Could this shark be megalodon? If it lived one million years ago, could it be alive in the sea’s depths today?
It is at least possible; it can be proved that megalodon was living much closer to our era than the fossil record would allow. While it is true the fossil remains suggest an extinction, there are other, non-fossilized remnants which suggest quite the reverse.
In 1875 the British survey ship HMS Challenger dredged two megalodon teeth, five inches long, up from the seabed 14,000 feet below. They were actual teeth, not fossilized. In 1959 these teeth were dated. The most recent proved to be a mere 11,000 years old.8 They were found in Polynesia, just a few days’ sail from Tahiti, in the region where the sightings have occurred.
In geological terms this tooth was modern. Megalodon, in all its powerful and terrifying fury, was alive at the time the first settlements were being built in Anatolia, at the time when communities were forming in Egypt – and, if some arguments are correct, about the time the Sphinx was being carved.
The Living Fossil
Certainly there are cases of creatures, known only in the fossil record, which have subsequently been found still thriving in the modern world. While this is not a common occurrence, the existence of even one example is sufficient to prove the possibility of others existing. One such is the coelacanth.
This fish first appears in the geological record around 450 million years ago; its heyday was about 50 million years later. Most varieties are considered to have been extinct for 200 million years, although a single fossil has been found dating from 70 million years ago.
In December 1938 a living coelacanth was found quite by chance in South Africa. The young curator of the Museum of East London, on the Indian Ocean coastline, had an interest in fishes. She was in the habit of looking at the day’s catch as the fishermen returned. A few days before Christmas she was on the quayside when she noticed an odd-looking fish beneath a pile of freshly landed sharks. It was large, about five feet long, with, she noticed, very curious lobe-like fins and tail. She had never seen such a fish before. Its scales too were astonishing: large, thick and rough. She took it back to the museum where it was eventually identified, to considerable world-wide excitement, as a living descendant of the fossil coelacanth.
Since that initial discovery a hundred or more examples of the fish have been found. It lives at depths of up to 900 feet, mostly around the Comoro Islands, which seem to be some kind of breeding ground or home-base for it. Indeed, long before science recognized its existence, the natives of the islands were well aware of it. They valued its rough scales as alternatives to sandpaper in their repair of punctured bicycle tyres. For them this fish was simply another useful creature of the sea.
None of these living fossils has yet been caught elsewhere in the world. Yet, tantalizing evidence suggests that a similar, or related, fish lives in the depths around the Mexican Gulf.
In 1949 a scientist at the US National Museum received in the post a single strange fish scale with a request that he identify it. The letter came from a woman in Florida who made souvenirs out of fish scales and had received a bucketload of these strange scales in one of her regular consignments from fishermen. The scientist saw that the scale was very similar to that of a coelacanth. He tried to contact the woman but failed. Worse, he managed to lose the single scale.9
In 1964 a finely detailed antique silver model of a strange fish which had been made in Mexico in the seventeenth or eighteenth century was discovered in a village church in Bilbao, northern Spain. It was a very exact representation of a fish which the silversmith had obviously seen. A year later a second such silver fish was found in an antiques shop in Toledo, central Spain. They were exact representations of a coelacanth.10
In the 1970s a US naturalist attending a craft fair happened to see one stall-holder wearing a necklace made of large scales, just like those of the coelacanth. The owner said that he had found them on a shrimp boat which plied the Mexican Gulf. The naturalist tried to buy the necklace but the owner would not consider it.11 This evidence too has vanished from the reach of the scientific world.
Whether, as seems likely, the coelacanth also thrives in the Mexican Gulf as well as the Indian Ocean, its importance is that it defies evolutionary theory by remaining essentially unchanged for upwards of 450 million years, and it defies the fossil record simply by still existing.
The importance of this single example of survival is that it must be considered possible for any other such creature of the past, especially one which can live deep in the sea, to have survived over tens of millions of years.
The way is opened not only for megalodon but also for other huge sea-creatures of the fossil record such as plesiosaurs, and other creatures of the dinosaur era, to still live deep in the sea, unnoticed by science. Of course, they may not be unnoticed by fishermen or other seafarers.
Sea-serpents
No scientist had made any methodical attempt to come to grips with the many reports of unknown animals and fishes until the 1950s, when the French zoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans embarked upon a project to gather and to analyse many reports from around the world. His first book was published in France, in 1955. In 1958 an augmented version of it appeared for the English-speaking audience as On the Track of Unknown Animals. This book caused a sensation and began a movement amongst scientists which led to the formation, in 1982, of the International Society of Crytozoology with Dr Heuvelmans as its president.12 The Society publishes an annual journal, Cryptozoology – the term which it defines as ‘scientific research into hidden animals’, that is, those which are known only by hearsay, not yet by sound evidence. It is the sound evidence which the Society seeks to find.
