1godzillafan
04-19-2005, 11:36 AM
Taken from the Compuserve What's New page:
Too Funny! Sea Monster Mystery Solved
In 1734, a "most dreadful" serpent-like sea monster was spotted off the coast of Greenland. Four eyewitnesses wrote down their first-person accounts of what they saw that day in the North Atlantic. Fast forward nearly 275 years. Researchers from Scotland's St. Andrews University think they know what that sea monster really was.
Their academic opinion? The serpent was no monster. It was--um...how shall we say this delicately?--an excited male whale, probably one of the last remaining Atlantic gray whales. The Edinburgh Evening News calls it the "unlikely tail of the rather excited whale."
"We think they saw a whale which was for some reason feeling very happy," research chief Charles Paxton told the Evening News. "It reared out of the water, fell on to its back, and they saw this thing that they assumed was a tail. You wouldn't expect to see a whale in this state on his own."
Sea monsters have long captured the imaginations of gullible human beings. And if it weren't for the fact that it's in Sea Life Park in Oahu, Hawaii as a tourist attraction, the brand new "wolphin" might be considered a sea serpent, too. The four-month old wolphin is part dolphin and part killer whale and shares genetic characteristics of both species. The wolphin's mother is also a wolphin and its father is an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. It was born on Dec. 23 and is already the size of a one-year-old bottlenose dolphin.
Too Funny! Sea Monster Mystery Solved
In 1734, a "most dreadful" serpent-like sea monster was spotted off the coast of Greenland. Four eyewitnesses wrote down their first-person accounts of what they saw that day in the North Atlantic. Fast forward nearly 275 years. Researchers from Scotland's St. Andrews University think they know what that sea monster really was.
Their academic opinion? The serpent was no monster. It was--um...how shall we say this delicately?--an excited male whale, probably one of the last remaining Atlantic gray whales. The Edinburgh Evening News calls it the "unlikely tail of the rather excited whale."
"We think they saw a whale which was for some reason feeling very happy," research chief Charles Paxton told the Evening News. "It reared out of the water, fell on to its back, and they saw this thing that they assumed was a tail. You wouldn't expect to see a whale in this state on his own."
Sea monsters have long captured the imaginations of gullible human beings. And if it weren't for the fact that it's in Sea Life Park in Oahu, Hawaii as a tourist attraction, the brand new "wolphin" might be considered a sea serpent, too. The four-month old wolphin is part dolphin and part killer whale and shares genetic characteristics of both species. The wolphin's mother is also a wolphin and its father is an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. It was born on Dec. 23 and is already the size of a one-year-old bottlenose dolphin.