Monday, September 26, 2011

Throwing the baby sea serpent out with the seawater

A story often repeated by those delving into sea serpents that that Captain William Hagelund in 1968 briefly caught, then release, a "baby Cadborosaurus" the sea serpent reported to haunt the coastal waters of Canada and the US Paficic Northwest). Hagelund sketched and released the creature. Now Dr. Darren Naish has published a paper with a likely identity: the seaman was not a hoaxer, nor a sea serpent pioneer. He was followed by an odd-looking creature, the Bay pipefish. Naish writes: "Pipefishes are not all that familiar and are rarely encountered. They also do weird stuff that most people would find unexpected: they can produce a neck-like region by bending and raising the anterior part of the body ....and can even raise the head above the water surface, for example."
COMMENT: I think he's likely nailed it. I never knew what to make of the "baby" stories (there is one other a bit like Hagelund's) and wrote them off as, if not false, then unprovable without a definite creature to compare them to.
BTW, there are lots of good links in Naish's blog post to other examinations of marine carcasses and other evidence. Cryptozoologists whould all give it a read.

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