Some Globster seem at first to look with their external shape, often with a small head, a long thin neck, a large body with fins and a pointed tail, at the first sight like a representative of the extinct marine reptiles group of the plesiosaurs. In fact, however, in all cases where sufficient material or data for identification was present, it turned out without exception as the carcass of a basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), which ultimately led to the coining of the term "pseudo-plesiosaurs" by Daniel Cohen in his book The encyclopedia of monsters“.
The underlying process can be generalized described as follows: Once the tissue of the shark is soft the whole gill-apparatus of the filter-feeding fish falls off including the lower jaw. Starting from the front of the body from the pectoral fins, only the spine is left and - in relation to the body - the small skull. The spine runs heterocercal as with all sharks that are the vertebrae of the tail fin always run upward. The lower lobe fins rot or disappear for other reasons so in result it seems that the animal just has a long, pointed tail. There are also more general processes and factors: the skin, the flesh and the dorsal fin rot or be eaten by fish, the fibers of the muscles break up, what gives the impression of hair or the presence of a mane, etc., etc. Many cases of such pseudo-plesiosaurs have become known over the years and were described including for example the Querqueville carcass of 1934 from France, the carcasses of Deepdale Holm and Hunda of 1941 from Scotland, the Scituate monster of 1970 from Massachusetts or even the Canadian " Parkie "from 2002. To better understand this process, it is obviously important to record every case and therefore a previously little-documented and seemingly forgotten case will be presented:
Read on...
No comments:
Post a Comment