In 1968 Heuvelmans published a work which dealt solely with unknown sea-monsters: In the Wake of the Sea-serpents. This too caused a sensation. In it Heuvelmans gathered 587 reports of sea-serpents witnessed throughout the world; 238 he dismissed as either hoaxes, mistakes or as too vague to be useful. The remainder he considered sufficiently solid to analyse. He divided the sightings into categories which allowed him to propose the potential existence of nine species of unknown large sea-creatures.13 One of these monsters had been seen on a number of occasions off the coast of Canada: a monster called locally ‘Caddy’, from ‘Cadborosaurus’, a name given it by a local newspaper since it was seen in Cadboro Bay, off Vancouver.
Heuvelmans’s book intrigued two young scientists working at the Institute of Oceanography in Vancouver. They were already aware of the reports of this strange aquatic creature and had begun to collect data about it. As a result of Heuvelmans’s systematic survey, these young scientists, Dr Paul LeBlond (now Professor of Oceanography at the Institute) and Dr John Sibert decided to pursue this local creature in a scientific manner. Late in 1969 they began a serious survey to gain further evidence and hopefully, by this, to gain a greater idea about the form and the life of these unknown animals or fishes. Their hope was that sufficient data might be forthcoming as to lead to a scientific search for these creatures.14
They began by searching for eyewitnesses and interviewing them directly. They were quickly contacted by all those witnesses still living and willing to talk. Of these witness reports, twenty-three described a creature so unusual as to be unlike anything known to science, a creature sighted down 1,000 miles of sea-coast from Oregon to Alaska.
Many of the descriptions revealed features in common which led LeBlond and Sibert to conclude that up to three types of unknown creature were involved. Two were distinguished by a horse-like head on a long neck – perhaps five or ten feet long – with a body which, when swimming, revealed three humps. One of the creatures had large eyes and was covered with short fur; the other had smaller eyes, short horns on its head and often a large mane like that of a horse. Both were very rapid swimmers. They may perhaps be male and female of the same species. The third creature was like a large snake, with a sheep-like head and a jagged fin running down its back. As it swam, loops of its body would br
eak the surface of the water.15
In November 1950 a lieutenant commander in the Canadian Navy reported seeing the ‘Cadborosaurus’. He was fishing in a small open boat out from the naval base at Esquimalt Harbour, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. ‘Caddy’ crossed behind him, less than seventy feet away. The officer reported that the creature was ‘thirty feet long, head to tail, and created a heavy wash’.16 And then
He surfaced about every thirty-five feet. Each time he lifted his head from the water he opened his mouth wide and showed two rows of large teeth which had a saw-tooth appearance. Before he dove he snapped his teeth together with a terrifying sound.
The naval officer described the creature’s head being about two feet long and eighteen inches wide; its eyes were black and two or three inches across. The head and body were covered with brown hair. Its neck was long, about six feet to where it joined the creature’s body at what seemed to be shoulders. It swam by means of large flippers and a big flat tail.17
During March 1961 a trained biologist saw the creature. She was walking with a relative and her two small sons on a beach near to the entrance of Puget Sound, the shipping route into Seattle. While they were watching a freighter far away, moving down the channel, they suddenly became aware of something strange in the sea closer to them:
We could see that it was some kind of creature and distinctly saw that the large flattish head was turned away from us and towards the ship. I think all of us gasped and pointed. We could distinctly see three humps behind the long neck.18
As they watched, the creature sank beneath the water. It then reappeared shortly after, closer to them: ‘we could distinctly make out colour and pattern, a long floppy mane and the shape of the head’. Her small son cried out and began to clutch at her in fear. At this the creature appeared to notice them for the first time and sank. It again reappeared close enough for them to see its details clearly. She confessed later that, as a biologist, she found it very difficult to accept what she was witnessing.
One curiosity reported with ‘Caddy’ is a readiness to add sea-birds to its diet. In December 1933 two friends were duck-shooting on the coast. One duck, wounded, landed on the sea and headed for the safety of a large mass of seaweed. The friends rowed out to retrieve the bird. As they neared it, ten feet from their boat, two large coils of some sea-creature rose six feet out of the sea. Then a head appeared – they described it as like a horse’s. To their horror, ‘it gulped the bird-down its throat’. The creature then turned and looked at the youths in their small boat. One recalled, ‘It then looked at me, its mouth wide open, and I could plainly see its teeth and tongue… I would swear to the head being three feet long and two feet wide.’19 The creature then snapped at some swooping seagulls before disappearing beneath the sea. A short time later the creature appeared again, this time only twenty yards from the shore where eleven other people saw it, including a local Justice of the Peace, who immediately recorded legal affidavits from all the witnesses.
This was not a unique occurrence. At other times it has been witnessed catching and eating ducks.20 And it has several times been seen snapping at seagulls. Once, watched by three observers, it caught and devoured one.21
By 1995, LeBlond and a colleague, Edward Bousfield, former Chief Zoologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, had compiled a total of 178 sightings, sometimes by several witnesses, dating from 1881 until 1994.22 In addition, they found eleven occasions when strange carcasses had been drawn from the sea or found on the shore, some or all of which might have been the remains of unknown sea-creatures.23
One of these carcasses was photographed and it is this evidence which has led LeBlond and Bousfield to name officially this particular creature Cadborosaurus willsi.24
The photographs were taken in summer 1937 at a whaling station in the Queen Charlotte Islands, near the Alaskan border. A recently caught sperm whale was being cut up when a very strange creature was discovered inside the whale’s stomach,25 a creature which had remained largely intact. It had been killed and swallowed shortly before the whale itself was killed and very little digestion had taken place. The station manager realized that this creature was very unusual and decided to make a photographic record of it. These photographs survive as the best evidence for the existence of at least one mysterious sea-creature in the British Columbian coastal waters.
