In 1860, the naturalist PH Gosse wrote one of the key books of early cryptozoology, The Romance of Natural History. In it, he introduced his own ideas about what he called ‘the Great Unknown’: “the existence of the sub-mythic monster popularly known as ‘the sea-serpent’.”
He goes on: “The cloudy uncertainty which has invested the very being of this creature; its home on the lone ocean; the fitful way in which it is seen and lost in its vast solitudes; its dimensions vaguely gigantic; its dragon-like form; and the possibility of its association with beings considered to be lost in obsolete antiquity; all these are attributes which render it peculiarly precious to a romantic naturalist.”
At this remove, we can be fairly certain that Gosse’s ‘obsolete beings’ were the extinct dinosaurs that he, as a deeply religious creationist, disputed with Lyell, Darwin and other proponents of the new doctrine of deep geological time.
If fossil sea-serpents were found, God put them there, he argued; and if sea-serpents were still being sighted by mariners, then they were a still-living species. His illustrations of them, mostly as the long-necked plesiosaur type, underlined their lineage and cemented in the popular imagination the sea-serpent as a prehistoric survivor.
The publication, in 1968, of Bernard Heuvelmans’s In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents marked the first comprehensive attempt to classify the putative creatures described in accumulated reports. His was not the first such attempt; before him was the Dutch naturalist AC Oudemans, and before him the French polymath Samuel Rafinesque.
Since Heuvelmans, we have seen the ‘field guide’ on lake monsters and sea-serpents by Patrick Huyghe and Loren Coleman; and classification studies by the likes of Bruce Champagne, Gary Mangiacopra and Yasushi Kojo… but it was Heuvelmans’s weighty book, with its catalogue of carefully dissected examples (many never before seen outside obscure archives) that finally brought the sea-serpent from the pelagic wilderness of the ‘romantic naturalist’ into the harsh and relatively sterile glare of robust and systematic scientism. Improving on his predecessors, Heuvelmans’s analysis settled upon “ten distinct categories of sea-serpent”.
With this slender but nevertheless important book, American biologist Michael Woodley presents a history of sea-serpent classification, reviewing the principal contenders and their theories, taxonomy and examples.
This is a valuable prelude to his own synthesis of a new methodology (chapter 1), which he then applies to Heuvelmans’s 10 categories – particularly the ‘mer-horse’, ‘the super-otter’, the ‘many-humped’ and ‘many-finned’ sea-serpents, the archæocetes (ancestors of whales), ‘super-eels’, and giant invertebrates (salps, worms, jellyfish etc), all of which are well illustrated with text and image.
This is not a book for popular consumption, but a guide that plods through the niceties of zoological taxonomy, species morphology, ecology and behaviour.
In this sense, it is a very worthy effort and only time will reveal its value to the fortean zoologist, especially those interested in the identity and fate of the sea-serpents of yore.
Fort pointed out the decline in the numbers of sea-serpent sightings, and since his day we have had fewer still… but now we have better methods of testing the reliability of eye-witness testimony, especially when there is a great dearth of dead or fossilised specimens.
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