With popular-science writers like Gosse behind it, it is not surprising that popular entertainment also embraced the idea of the sea serpent. As do their present-day descendants, early science-fiction writers looked to dramatic scientific discoveries for storytelling possibilities—and plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were as dramatic as they come. In Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), for example, protagonists clinging to a raft on a secret underground sea witness a battle between “the most formidable of antediluvian reptiles, the ichthyosaurus,” and “a serpent disguised by a shell like a turtle’s, the terrible enemy of the first, the plesiosaurus.”139 Modern human characters likewise see or interact with surviving plesiosaurs in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tale The Land That Time Forgot (1918), in which the crew of a German U-boat finds plesiosaur steaks delicious.140
The theme was further advanced by Rupert Gould, who argued that—despite his criticism of Hope’s report from the Fly—the eyewitness evidence supports as many as three types of undiscovered species. Foremost among them is a gigantic creature “much resembling in outline and structure the Plesiosaurus of Mesozoic times.” Echoing Gosse, Gould invoked evolution to make his case: “I do not suggest that the last-named is actually a Plesiosaurus, but that it is either one of its descendants or has evolved along similar lines. In either case, I suggest that there is little doubt that it has much the same characteristics—a slender neck and tail and a comparatively large body with propelling flippers.”141
The “plesiosaur hypothesis” remained popular throughout the twentieth century, coexisting with the hippocamp-like sea serpent. Dramatically different though these two major types of sea serpents may be, they morph easily into each other throughout the world’s seas and monster lakes—with witnesses dipping liberally into both culturally available templates on a case-by-case basis. Consequently, reports and reconstructions offer no end of hybridized monsters, including plesiosaurs with manes, plesiosaur-headed serpents, and plesiosaurs with an improbable series of coil-mimicking humps on their backs. The Loch Ness monster, for example, comes in all these forms and more (including straight-up traditional sea serpents), despite Nessie’s status as poster girl for the plesiosaur-survivor mythology.
Hydrarchos: 114-Foot Fossil Sea Serpent?
The discoveries of fossilized plesiosaurs and other extinct marine reptiles in the nineteenth century led to an enduring new subcategory of plesiosaur-like sea monsters and yet also boosted the profile of the traditional hippocamp-style sea serpent. Of all the dramatic fossil evidence to support the sea serpent’s apparent plausibility, nothing was quite so stupendous—or quite so on the nose—as the fossil reconstruction of a creature dubbed Hydrarchos sillimani (figure 5.25). According to its discoverer, Albert Koch, it was nothing less than the bones of the sea serpent itself. Reconstructed in a hippocamp-like posture—massive head rearing high above fore-flippers, body arching, and tail curling—it could hardly be anything else. Or could it?
This intensely hyped skeleton of a “GIGANTIC FOSSIL REPTILE 114 Feet in Length” (as the advertisement screamed) was exhibited in New York City in 1845, in the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway (a large saloon that had hosted the debut of the New York Philharmonic three years earlier). Crowds flocked to pay 25 cents (children half price!) to see the fossil sea serpent.142 This amounted to a tidy fortune. Consider that New Yorkers were then paying 4 cents for a quart of milk.143 The press was as gobsmacked as the crowds. The New York Daily Tribune hailed it as “indisputably the greatest wonder that ever was brought to light out of the strata which form the crust of our globe”—and a lasting monument to American greatness.144 Alas, not all was as it seemed.
Figure 5.25 The chimera fossil assemblage that Albert Koch dubbed Hydrarchos sillimani.
