I went ahead and passed the next blog through, one about my longstanding theoretical accounting for Merfolk reports. I had mentioned it on the CFZ blog before but this is my first posting of it in Blog form:
http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/07/marine-monkeys-and-merfolk.html
A similar creature to the Merbeing is the Selkie, which is supposedly a seal that can doff its sealskin to reveal a human beneath. A theory regarding the origin of selkie belief (in Scotland particularly) is that the odd Lapp has drifted south from Norway in his kayak, clad in a sealskin coat.
ReplyDeleteSome quite credible reports of Merfolk describe animals who look remarkably like the traditional type. In the Orkney Islands they believe in Finfolk - the men have legs, but the women look like mermaids. See Wikipedia article.