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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk Here’s a thing I can’t prove, but also feels unassailable.
Sea monsters have been a part of human storytelling for as long as humans have taken to the oceans and crafted their own making.
I mean, monsters come from fear and uncertainty, and three-quarters of our planet is covered in a layer of opacity that begs for exploration, definitely supports hidden life, provides us with food, and often lies between us and vital destinations.
So, of course, we fill those endless waves with monsters.
But which of them are real, and which are better suited to the margins of a medieval illustrated map?
Out of centuries of stories, some have turned out to be based on real animals, but with more recent reports, say from the past 200 years or so, how much of what we think we know about these cases actually holds up when you go back to the original source material?
Probably not as much as you would think.
Today, we’re joined once again by paleozoologist Darren Naish to talk about his new article in Geology Today, Monsters of the Deep, which grew out of his work on a museum exhibition of the same name.
We’ll look at the 1893 sighting of the SS Amfouli, a case where the witnesses described something like a giant eel, but an artist’s reconstruction turned it into a plesiosaur.
And we’ll dig into one of the most famous sea monster encounters of all time, a creature allegedly blasted out of the ocean by a German U-boat during the First World War, a story that somehow nobody mentioned for almost 20 years.
And we’ll also talk about how fossil discoveries shape what people claim to see at sea and whether the coelacanth really deserves its reputation as the poster child for cryptozoology.
I’m Blake Smith.
With me, as always, is Dr. Karen Stolzno.
And this…
is monster talk this is a sad thing but like so many of the people who work in science but touch into cryptozoology are passing away and so it’s like uh finding someone who’s willing to talk about this stuff uh and also maintains academic credibility it seems like a dwindling crowd there’s a lot to say on this
general topic and um i don’t know i kind of feel the opposite to what you just said but oh good maybe i’m wrong maybe i’m wrong let’s see where this goes i think that we are you know you and i have spoken quite a few times before about what you once called post-crypted cryptozoology a quick interruption here while i have said the phrase post-crypted cryptozoology that phrase is actually as far as i know originated by my friend and colleague daniel loxton
I’ll put a link to his work in the show notes.
I think it’s now anyone interested in this is aware of the fact that obviously we’re never going to get away from the fact there’s a lot of people interested in cryptozoology because they are interested in the idea that Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.
are real, right?
That’s always going to be there.
But there’s also an increasing number of people that are fully accepting and embracing of the whole field, the whole idea that…
is not necessarily about what you want to believe.
It’s the, what do other people think?
You know, this is like a broad part of cultural studies.
And I think there’s more people, I think more and more people are prepared to like…
like agree that there’s something to study here that is sociological anthropological cultural and it’s really interesting to you know i find that i’m you know i always have been i always have enjoyed being in the kind of cultural headspace of cryptozoologists and saying well if you believe that’s true then what does that mean you know what does it mean in terms of you know the concept of prehistoric survivors the concept of how many species there are to discover
the concept of what the animal was actually like and how it’s related to other things, etc.
And then kind of like seeing how we can critique that and what we should and shouldn’t critique and which are good arguments and which are bad arguments, no matter who they come from.
Because I think sceptics have often put forward really terrible arguments against cryptids.
I think it’s really, really common today.
And I also think something that just occurred to me at, there was a brilliant event
I’m undergoing a bit of an introspective period on this because Hunting Monsters, my 2016-2017 book that covered various of my thoughts on cryptozoology, that’s 10 years old as of a couple of months ago.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about 10 years of Hunting Monsters.
what would I do in a new edition if I were to be able to do one?
There was an event… And where do you keep all the specimens you’ve collected?
That’s one of the important…
This vast, like, storehouse Tetsu Towers here.
There’s a couple of Bigfoots and Yetis of the many different species.
There was a London Fortean Society event I attended a couple of weekends ago, and it was brilliant.
And like all those events, it was a couple of talks on monsters, a couple of talks on ghost hunting…
some UFO talks, and something that I felt during my talk and I sensed from other people, detected from other people.
And I just the other day listened to an interview from Chris French, and he said the same thing, or something that made me think about the same thing, which is that many of us that are…
widely known as sceptics and are framed as such by our detractors as well as our friends is we kind of actually have a bit of a sort of guilty secret which is I was a believer once I came into this because I was a believer and so when you’re talking about it from a sceptical point of view it’s like I don’t want to say it’s sad but it’s almost like um
So I’m deconstructing this case now.
