline to communicate to outsiders, because of the contemptuous incredulity always shown by landsmen ignorant of the infinite potentialities of the sea. But sufficient instances of strange beasts seen on the high seas have been placed on record to make a formidable body of testimony.’
It is noteworthy, perhaps, that while Rostron told his tale to the Daily Mail in 1907 and gained worldwide fame half a decade later, he had no reservations about putting his reputation at risk when he wrote of the sea serpent again in his autobiography, bringing further such testimony home from the sea. Retailing the story, despite the high offices he subsequently held, including that of Aide-de-camp to the King, may even be a mark of the man’s essential humility.