Commercial fossil collector “Doctor” Albert Koch was a colorful figure: a successful and important fossil hunter, a shameless self-promoter, and (most of all) a hustler of the first order. His previous major fossil find, likewise profitably toured and hyped, was presented to the world as Missourium, “the Missouri Leviathan”—a web-footed, aquatic predator that had once lurked in the rivers and lakes of Missouri. According to Koch’s analysis of his newly unearthed creature, Missourium was remarkable for its hard armor (on which no “barbed iron, harpoon, or spear, would make any impression”) and its “enormous magnitude, ferocity, and strength, as well as fleetness in swimming.” Its “fleetness in swimming” may well have been overstated, however, for despite Koch’s colorful assertions (and the several extra ribs and vertebrae he had added to his specimen), Missourium was in fact an American mastodon. (Nonetheless, it was a very nice American mastodon. The British Museum knew exactly what it was buying when it snapped up the skeleton in 1843 for a whopping £1,300.145 Anatomist and sea serpent skeptic Richard Owen promptly restored the skeleton to its rightful anatomy. It still stands in the Natural History Museum in London, properly identified as a mastodon.)146
When Koch revealed as his next big trick that he had personally discovered definitive proof of a 114-foot sea serpent, it drew crowds—but also scrutiny. Hydrarchos seemed too good to be true. And, indeed, it was.
Jeffries Wyman, a professor of anatomy at Harvard, examined the massive skeleton during its New York exhibition and saw immediately that something was wrong. He communicated his findings to the Boston Society of Natural History. First, it was clear from the double-rooted teeth that the jaws of Hydrarchos belonged to a mammal, not a reptile. This identification slammed the scientific door on the sea serpent pretensions, but it wasn’t the worst of it. It was clear to Wyman that the vertebral column was cobbled together from “a series of bones which could never have belonged to the same individual, as is obvious from the fact that they manifest different degrees of ossification, and must, therefore, have belonged to individuals of different ages.”147 As a final humiliation, Wyman discovered that the hippocamp-like paddles were at least partly constructed “not of bones, but of casts of the cavities of a camerated shell, a species of Nautilus…. These could not fail to strike the eye at a glance, when examined by any one acquainted with the forms of fossil nautiloid shells.” Ouch. Hydrachos was not an animal, but a chimera—a sculptural creation that combined bones from multiple fossil animals. It was assembled from several specimens of an extinct whale (now called Basilosaurus).
If the problems were this obvious to any trained eye, does this expose Koch as merely incompetent or as a deliberate fraud? The jury remains somewhat split on the question of Koch’s competence. One modern historian cautions, “To dismiss Albert Koch … as simply one of the more ingenious showmen of his day would be unfair. Koch appears to have been a keen observer of geologic phenomena and a competent natural historian, although he was not professionally trained.”148 Others have been less kind. In particular, geologist James Dwight Dana of Yale was ferociously critical of Koch, writing that his papers collectively “sustain the conclusion that Dr. Koch knew almost nothing of geology, and that what he gradually picked up from intercourse with geologists he generally made much use of, but seldom was able to use rightly. In zoological knowledge he was equally deficient.”149
Regardless of Koch’s level of competence, two truths stand out: his fossil finds were genuinely spectacular, and he was intentionally deceptive about those finds. “Dr. Koch was a man of large pretensions,” said Dana, concluding that “Koch appreciated the absurdity” of his claims, but made them anyway “merely to get a full house” of paying customers for his exhibits.150 Dana singled out as evidence Koch’s willingness to improbably assert that Missourium was the inspiration for the biblical Leviathan—and then turn around with a straight face and publicize the notion that Leviathan was based on Hydrachos!
