UPDATE ON DALE'S CHAMP PIECE FROM THIS MORNING

I think my editorial powers deserted me a tad this morning. I should have realised that my headline to Dale's piece was a little misleading. He writes:

OOPS! I did not mean that to sound like this was "The Earliest Lake Champlain Sighting", What I was trying to say was it was the first one I ever saw personally...AND it was an obvious moose sighting. Obviously Samuel de Champlain had the "first sighting" but what he was talking about was a kind of a fish. And there were many other sightings betwen his time and this archive report. Several are possibly swimming moose reports, but this one has not only the horse's head, mane and prominent eyes, it also includes the big droopy ears and moose antlers. Eberhart lists this as a type of cryptid in Eastern Canada called "Horse's Head" and considers that the Water Horse tradition had crossed the Atlantic along with the British colonists.

Reports of "Lake Monsters" with definite moose antlers also come from Flathead Lake and Lake Winnepeg, and one of Mark Hall's "Giant salamanders" from Ohio has them (no less) And that led to the supposition that the "Salamander" might have branching external gills. BUT that leads to another thing, the "External branching gills" theory includes the "Red horn" subsection of Water Horse reports, and the "Red horns" are apparently a reference to the antlers during the period the velvet is coming off (and during which time the antlers are actually temporarily bloody). Such reports are rare and basically still occur in parts of the same general "Monster Latitudes", which correspond to the original range for the moose or elk.