But the show's aquatic beings are nothing like Disney's human-obsessed Ariel—they look more like Avatar aliens with tails or the Harry Potter merpeople and should definitely want nothing to do with humans.
Anyone who tuned in over the Memorial Day weekend to watch one of the showings of the mockumentary hoping to see real evidence of
merpeople ended up being sorely disappointed. And hopefully most viewers realized that the show wasn't real by the time it was over—it doesn't seem as though Animal Planet was really trying to fool the public with a modern-day Fiji mermaid. P.T. Barnum popularized the Fiji mermaid sideshow attraction shown in the photo on the right—it was basically a mummified monkey head and torso sewed to that of a fish and covered with papier-mâché.
In Mermaids: The Body Found, researchers for NOAA are investigating whale beachings all around the world. They decide that the Navy is testing a new kind of sonar that's causing the creatures to beach themselves, and while listening to some of the sonar recordings that took place during the testing, they hear what seems to be a new species of dolphin.
Read on...
New at the Frontiers of Zoology: 