I don’t think the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot are real zoological entities, but I know that what got me interested in it is the amount of the body of evidence that other people are still accepting as valid.
And I don’t know where I’m going with that, but I think that’s something that is, you know, where you should maybe talk about.
I think a lot of people have already brought attention to this.
But yeah, being a skeptic is not a bad thing.
It’s like coming out of any set of beliefs that generally we don’t think are wise to hold in the modern age.
You said something along the lines of, you know, many an adept critical thinker has sharpened their mind on the whetstone of Bigfoot, right?
So it’s a useful exercise if you’re an honest inquirer, I think.
I would add to this too that if not believers or former believers, certainly people who are aficionados of these kinds of creatures and that we have a love of the folklore and the tales, the stories, the storytelling aspects.
So I think that that brings us together as well.
Let me see.
I guess we should get to the article, right?
Sorry.
Yeah.
So we brought you on the show extensively to talk about your new article.
And so in that article, you walk readers through the Monsters of the Deep exhibition, which apparently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery until late last year and had originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall.
So back in 2020.
So during COVID.
How did this change or evolve over the course of those five years as it travelled?
Yeah, I mean, let me just say, being invited to be involved in setting up an exhibition like that for someone who’s a, I’m a visually oriented person, I like pictures and models and dioramas and stuff like that, and getting the chance to help put together an exhibition on something you’re really interested in, a dream come true, super happy.
And the National Maritime Museum, it’s a famous British institution, the…
National Maritime Museum is at Greenwich in London so this was in the Falmouth one in Cornwall which is over in the west country and um the fact and it and it yeah there’s a whole story I won’t go into a whole story behind the fact that it opened in Covid because like oh god that was that was not good for us but um
Worst timing ever.
But it then finishing its run there and then deals being made for it to go on exhibit elsewhere.
And it’s been at two other venues since.
Yeah, most recently, as you said, Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland, opposite end of the country.
That’s a really fun thing to be involved in because, you know, museums are not like…
prefabricated houses or something.
Every one of them is a strange, very distinctive, weird shape with different sized rooms and even shapes, curved walls and heights of ceilings and all kinds of insane amount of variations.
So you basically have to do a redesign each time, meaning that it’s not the same exhibition each time.
It’s a radically different exhibition.
So there have been three different versions of this.
exhibition and yes i’m super happy with uh all of its visions and where it goes next which i can’t talk about
Does that change narrative flow, or is this just about how it’s presented visually, organizationally?
Yeah, all of that, all of that.
So it was specifically designed for the shape of National Maritime Museum Falmouth, and that was a peculiar shaped building.
Shaped like a Falmouth, actually.
Yeah.
It was a long bottlenecked space.
And we used that bottleneck as like you, several sections of the exhibition, as is reflected in the article.
The idea is you are introduced to what people in medieval Europe thought about the sea.
So that’s a good excuse to have your medieval sea maps like the Carta Marina and so on.
Then you’ve got during the Victorian age, sea monsters are mostly like killed off.
Richard Owen kills the sea monster.
And there isn’t a real reason post the Challenger expedition to think that sea monsters are real.
But then you’ve got this mid 20th century renaissance of cryptozoology.
And we are the sort of people that know about the kind of left-field, weird cryptozoology stuff, but that’s always there, and it does bleed over into pop culture a little bit, but mostly…
It hasn’t.
Mostly popular culture is now sceptical.
Sea monsters aren’t real.
There are new animals found in the seas, but they’re not going to be giant sea serpents and whatnot.
And so the bottleneck gave us an excuse to say that this is a critical point where history could go this way, it could go this way.
Hoovermans and Sanderson and other cryptozoological literalists continued this medieval tradition, and that’s continued all the way to the present.
But otherwise, you’ve got this more scientific…
tech-driven view of life in the oceans so yeah so we exploited the specifics of the building in Falmouth to bring that home but then if you think about other the other museum spaces where things are totally different couldn’t do that had to do something different so yeah you do have to do a redesign
In Aberdeen, which for people who don’t know, that’s really far north in Scotland.
The two biggest cities in Scotland are Edinburgh and Glasgow, which are both roughly at the same latitude.
And they’re still about 100 kilometres away from Aberdeen.
A lot of people in Edinburgh and Glasgow haven’t been to Aberdeen.