Following up on his original exposé of Hydrachos, Wyman explained in a letter to a colleague that “Dr. Koch, who by the way is no doctor, is a shrewd man [and] knows very well that few are sufficiently acquainted with bones to give an o
pinion as to the nature of the beast,”151 and asked for further information to help him determine the true origin of the fossil whale bones from which Koch’s sea serpent had been constructed. Koch had asserted that all the bones had been found together in a life-like assembly, but Wyman’s discovery that they came from multiple individuals showed Koch’s yarn to be “a mere fabrication” (as was the judgment of the Boston Society of Natural History). Sure enough, Wyman’s findings were confirmed by Dr. Lister, a resident of the area where Koch had found the bones. Lister investigated, informing the Boston scientists,
Dr. Koch found a considerable portion of the bones now constituting the Hydrarchos, lying upon, or near, the surface of the earth. They were not lying in their natural position, so as to constitute an unbroken series, but were scattered here and there. Some days after finding some of the bones of the anterior extremities, and some ribs and vertebra … [h]e also procured others of the bones in Clark county, at a place twenty miles distant, and some wagonloads of them at another place seven miles distant from the spot where he got the most interesting part of them.152
Interestingly, much of this story is corroborated by no less an inside source than Koch himself. His travel diaries describe his discovery of the largest cache of incomplete bones that would be used to create Hydrachos: “After the softer parts had decomposed, the bones were lying for some time unpetrified … individual bones of the skeleton suffered displacement; indeed, a part of the ribs, the foot bones and several of the tail vertebrae were lost completely.” Although loosely arranged in a “sort of half-circle,” the remaining bones were damaged and scattered, with the surviving portions of the head “completely turned around”; nonetheless, Koch was confident that “of the whole so much existed that the missing parts could be replaced artificially.”153 And, as we now know, that is what he did—artificially, and very creatively, using bones from other locations. (Basilosaurus vertebrae were so common in the area, Koch wrote, that he found them built into fireplaces, used to support a garden gate, and even serving “a Negro for a pillow.”)
Even more striking, Koch’s diaries refer to these fossils as belonging to “Zygodon”—a bastardization of Zeuglodon, which was another name for Basilosaurus. Koch clearly understood from the get-go that Hydrachos was not a startling new form of life, but a genus that had been discovered, described, and mounted by other naturalists. Koch’s diaries reveal that he deliberately chose to do his fossil hunting in “the region in Alabama where the big Zygodon is found.”154 Moreover, Koch’s use of the term “Zygodon” reveals that he knew in advance that his sea serpent was a mammal! The genus Zeuglodon was proposed by Richard Owen, whose examination of fossil bones from the inaccurately named Basilosaurus (king lizard) in 1839 revealed that “the fossil was a Mammifer of the cetaceous order”—a whale. Just as Wyman found when he examined Koch’s specimen six years later, Owen concluded that the creature’s double-rooted teeth were a dead giveaway. Thus Owen renamed it Zeuglodon (yoked tooth).155
Nonetheless, the bones comprising Koch’s so-called sea serpent were rare and valuable. Despite insightful criticisms from European scientists, the assemblage was snapped up by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who gave Koch a yearly pension for life in order to secure Hydrarchos for the Royal Anatomical Museum in Berlin.156 (Sadly, it was, like so many of Europe’s natural and cultural treasures, destroyed during World War II.)157 Once again, a generous reward for the dishonest “Dr.” Albert Koch—the man who, as Robert Silverberg put it, made a “career of creating supermonsters.”158
False-Positive Sightings: Fuel for the Global Legend
Running a case-sensitive Google Ngram search on “sea serpent” and “Sea Serpent,” I see without surprise that the frequency of the term in English-language books spiked dramatically in 1849 (in the wake of the Daedalus case of 1848), soaring to heights of fame that it would never again attain.159 This tidal wave of celebrity subsided, but the sea serpent never did recede into obscurity. Having become a truly global legend, sea serpents continued to appear wherever ships sailed and wherever eyes looked out to sea. (Nor was it just saltwater: sea serpents appeared inland as well, slithering into the folklore of freshwater bodies from Lake Erie to Lake Okanagan.)
The sea serpent thrived not only in books and popular culture, but, according to eyewitnesses the world over, also in nature. What, if anything, were all those people seeing? To answer that question, we might stop first to consider an insight or two from the critical literature on other paranormal claims—for, to repeat Richard Owen’s insight: “A larger body of evidence, from eyewitnesses, might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent.”160
When considering UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, telekinesis, faith healing, and similar elusive, paranormal phenomena, advocates must grapple with the two fundamental vulnerabilities of eyewitness-dependent cases: people lie, and people make mistakes. Traditionally, advocates for these phenomena have responded with a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument:
• There are many eyewitness encounters.
• It is unreasonable to suppose that lies or mistakes are so extremely common as to account for all encounters.
• Therefore, some of the paranormal encounters record genuine paranormal events.
