CRYPTOLINK: Mythical ‘Sea Serpent’ Comes into the Light

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Artist’s view of an oarfish, alive in the ocean depths. (Illustration by E. Paul Oberlander ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Davy Jones’ Locker, it might be called, this final resting place of a sea serpent.  In a darkened back room at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, ichthyologists Jeff Williams and Kris Murphy prepare to break the seal of a time capsule, a faded jar the color of yellow-green sea glass. A container that is a coffin.

Hidden on a dark upper shelf for 47 years, an oarfish has come into the light. (Photograph by Sandra Raredon.)

Williams and Murphy lift the lead-weight jar from the uppermost shelf at the end of a row in the support center’s fish collection, place it on a steel cart, and wheel it to a lab where fluorescent lights illuminate the contents. And where there are instruments for prying open the tightly shut, three-feet-high by one-foot-wide jar.

Once through the lab’s double-door entrance, Williams tries to free the jar’s top. “That lid is wedged in almost like it was superglued shut,” he says.

Finally, after several twists of a wrench, open sesame. Within, an 11-feet-long fish with iridescent fins lies in repose, floating in preservative.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center measure a long-lost oarfish: 11 feet, 2 inches. (Photograph by Sandra Raredon.)

It’s an adult oarfish that, at best guess, washed up near St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, on April 6, 1967. According to a report in the next day’s St. Petersburg Times, retired Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg found the fish floating in the Gulf surf and dragged it ashore.

Ellsberg hauled it to the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Laboratory in St. Pete Beach. Scientists there donated the oarfish to the Smithsonian.

Little but a one-inch silver tag reading USNM (U.S. National Museum) 201458, a clue buried with the fish, heralds its existence. Marker aside, there’s no record of the oarfish in the museum’s database. The fish had been lost in time, its grave undisturbed for 47 years.

Now the “sea serpent” has come to light. It will receive an official catalog date: 2014. It’s the only adult oarfish in the Smithsonian’s collections.

The fish’s half-dollar-sized silver eyes seem to register our presence. I reach out to touch its scales. They’re firm and far from cold. Shimmering flecks soon cover my hand.

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