I’d never been to Aberdeen.
I’ve been to Loch Ness, which is even further north.
But…
Me too.
Obviously.
Yeah.
Of course.
I should hope so.
Yes.
But yeah, in Aberdeen, it was the space there was like there was an initial room you enter.
So that’s going to have to be our introduction to medieval thoughts.
Then there’s this giant kind of continuously curved space, which we kind of used as an excuse to say, you know, talk about the history of everything all the way up to modern deep sea exploration.
So Blake was wrong.
Let’s make that clear that this is more of a changing of the guards than all people are no longer interested in this kind of thing.
So you’re saying that there’s this ongoing interest in these topics, but it’s just changing with society.
So in the 2020s, then what is keeping this interest alive, these stories alive for people?
I think that these days it seems that the people that are publishing cryptozoological work, and there’s kind of a difference between, you know, like your online enthusiasts, your fans of the field, people in Facebook groups and whatnot, versus people that are actually publishing articles and even books.
And I think that there’s an overlap between people that are interested in cryptozoology academically
and have an overlap with paleontological expertise, because there’s so many alleged connections with fossil animals, evolutionary history, and paleoartistic portrayals of animals, and spec zoo, speculative zoology, the whole field of…
imagining creatures from alternative timelines and imaginary creatures from the future.
I think that all those three fields are quite connected.
And the people that are sometimes publishing on cryptozoology come from that sort of background.
and are doing new critical analyses of how likely is it that megatooth sharks, for example, might have persisted to the present based on what cryptozoologists have said.
That’s something that you have to have…
You have to have paleontological expertise to evaluate that claim.
You have to have paleontological expertise to evaluate various of the claims made about the identity of, you know, Yeti and Bigfoot and so on.
And the major, most influential works in thinking here on sea monsters in particular that have been published most recently, I’m thinking of Robert France’s book of 2019, Disentangled, it’s called.
and Adrian Shine’s 2024 book, The Natural History of Sea Serpents, they pull all those things together but are fundamentally about the human experience in looking at stuff on the sea or in the sea.
Like, in order to evaluate monster reports, you need to know about the history of…
that specific monster and what people claimed about the sighting and how the sighting was interpreted.
But you also need to know about the actual real animals and other objects that occur in that part of the sea.
And you need to have some good background knowledge of how people perform as observers.
what opportunities for observation existed for those people and what the specific conditions were of the time.
Because interestingly, I think those two books in particular have done a good job of showing that the specific sea monster phases of history they were interested in, for France, that’s the late 1810s and 1820s, and for Shine, that’s mostly the late 1800s,
People are using new ships and seeing the effects of new kinds of marine technology, new kinds of fishing technology, new kinds of vessels, new kinds of wakes and waves produced by vessels.
You’ve got to have that in there as well.
And there isn’t, you know, there isn’t like a single simple answer to what sea monsters are.
It’s obviously people seeing a huge number of things.
But yes, you sweep all these things together to try and like, you can explain some specific sightings.
For the listeners, I’m nodding vigorously in agreement.
But so this actually.
Your article and the things you just said fit very tidily into something I’ve been working on.
It started as a joke or some wordplay, this concept of scripteds, the idea that films influence what people see.
But the more I’ve developed that and looked into it, there seems to be this, I call it, Ouroboric loop of…
People’s folklore influencing their experience, people’s fiction that they consume influencing their experience, and people’s experience influencing folklore and fictional representations.
So there’s constant feedback.
And when we talk about sea monsters, you’ve talked about the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
And I was trying to sort of run that same concept back to where it began.
And it seems like, to me, from a fictional perspective, maybe the Lost World and maybe some Jules Verne action there.
But this idea of surviving dinosaurs, in order for that to exist, you also need to have…
A cognizance of extinction, a cognizance of fossils.
So, again, you’ve got real scientific discoveries, scientific discoveries feeding into fiction and then feeding into people’s experience.
And, of course, Locks and Prothero talk about the idea that maybe King Kong influenced early Nessie sightings.
But I’d like to talk a little bit your thoughts on that instead of me saying what I have to think about it.
This idea of the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
Are you finding a similar sort of storyline there or through line for how this is emerged?
I definitely think it’s been important and with respect to sea monsters in particular.
And Charles Paxton and I actually did an analysis of this.
When did we publish that?
I can’t remember the date now.
20, no, I can’t remember.
I’m going to say 2017, something like that.
