In November of 1976 a US Naval research vessel captured a sea monster.

© Martin, R. Aidan. 2003 [Biology of Sharks and Rays]

According to the dictionary, a monster is ‘an animal of strange or terrifying shape’. At over fourteen feet long and weighing almost a ton, the megamouth shark caught off the Hawaiian island of Oahu was large enough to be terrifying. Its gigantic mouth, adapted to filter feeding in the sunless depths of the sea, was indeed strange. But the megamouth could lay claim to the title ‘monster’ for only a short time. Once it was caught, studied, identified and labeled it lost the most important qualification for being a sea monster, it became accepted by science.

The world was once filled with monsters. Every dark, unknown place had its share of strange and terrifying creatures that walked, crawled, swam and flew into the stories and nightmares of our ancestors. Ancient maps and charts often bore the warning ‘Here there be monsters’ to mark the unexplored. Now the dark places are rare and the monsters mostly gone, replaced with scientific names and labeled specimen jars. But the sea remains enigmatic, a source of wonders and mysteries that only the most arrogant would consider exhausted. But are there any true ‘monsters’ left to find in the sea? Many skeptics, both inside and outside the scientific community, hold the opinion that there are no large unknown creatures left to discover. They dismiss finds like the megamouth as aberrations, animals that are small enough and limited enough in their distribution to allow them to remain hidden. But truly large animals would have been found by now if they were there to be found at all. Sightings of large unknown sea creatures are explained away as mis-identification of known animals, optical illusions or hoaxes.

Maybe the skeptics are right about many of the reported sightings of sea monsters. Perhaps a considerable number could be explained if the observer had been a bit more knowledgeable. Maybe some could be, but not all.

‘Sixty feet long, big around as a barrel, and a head like a snake’ was how the 1817 visitor to Gloucester Bay was described by many of people who saw it. And there were hundreds, if not thousand from all walks of life that saw and wondered at this strange animal. Most sightings of so-called sea monsters involve just a handful of people in lonely out of the way places, but the sightings in the waters of New England were unique it that they happened to so many people in so many different locations over so many years. Seen almost yearly for ten years and sporadically through much of the rest of the 19th century, the creature was chased, shot at and even harpooned, but it was neither killed nor captured leaving science with no ‘proof’ that it even existed.

The unknown by definition will always be the unknown. Creatures captured and labeled become less of an enigma and more of a puzzle once they hit the dissection boards. But creatures of the sea have a fascinating habit of adding to the pages where their natural histories are recorded in the most unexpected ways. Consider the sharks. Sharks range in size from the tiny 6-inches of the dwarf shark to the 50 plus feet of the whale shark. New species of sharks are found more often than probably any other species of large animal in the world. In the late 1950’s the number of known shark species was around 250. At the beginning of the new century the number is placed at 350 plus and still growing. Both small and large species have been found in the past 40 years, the megamouth being an excellent example. But even at 14 feet the megamouth has a long way to go to fit the classic definition of a huge sea monster. How big would a species of shark need to be before wearing the title? Would 65 feet be enough?

Megalodon tooth [www.paleodirect.com]

A close relative of the modern great white shark, commonly called megalodon, is thought to have become extinct around 100,000 years ago, for reasons unknown to science. These creatures were the stuff of nightmares, reaching an estimated length of between 80 and 120 feet, with teeth 8 inches long and a mouth large enough to swallow a cow. A true sea monster by anyone’s definition but separated from us by thousands of years. Maybe.

Toward the end of the 19th century, a research vessel dragging the tops of sea mounts in the Pacific made a startling discovery. Among the plants, shells and other bottom detritus were 5-inch long megalodon teeth. Estimated to have come from a megalodon of around 65 feet, they were far from rare and would have been just another item to label and store except there was a problem. The teeth were not fossilized.

Normally items on the ocean floor will, over time, be buried in silt, and if the material is of the proper organic makeup, it will fossilize. Fossilization is a slow process, usually taking place over a period of about 10,000 years. If 65 feet long megalodons were alive less than 10,000 years ago, why not now?

One classic sea monster, the giant squid, is definitely alive today, swimming in the cold, dark depths as it has for millions of years. Although known and accepted by science since the 17th century, certain aspects of the creature have remained in the scientific closet as wild theories and wilder stories. Science contends that the largest of these invertebrates reach a length of a little over fifty-five feet. Large enough to wear the monster hat, but far from the most frightening possibilities.

A squid, minus its tentacles, washed up on a beach in Natal in 1924. The body was an incredible 9 feet wide and 28 feet long, making it by far the largest ever found. If the tentacles were proportional to other giant squid, the living creature could have been a staggering 115 feet long. Large enough to feed the nightmares of any monster junkie, but still, perhaps not the largest.

