Where are all the dead sea monsters?

[By Demons Driven]

Where are all the dead sea monsters?

Category: cryptozoology
Posted on: July 11, 2008 6:59 PM, by Darren Naish

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, UK) who mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs. He also studies such things as the swimming abilities of giraffes and fossil marine reptiles. An avid interest in modern wildlife and conservation has resulted in many adventures in lizard-chasing, bird-watching and litter-collecting. I've been blogging since 2006 and a compilation of early Tet Zoo articles is now available in book form as Tetrapod Zoology Book One. Additional recent books include The Great Dinosaur Discoveries and Dinosaurs Life Size. For more biographical info go here. I can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. PLEASE NOTE: I am now completely unable to keep up with email correspondence. I do my best to respond to all queries and requests, but please don't be offended if I fail to reply. I blog from and about conferences - please contact me for more info. Follow me on twitter: @TetZoo.

[By Demons Driven]

Where are all the dead sea monsters?

Category: cryptozoology
Posted on: July 11, 2008 6:59 PM, by Darren Naish

Better late than never; I was at the office of a London-based publishing company yesterday, so didn't have time to get anything ready before today. I know you'll all forgive me. Anyway... so, how to finish sea monster week? With a predictable and familiar set of images that you've seen a hundred times before? Maybe. Or with a striking photo (or series of photos) that will blow you away in offering hitherto unappreciated, obvious evidence for the reality of giant marine cryptids? Well, I wish...

My original, rather boring plan, was to finish sea monster week (this article is part 5) with a set of photos that you might regard as among the most iconic sea monster images of them all - yet also among the least interesting, if only because they have been well explained on so many occasions. On 25th April 1977, the Japanese trawler Zuiyo-maru accidentally hauled up a 10-m-long vertebrate carcass while about 30 miles off the coast of Christchurch, New Zealand. They didn't want to retain the carcass for fear of contaminating their catch, but it was photographed and a few tissue samples were taken before it was discarded.

Zuiya-Maru%20Yano%20photos.jpg

This carcass is known without doubt to have been that of a shark: we can make such a bold proclamation because Kimura et al. (1978) demonstrated the presence of the collagen elastoidin within the carcass's **** fin fibres (called ceratotrichia), and showed that the elastoidin in the carcass was identical in its amino acid composition to that of basking sharks Cetorhinus maximus. The elastoidin in the carcass's fibres also exhibited a microstructure (observed under SEM) identical to that of basking shark elastoidin (Kimura et al. 1978). Case closed. Definitely basking shark. Even some (not all, but some) creationists accept this, urging their like-minded colleagues to STOP STOP STOP pretending that a rotting shark somehow supports the view that evolution doesn't happen. A very thorough account of the entire Zuiyo-maru incident was published by Glen Kuban (Kuban 1997): it's available as a website here and as a pdf here.

http://www.enricobaccarini.com/plesiosaur_carcass.pdf

http://www.paleo.cc/paluxy/plesios.htm

[By Demons Driven]

Here we come to the great problem. There probably - in fact, there surely - are large marine vertebrates out there that we have yet to officially recognise, and at least some of them are, hopefully, tetrapods (empirical support for this assertion comes from studies of discovery rates over time: Paxton 1998, 2001, Raynal 2001, Solow & Smith 2005). It's just that we have no good evidence for them at the moment. Well, no evidence beyond the anecdotal anyway. When carcasses are photographed, retained or sampled, they invariably turn out to be rotting cetaceans, sharks, or oarfishes or whatever (yet another example is provided by 'Parkie', the 2002 carcass from Parker's Cove, Nova Scotia. Definitely a basking shark [confirmed by DNA and anatomy], but hypothesised by some to match Heuvelmans's long-necked pinniped, as shown here).

'Those that still seem to defy explanation'

But there are still quite a few reported carcasses that defy explanation: mostly this is because information is deficient, and it's just not possible to come to anything more than a speculative conclusion (Roesch 1997, 1998a, b, 1999). However, it's also because some carcasses really don't match anything we know, and - if real (read on) - almost certainly represent unknown species. Examples include Captain Hanna's bony fish (reported in

[By Demons Driven]

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/07/dead_sea_monsters.php

[By Demons Driven]