And we noticed that, and we weren’t the first to notice this, and other people have made this claim before.
Sprugg to Camp was, I think, one of the first people to comment on it.
The fact that the discovery of specific kinds of fossil animals, and most famously, the long-necked plesiosaurs.
That happened in 1824.
It’s the public in parts of the world, and I’m obviously mostly fixated on Western Europe, they were savvy enough and the information was shared well enough in newspapers and popular sources at the time, not just academic journals, that knowledge of those kinds of creatures started to influence the sorts of sea monsters that people reported.
So Charles and I…
Charles has got a database of, there’s about 1,700 sea monster accounts on record and Charles has got like a, you know, giant spreadsheet of most of them.
Wow.
And yeah, at what point in history do people start talking about, you know, saying they see a sea monster with a long neck?
Because as we know, historically, you know, what’s a sea monster?
There’s sea monsters of every conceivable sort of size and shape.
But the commonest form in older literature is a serpent, sea serpent.
But you don’t really get people commenting on a neck until the Daedalus or Daedalus event of 1848, an account that happened off of Namibia, so South Atlantic.
that’s one of the first to actually mention a long neck, even though the creature is actually sort of like a long, like, you know, sort of cylindrical object.
And yeah, there’s statistical support to be found for that contention that people start talking about a neck after plesiosaurs become known, which is consistent with the idea that people are really influenced by popular culture.
So, yes, I definitely do think that, yeah, the discovery of specific fossils, the sharing of it does have a osmotic effect, you know, then goes to the monster sighting.
So that’s, yeah, that’s kind of the background to the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
There’s another thing that always needs to be mentioned, and I find myself mentioning this more and more, and that’s also that the history of cryptozoology and indeed the history of like Fortiana and the paranormal and everything in general is mostly driven by sensationalist popular writing.
So there’s this common idea that, you know…
writer x i’m not going to mention any specific names because it seems mean but this specific writer like oh they they did this big book where they they showed that the evidence for surviving plesiosaurs or whatever is pretty good it’s like well it was a popular book and they were deliberately writing something to appeal you know to a mass audience and they were deliberately uh kind of you know sensationalizing and popularizing it and i i think that that’s partly why some authors
including some that are still quite active today, have really promoted and latched on to the prehistoric survivor paradigm because it’s the funnest and most sensational perspective that you can go on.
What a cool idea.
It’s a fun, speculative idea.
And I’ll say one more thing, which is that…
And the idea that people like writers promoting the prehistoric survival paradigm, the idea that they were thinking that it was a good idea based on various scientific arguments they could make, like, could it be conceivable?
that creature like a plesiosaur could persist for years beyond the end of Cretaceous or a bacillosaur beyond the end of the bacillosaurs or zygodonts, this famous group of long-bodied whales.
Could they have persisted for 36 million years beyond their point in the fossil record?
That’s something that we might say in the modern decades because we’ve now…
you know, decades of recent geological science have helped pin specific ages on the geological strata.
But when these ideas first become popular, late 1800s, they don’t have those exact, like, specific geological, the correct word is evading me right now, but they don’t have the accurate geological ages.
They’ve got this vague view of the age of the Earth and the age of the specific
People have known since the early 1800s that there was an age of reptiles before there was an age of mammals.
But what specific dates can you pin on that?
Well, if you’re a Victorian scientist, you’ll be absolutely fully on board with the fact there is an age of reptiles, but maybe it’s four million years ago.
maybe it’s 10 million years ago, maybe it’s 2 million years ago.
They are not thinking that they are, today, the mesozoic age of reptiles is between something like 252 and 66 million years ago, but they don’t know that.
So they’re thinking that bacillosaurs and plesiosaurs are animals of a few million years ago.
Therefore, the idea that they might have cryptically survived in the modern world is actually not unlikely.
That hasn’t been mentioned enough.
It’s been mentioned a few times in the paleontological literature when paleontologists have commented on things like bacillus or zygodon survival.
But I think it’s one of the things at play here.
Well, the young Earth creationists, if the Earth is only 6,000 years, there’s plenty of time for dinosaurs to still be around.
So there’s some context, right?
I’m going to say, as I always do, dinosaurs are not extinct.
Oh, nitpicking.
I just have to remind people every time.
There’s still so many dinosaur experts, so many paleontologists.
There’s one pooping on my car right now.
Exactly.