The photographs reveal a thin serpentine creature, ten and a half feet long, with a head rather like a dog’s but with no noticeable hair. Its tail appears to have flippers at its end and there are small fore-flippers at the base of its neck. This seems damaged, probably by the sperm whale which caught and killed it. A witness present when it was removed from the whale’s stomach reported that its long body was covered with fur except for its back, which had overlapping spiked plates of horn or something similar.
The file of photographs found by LeBlond has a note stating that it was sent to the Pacific Biological Station at Nanaimo on Victoria Island. But there is no record at the laboratory of it ever having arrived.
In 1987 a sea-captain, Captain Hagelund, reported having once captured a baby ‘Cadborosaurus’. During a family sailing trip, he had anchored for the night when he and other members of his family saw something odd moving on the surface of the water. Upon investigation it was found to be a small ‘eel-like sea-creature swimming along with its head completely out of the water, the undulation of its long slender body causing portions of its spine to break the surface’.26
This small creature was caught in a net and brought back to the yacht. It was about sixteen inches long, an inch thick with a lower jaw holding small sharp teeth. On its back were scales like plates while underneath its body was a covering of soft fur. It had two small flippers at its shoulders and two flipper-like fins at its tail. It seems to have been a young example of that found inside the sperm whale in 1937.
Captain Hagelund, realizing that this was something very unusual, resolved to bring it to the scientific laboratory at Nanaimo and so put it in a plastic bucket of sea water. Into the night this little creature fought and scratched in attempts to escape. Listening to this increasingly desperate splashing and scratching Hagelund became filled with compassion and so returned to the deck and lowered the bucket back into the sea. He saw the little creature swim quickly away.
No other has yet been caught.
Mysterious Aquatic Animals
In the face of this considerable weight of evidence, eyewitness accounts by credible witnesses, together with photographs, it is not difficult to accept that one or more very strange species of animal live in the north-west Pacific Ocean. This evidence also adds credibility to the many eyewitness statements regarding other unknown aquatic animals living either in the oceans or in lakes.
The most famous of these is undoubtedly the Loch Ness ‘Monster’ but it is not alone. Large creatures have been reported elsewhere for many years, not only in other Scottish lochs. Lake Nahuel Huapi in the Argentinian Andes has a plesiosaur-like ‘Nahuelito’;27 a large, long-necked creature with a long fin running down its back was seen in 1964 by a Russian scientist in Lake Khaiyr, Siberia;28 another long-necked creature is reported from Siberia, in the lake of Labynkyr and, like ‘Caddy’, it has been seen to catch low-flying birds in its mouth.29
A possibly related creature has been reported in Sweden’s Lake Starsjön, since at least 1635. This lake lies midway up the country, at the edge of the mountains, and is Sweden’s deepest. The creature is described as ten feet long with two pairs of large flippers, a long thin neck and small head. Large fins reported on its head or back are probably a dorsal crest rather like that seen on the creature from Lake Khaiyr. The creature has become something of a tourist attraction for the adjacent town of Östersund.30
Japan too has its monster, ‘Issie’, a resident of Lake Ikeda. This has never been seen clearly but it is large, perhaps up to sixty feet or more long judging by its humps, which have been seen moving rapidly across the lake.31 New Guinea has its
migaua on the island of New Britain. In January 1994, a Japanese television team managed to get it on video from a range of almost three-quarters of a mile: it showed a creature about thirty-three feet long swimming with an undulating movement.32
North America also has some strange creatures apart from ‘Caddy’. Lake Okanagan in Canada has its very old tradition of a creature called ‘Ogopogo’ which is serpent-like and reportedly grows up to fifty feet in length. To date over 200 sightings have been recorded.33 Lake Champlain, near the Canadian border, has provided many sightings of a monster, up to twenty-five feet long, with the head of a horse, a long neck and humps, the chaousarou or ‘Champ’. Sightings stretch back far into Indian times. The first European to visit the area – and after whom the lake is named – Samuel de Champlain, saw the monster himself during summer 1609.34
Champlain also reported seeing a further strange creature, a fish five feet long, with a small head, a long snout and two rows of sharp teeth. This was probably a garpike, the Lepisosteus osseus: it belongs to a type of armour-plated fish with heavy ganoid scales which mostly became extinct many millions of years ago. Examples have survived only in North America.35 If one such prehistoric survivor still flourishes there, should we really be surprised to find another?
The Ancient Survivors
Given the great similarities in the various aquatic monsters reported from around the world, both sea- and lake-dwelling, it has been suggested that, of all the known extinct creatures, two in particular would be possible ancestors of some modern surviving species. Naturally, over the tens of millions of years certain changes and adaptations would be expected: changes in size, in habitat, even in the emphasis of various body features.
Ancient Traces: Mysteries in Ancient and Early History Page 6