DALE DRINNON: "Nine Nostrilled/Eight gilled" Giant Eels

Dale started at IUPUI hoping for a degree in Biology before changing to Anthropology and as a result, has a very diverse background in Geology, Zoology, Paleontology, Anatomy, Archaeology, Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Latin, Popular Culture, Film criticism, Mythology and Folklore, and various individual human cultures especially mentioning those of the Pacific and the Americas.

He has a working knowledge of every human fossil find up until his graduation and every important Cryptozoological sighting up to that point.

He has been an amateur along on archaeological excavations in Indiana as well as doing some local tracking of Bigfoot there.

Now he is on the CFZ bloggo....

While I was writing around to various pople about the problem of certain Giant-Eel type water monsters, following Linsay Selby's blog entry and mentioning Rafinesque's "Octopos bicolor", a member of `Frontiers of Zoology`emailed me privately and said that the reference was to lampreys. And it would be wrong, the eels in question would be nothing related to lampreys; the explanation then offered that laymen not knowing any zoological difference between lampreys and ordinary eels merely ASSUMED they were the same and added the detail that the giant eels they saw had lamprey gills-in different, unrelated parts of the world-just to add an element of verisimilitude to the reports.

The line of openings behind the eye in lampreys is also never eight or nine as in these reports, so presumably multiplying the number goes along with the much larger reported eel.

This does seem to be the best fit of all the suggested options I have heard so far. So rather than reinforcing each other, the information tends to discredit every one of those independant reports. Which is rather disheartening but probably being more pragmatic about such things.