We have to train people out of saying that if birds are dinosaurs, and we all agree they are, then you can’t be extinct when you’re still alive.
That’s true.
Can we say Mesozoic marine reptiles are extinct?
Yeah.
Okay, thank you.
We’re back in agreement.
Most people get that granular and just don’t think of it in terms of that.
So in your article, you talk about the U-28 sea monster story and also the SS fully case.
So I’m wondering if you could tell us a bit about those and also that you credit Adrian Shine’s book.
You already mentioned him, A Natural History of Sea Serpents, for that reanalysis.
So if you can tell us about those cases a bit and how important his book is to the field as well.
Yeah, so those are both really good examples of how newsflash is as if you have to go back to the source.
You cannot rely on second, third or fourth hand retellings in popular books.
So this connects to what I just said about the history of sensationalist claims made in books on monsters.
Adrian Shine.
And for those of you who don’t know, most of you will, but he’s the famous Loch Ness guy with the massive beard.
He is the Gandalf of Loch Ness.
That’s true.
Yes, he’s a great guy.
Really, you know, decades of amazing, like, on the ground research.
Or in the water.
Or in the water research.
At Loch Ness and other Scottish lochs.
But yeah, he’s also got this very grounded, serious interest in sea monster research as well.
And he shows in The Natural History of Sea Serpents, which I really liked.
I did a review of it.
at Tetrapodsology.
Yeah, if you go back to the source, the original account is often quite different from the popularised one.
So… And I should also say that a lot of these sea monster reports, they’re so exciting that…
when they’ve been featured in newspapers and popular books, they’ve been accompanied by artistic reconstructions produced by artists, not by the original witnesses.
So you’ll therefore see in a kind of often sort of Chinese whispers or like deliberate embellishment of the original case.
And the Mfuli account is from the vessels called the SS Mfuli.
In 1893, it was off the Canary Islands.
And Captain Kringle, always find that an amusing name, he described their observation, the observation of him and several crew members of like a weird monster of some kind.
And the conventional interpretation of this, which you can see in Hooverman’s book of 1968, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents and Other Sources, is a bulky-bodied, like a lumpy-bodied sea monster with a really long neck projecting way out of the water with a little head.
And it looks exactly like the conventional view of a plesiosaur.
Now, today we know plesiosaurs didn’t look quite like that.
They didn’t look lumpy and bumpy and they couldn’t swim along with the neck way out of the water like that, but whatever.
It looks like a plesiosaur.
So if you’re interpreting this, trying to interpret this based on just that information, it’s like, what could this be?
I can’t explain this away as a wayward sighting of a killer whale or, you know, a bar skin shark or anything.
It’s a giant long-necked monster.
What Shine emphasises, go back to the source, go back to the Umphalys ship’s log, that’s not what was described at all.
The monster that Kringle and others described was thought by them,
to be a giant conger eel they thought they were looking at a giant eel so they were talking about a long and low animal that did not project much above the water surface it certainly didn’t have a long neck and there was no mention of a neck in the in the report in fact and the it was said to have it was only seen fleetingly they got these brief glimpses of it
uh it was said to have an upper jaw seven foot long and the artist that produced the plesiosaur light reconstruction must have like not read this properly or was miscommunicated because it looks like they thought upper jaw um was i don’t know long neck or something i can’t remember how they might have made the mistake
It’s a long jaw, seven foot long, with white gums fringed with serrated teeth.
And as soon as you talk about a really, really long upper jaw fringed with serrated teeth, you should probably be thinking of a baleen whale, like a fin whale or a say whale or something like that.
And…
Now, we know today, if you think of like a blue whale or one of those rorqual whales in your mind, you’re probably thinking of a very, very long, slender animal, looked like a wine glass or something.
We’ve, you know, we’ve seen them on TV and aerial photos.
We haven’t seen them in real life.
But go back to the 1890s, people did not know that rorquals were like that.
They thought they were sort of blubbery, chunky, blocky animals.
So I don’t think they had the information to interpret it as a rort call, but that does seem to be what it is.
So, yeah, that’s a case of having to go back to the source.
What did the witness actually say?
They didn’t say what sensationalist authors have said that they did.
And then picture worth a thousand words.
I mean, look at Mothman.
Frazetta does that cover art for the Mothman prophecies.
It changes the reports.
It changes what people expect.
It matters a lot.
This art stuff matters.
