DALE DRINNON: Meurger on Canadian Lake Monsters

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....

Following on from Richard's posting the other day Michel Meurger is quite wrong to say that the different sorts of lake monster reports in Canada indicates that there are no such things. That is an absurd statement. Michel Meurger is quite correct to say that the reports are contradictory but he overlooks the quite obvious conclusion that people are talking about more than one kind of lake monster in Canada.

The problem is this fixation on there being only one kind of water monster; that somehow the term "water monster" has some specific connotation. It does not; it is a generic term.

Obviously, some of the reports are fish, and reports of fish as different from one another as pikes and sturgeons. Some of the reports are obviously eels of unusual size and are stated as such specifically. SOME reports are said to be giant lizards or "Alligators" but are more likely giant salamanders. Others may be stray pinnepeds down from the frozen Arctic and the basic model is still fundamentally based on mistaken reports of mooses in the water. MOST reports are actually indeterminate; people cannot make out what they are seeing. And to top it all off, it does indeed look as if unknown outsized otters and beavers are definitely involved. Both of these have specific candidate fossil forerunners.

There are NO simple solutions.

Richard is also quite right to say that multiple-channelled rivers are personified as multiple-headed dragons. The Meikong is one such river.