DALE DRINNON: Two long-necked Sea Creatures

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....

This concerns two different long-necked animals reported as Sea-Serpents. The first is the Long-necked sea lion such as reported off the Island of Hoy in 1918 and the other is the larger more Plesiosaurian creature more commonly seen.

These are more samples from the group Frontiers-of-Zoology. The Kivik Stone is in the files and has this description:

'Original for some of Holiday's creature drawings: showing a possible Scandinavian long-necked sea lion of unknown type.'

However, that is not the only or even the more important of the long-necked Sea-Serpents. The illustration from Monster Hunt shows one of the larger, longer-necked, smaller-headed, tailed creatures hunting seals (which it evidently kills but does not eat, and when they are said to kill human beings the same thing is said again).

This is incidentally one of three such plain representations of a Plesiosaurian tailed creature seen from above that Heuvelmans must have known about: two other examples were in Sanderson's archives. A later and better-known example was the Plesiosaurian creature seen by the research submarine Alvin in the tongue-of-the-sea, off Grand Bahama.

The larger collage is also from the files of the group and collects together several pre-contact representations of Plesiosaur-shaped creatures, from prehistoric rock art up until 'Primitive' art in more recent times. This is only a sampler from the groups' photo albums. Specifically Plesiosaurian anatomy shows in several cases: sometimes the specific skeletal structure of the paddles and limb girdles is shown, sometimes even the characteristic Euryapsid openings at the back of the skull are clearly intended (Snakes have nothing like that)

I presume that both types can wander inland but they do not make a career of it: and the two areas in specific where the long-necked seals wander inland are Ireland (Shannon River system especially) and Australia (where they are sometimes called Bunyips. Not the only things called Bunyips, either).

And personally I prefer maintaining the proposed scientific names of Megalotaria for the sea lion and Megophias for the more typical long-necked (and tailed) sea-serpent. My colleague Charles Paxton is, however, strongly opposed to the suggestion.