But as population geneticist George Price explained in 1955 in a widely read article, this argument is backward. Price’s criticisms focused on fraud in research on extrasensory perception (ESP), but his arguments apply just as well to sightings of sea serpents:
When we consider the possibility of fraud, almost invariably we think of particular individuals and ask ourselves whether it is possible that this particular man, this Professor X, could be dishonest. The probability seems small, but the procedure is incorrect. The correct procedure is to consider that we very likely would not have heard of Professor X at all except for his psychic findings. Accordingly, the probability of interest to us is the probability of there having been anywhere in the world, among its more than 2 billion inhabitants, a few people with the desire and ability to produce false evidence for the supernatural.161
We have seen that deliberate fraud by both witnesses and investigators is a serious (perhaps crippling) problem for cryptozoology, but let’s set aside fraud for the moment. Price’s argument also goes to the issue of false-positive misidentification errors. As with fraud, cryptozoologists often argue, in essence, that a reasonable observer in a given eyewitness case would not have mistaken an ordinary phenomenon or animal for a cryptid. This retort to skeptics is typical: “[T]he men who see sea-serpents are familiar with seals, and … are not likely to make such mistakes.”162 By extension, if many reasonable observers report having seen cryptids, a significant percentage of those sightings should be genuine. Right? Not so fast.
As Price pointed out in regard to ESP researchers, this argument approaches the evidence from the wrong end. Those who claim to have seen cryptids are not randomly selected average observers. They are among the few people who, out of the billions of people on Earth, have already filtered themselves into the minuscule outlier population of those who claim to have seen cryptids. Even ignoring the issue of fraud, we run into the Law of Large Numbers: given large enough numbers, very unlikely things become inevitable. (As Michael Shermer has often observed, “The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.”)163 We could grant the dubious assertion that people in general are decent observers—we could even unrealistically suppose that almost everyone is accurate almost all the time—and we would still expect some small percentage of the population to mistake ordinary animals, objects, or events for cryptozoological creatures. This becomes an inevitability simply because so many billions of people see so many billions of things.
As it happens, however, there is no need to rely on theoretical arguments and certainly no need to speculate. As with other cryptids, there are many records of false-positive sightings of sea serpents. Let’s look at a few of these
documented misidentifications and their variety of causes.
• Smaller animals: It is important to recognize that eyewitnesses do not usually report having seen animals shaped like serpents. Instead, they describe a series of discrete coils, humps, or dark rounded objects (“like a string of buoys” is typical)164 and infer that they are connected beneath the water’s surface. The problem, of course, is that such sightings are by their nature ambiguous: a humungous serpentine animal might resemble a string of buoys, but a group of smaller individual objects (say, an actual string of buoys) also might resemble a string of buoys. For this reason, seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises, and waterfowl have always been obvious sources for false-positive sea serpent sightings. Edward Newman noted in 1864 that the large groups of barrel-like harp seals common to Norwegian waters could easily generate reports of sea serpent sightings:
These were very fond of swimming in line, their heads alone above water, engaged in a game of “follow-my-leader”; for on the first seal making a roll over, or a spring into the air, each seal of the whole, procession, on arriving at the same spot, did the like, and exactly in the same manner. While viewing this singular proceeding (and I had many opportunities of doing so), I could not but be struck with the plausibility of one of the suggested explanations of the appearance which has obtained so widespread a notoriety under the name of the “great sea serpent.” … I could quite understand any person, not an unromantic naturalist, on witnessing for the first time such a sight as I have tried to describe, honestly believing that the mythical monster was actually before his eyes.165
Newman was correct: pods of seals are mistaken for sea serpents. In one example cited by Cadborosaurus advocates Paul LeBlond and Edward Bousfield, two British Columbia police officers observed a “huge sea serpent with a horse-like head”—only to discover, using binoculars, that the “serpent” was actually a group of seven sea lions. “Their undulations as they swam appeared to form a continuous body,” reported the Province, “with parts showing at intervals as they surfaced and dived. To the naked eye, the sight perfectly impersonated a sea monster.”166
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