The Sumerian image of Tiamat has been identified as the oldest portrait of a Longneck we can feel pretty certain of according to Ted Holliday: the head and neck are in about the same position as the "Surgeon's Photo" at Loch Ness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat (Above)
http://www.artisannorway.com/447/borknagar-symbols-explained-at-the-viking-ship-museum/
These Plesiosaurian Viking "Sea Dragon" has exaggerated spines on their backs and exaggerated forefin "Wings"-The image is identified as meaning the Midgard serpent but it shows TWO creatures
The image above is a native petroglyph named "Puff the Magic Dragon" by sightseers and suggested to be a "Living dinosaur." Actually it is clearly a variation on the local "Water Monster" or Avan-Yu..
This witness' sketch of "Cadborosaurus" shows how the top half of the "Stretched-S" shape is the same thing as is usually called the "Periscope" position. The rearward section I also judge to be the base of the neck becoming much broader before merging into the bulkier body.
A number of these illustrations from In The Wake of Sea Serpents (following) turned up during my recent researches and so I thought I'd make use of them here.
We have had a long discussion about this fellow on separate occasions before, most recently in the "Sea Giraffe" article. I am now considering if I should add this picture there or write a new blog now that I have this picture available. Incidentally, the eyes/irises looking blue or grey is a feature that has been noted on other occasions, and apparently the eyes are surrounded by a ring of ski the same colour as the eyes (Peter O'Connor surmised this in In Search of Lake Monsters, but the exact statement of this observation has been around since the late 1700s and early 1800s)
Below are some early Longnecks, some of them confusingly leaving the "Many-Humped/String of buoys" effect in the wake: these first two are marked as ?SO for no especially good reason.
The mast was 18 feet tall. This is like the Umfuli SS turned up on end.
These ones were apparently drawn as too thick by the witnesses: both feature the "Sawtoothed" back ridge. The one below was represented in a different drawing in the blog about "Cadborosaurus"
(This Massachusetts Bay SS on the other hand looks like a standard threehumper):
This creature has the usual very broad and flat head attributed to BOTH The Longneck and the Merhorse: Oudemans also agrees to the proportions that the head is half as thick as it is long, but the width is 2/3 the length. The eyes are not actually directed forward, they merely seem so from this view: from the side the eyes are described as being more "Elongated"
This very confusing "Plesiosaur" drawing evidently means to show a "String of Buoys"
Very likely the sketch is so misleadingly different from whatever was actually seen as to be valueless. The witness did insist he had seen a Plesiosaur with "Erected nostrils" that others took to be "Ears"
This thick bodied Sea Serpent matches a sighting at Loch Ness where the head was not brought up out of the water. We can only imagine the witness exaggerated the thickness in his drawing
This one evidently showed a hind flipper up out of the water while it was being watched. Once again, a good length of tail is behind the rear flipper.
This is an obscure sighting made before the Surgeon's photo was taken at Loch Ness but displaying a neck of much the same shape. It was only published after the photo had been in circulation but was supposedly based on a drawing made in earlier letters.
This one has its neck in the typical arched position often seen while the animal is fishing, only it has been startled and is now looking up.
Several Plesiosaurs have a head shaped like that.
The
Cuba SS was cited by Heuvelmans as having no tail. On the other hand, I read the drawing as showing a definite tail about as long as the definite part of the neck, very short and thick and quite possibly with a large fin on it. The cloaca would be about directly under the second hump back on this one, going by the shape of the body, and the two humps seem to correspond to where the foreflippers and rear flippers would be. Its actually a pretty decent depiction allowing for that
The Bali SS has a similar "Turtleheaded" appearance to the Valhalla creature, and upon checking the neck is at standard Longneck proportions for the forepart of the neck (Neck a foot thick and ten feet long, being the statistical average for a creature 40 feet long. The head of such a creature is about 2 feet long) See below:
The
Campania SS reported by Sir Arthur Rostron turns out to match the top part of a neck of those same proportions.
Evidently the
Vondel SS briefly held up a foreflipper near its head (below)
This would appear to have been a maned male "Merhorse" instead of just an ordinary "Longneck"
Although the illustrations SEEM very different, the creatures seen by the ships HMS Daedalus and the City of Baltimore were actually very similar and described in nearly the same terms.
The conventional explanation of the Fly SS is that it was a kind of a Plesiosaur,
but Heuvelmans opts for a Mosasaur or a kind of sea-crocodile instead.
This rather repulsice creature was called a Merhorse by Heuvelmans. That could be right because the head seen on top of the water was very small in comparison to the
very large body that was indicated as being underwater.
This is an illustration of a Brazilian encounter from a book of fairy tales.
http://www.mandatrix.org.uk/shaw/Shaw/Limerick_Sea_Serpent.html
The Mystery of the Monster of Limerick DockWay back in October 2005, when fustar.info was but a mewling babe, I related the blood-curdling (1922) tale of The Mystery of the Monster of Limerick Docks. At the time I promised to dig out a copy of Denis O'Shaughnessy's Limerick: 100 Stories of the Century to flesh out the rather sketchy details I'd gleaned from Graham J. McEwan's Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland and the Limerick Leader. Despite my half-arsed efforts the book had remained, like mystery beasties themselves, frustratingly elusive. That is, until now.
Goodbye sketchy details, hello not-very-detailed sketch:
The artist was one Stephen O'Gorman (a Limerickian who'd emigrated to Birmingham) and the above depiction was submitted to the Limerick Leader after they'd reprinted the story in 1974.
Stephen was a teenager at the time and was playing handball in Shannon Street with several of his pals when suddenly they noticed that people were gathering in large numbers at the quayside. "We immediately joined them and to our amazement saw this strange creature in the middle of the river. It was travelling very slowly towards Sarsfield Bridge.""The creature travelled as far as Limerick Boat Club and then turned back[...]A group of Free State soliders with rifles came dashing by (I believe they came out of the Strand Barracks) and they kept pace with the creature. When it passed the end of the Docks…they opened fire from Cleeve's Bank and every so often they repeated the shooting until the creature passed Barrington's Pier and finally disappeared into the distance."
"They did not hit it, merely content to hit the water just behind it. I believe they were just trying to encourage it on its way".
A parallel read of the events of the time is the Book "Not while I have Ammo" written by Jim Corbett which is the story of Jim's Grandfather Captain Connie Mackey.. The book is a worthy read of the History of Captain Connie Mackey....Defender of the Strand who was defending the Strand Barracks, Limerick whilst all this was happening.
In the case of the Tyne Sea-Serpent (below) the head and neck were stuck up unusually high, over 35 feet, and the back trailing behind it unusually long, perhaps 90-100 feet long, and in this case I feel it is much more likely the witnesses were viewing a waterspout.