Much of the information about giant squid came during the heydays of whaling when pieces of tentacles and squid beaks were common finds in the stomachs of slain sperm whales. But more telling were the scars on the skins of the whales left by squid’s suckers, souvenirs of titanic battles fought in the ocean’s sunless depths. The largest rings from known squid are around 4 inches in diameter, yet scars have been found on the skins of whales that measured over 18 inches in diameter.

An 18-inch sucker would indicate that there are giants among the giants, squid swimming in the depths that reach a length of over 500 feet. A monster’s nightmare.

Tasmanian "globster"

Today science is more enlightened to the possibilities of discoveries, even those made by non-scientist. As long as there is proof in the form of photographs, videos, and a specimen pickled in a jar. But sometimes even that’s not enough. In August of 1960 two ranch hands in Tasmania came upon large, regularly shaped 'something' cast up on a beach. The carcass measured 20 feet long, 18 feet wide and 4 feet thick at one end, tapering to just 6 inches at the other. The material was hard and rubbery and covered with fine hairs, “almost like sheep’s wool with a greasy feel”. Five or six gill- like hairless slits were on each side of the high end (front?) where there were four large, hanging lobes, two to a side of a smooth, gullet-like orifice. Even after being informed of the discovery the scientific community showed little interest for almost two years until the Tasmanian Museum undertook an expedition to the remote location. When they arrived they found the lump in the same place with “no smell, no sign of decomposition, and the skin was as hard as ever.” The creature, lump ... thing was examined, photographed and pieces were cut off and carried back for analysis. Now the find was a world sensation. Dubbed a Globster in the press, theories ran wild about its origin and classification. Everything from a giant ray to a creature from outer space were suggested and discussed as two years passed. Finally the Australian government made the announcement that the mass of material, unlike anything ever seen before, was nothing more than a whale carcass. A hairy whale with gill slits and which didn’t decompose after two years.

In 1968 another Globster appeared on the shores of New Zealand, this one even larger than the first. At 30 feet long and 8 feet high it was estimated to weigh over 20 tons. Another hairy, gilled whale? Sixty-four years before the waters of Australia coughed up its first reported Globster, St. Augustine, Florida was host to a giant lump of something that is still argued over today.

St. Augustine blob

In 1896, an 18-foot long, pink, fibrous mound was found partially buried on a beach near St. Augustine. Speculations as to the lump’s origin lead to pieces being cut off and sent to various scientists and museums around the country, including the Smithsonian, then called the U.S. National Museum. Locals, and at least some members of the scientific community, declared the lump the remains of a giant octopus. Impossible, declared the majority of the scientist of the day. The argument raged long after the Blob had disappeared, probably washed back out to sea. Eventually the argument faded along with the memory.

In 1957 the pieces of the creature were rediscovered in the Smithsonian. Using the finest methods of the day, it was determined that the specimen had indeed come from a member of the octopus family. Based on 1896 photographs it was determined that octopus tentacles could have reached over 75 feet long on the living animal. But science has refused to accept the creature since the tissue samples were again lost. Science will most likely remain unconvinced until another is found, captured, dissected and turned into more pickled proof.

If an unknown Glob, Blob or fully intact sea serpent were to wash ashore today, it would be the best time in the history of the world to identify it. DNA testing could place the find in a family of creatures if it didn’t point to the actual species. But world wide, the number of sightings and finds has become a small fraction of what they once were. Once stories of encounters with sea monsters were regular fare everywhere that men of the sea gathered. No deep-water sailor was more than one or two people removed from a sighting. But today the stories are rare, the actual sightings even more so. Where have all the sea monsters gone?

In the past century the oceans of the world have become very noisy places. When the seas were filled with sails, the ocean depths echoed with the sounds of the natural world, noises that the creature of the sea knew and accepted. But now the hums, thumps, clatter and roar of machinery powered ships fill the waters of the heavily traveled shipping routes with a pollution of noise that may be as damaging to some species of marine life as oil spills. A pollution that can only be escaped by running away.

Maybe there are plenty of unknowns to see in the parts of the oceans where man seldom goes. Places where only the occasional vessel disturbs the peace of the depths. But to search for them may be to lose them to other, even more remote places, to lose them until the day when every dark place is charted, every mystery solved, all the wonder of discovery gone.

And that would a tragic blow to the imagination of mankind. But until then, eyes and imagination can both be turned to the sea, accepting the warning ‘Here there be monsters’.