Fortean author and author in general, Mike Dash, gave a really good talk that I went to a few years ago called Are Artists Pictures What the Witness Saw?
And it was all about this.
It was about the fact that
Yeah, as soon as you get an author to make a cool picture for the cover of a book or a magazine, that then becomes the monster.
There were many, many case examples of this.
But yeah, that’s a real important phenomenon.
This affected a whole load of sea monsters and other monsters in general.
And just more briefly, because I spoke for too long there, more briefly, the U-28 encounters, one of the most famous sea monster accounts of all time.
So 1915, First World War.
The German U-boat, U-28, is patrolling off the coast, off the southwest coast of Ireland.
And these vessels, the U-boats, were terrifying.
And I did a bit of research into them, and it’s astonishing how successful they were.
It was ordinary for, in a season, a U-boat to disable or sink between 200 and 300 enemy vessels, which is absolutely unbelievable, their success rate.
So they saw, this is recorded in the, I’ve forgotten the very long German name for war diary, Kreigs something, there’s a German word for it.
A big compound down.
Yes, classic piece of German lingo.
And, yeah, they saw this vessel, the Iberian.
They torpedoed it.
They disabled it.
They took – a small number of men were killed during the attack, like less than five.
About 70 survived and were taken on board.
And the standard procedure was to take survivors on board and drop them off at the nearest friendly port –
and to sink the vessel.
So this is exactly what they did.
They sank the Iberian.
And Captain Von Forstner was the main man.
This story revolves around.
And he’s a very famous U-boat commander.
He wrote a book in, I think, 1917, all about his adventures as a U-boat commander.
And he says that they watched it sink.
um well hold on he says yes there’s two sets of different things but in the 1930s he says that they uh they watch it sink and then they see an explosion and blasted among the skyward among the wreckage is this gigantic like 60 foot long 18 meter long crocodile shaped writhing sort of sea monster and that was written about by hoovermans and other cryptozoologists and that’s a canonical cryptid it’s the marine saurian it’s meant to be like a
surviving mosasaur or other cretaceous marine reptile but there’s no mention at all of this account in von forstner’s book and when the survivors of the attack uh the crew of the iberian were um interviewed by local journalists in ireland there’s many many newspaper reports of what they what they saw and what happened there’s no mention of a sea monster
There’s the story went national across Great Britain and Ireland.
It went international.
It was reported in the US before the US was involved in the First World War.
So they had no reason to be coy or sceptical in their reporting of it.
And there’s no mention of sea monsters at all.
That’s quite a cover up.
Yeah.
It doesn’t become part of the story until 1933, and there’s two things going on in 1933.
In Germany, there’s a little bit of a nationalistic push, and nationalistic right-wing newspapers basically want to celebrate German achievement and excellence.
And, of course, the Loch Ness Monster is a phenomenon in 1933.
So what seems to have happened is that right-leaning…
pro-germany publications wanted a german story coming from a respected german guy like let’s get our own loch ness monster story um and they found that in von forstner and i should also say that von forstner wasn’t like an innocent you know like uh
He participated very much in this because he wrote the forward or the preface, I can’t remember, but he wrote like an introductory set of some text for the German version of the first ever book on the Loch Ness Monster, Rupert Gould’s Loch Ness Monster and Others, which in Germany had a different title.
It’s called like My Adventures with Sea Monsters or something along those lines.
And…
And von Thorsten again mentions there the fact that, oh, I saw a sea monster one time back in the First World War when I was a U-boat commander.
So, yeah.
So we have to conclude from that that sadly the U-28 1915 sea monster account actually didn’t happen.
The Iberian was indeed sunk.
There probably was actually an explosion.
But, yeah, nobody saw or reported or wrote down a sea monster at that time.
Didn’t become part of the literature until the 30s.
Is this article behind a paywall or is it something people can just get to?
It is paywalled, yeah.
But, you know, I hopefully don’t need to say this.
If you ever find an article that you want and it’s paywalled, ask the author, find the author and ask them and they will 99% of the time be more than happy to send you one.
Yeah, on research.net or…
academia.edu or something like that i think it’s just such a well done piece and it’s got great pictures but uh you you get you hit some really great points that i love to see reiterated and one of them is the coelacanth as red herring which is funny in its own right but uh but
Can we talk about that a little bit before we run out of time?
Because it is.
I mean, it is the image of cryptozoology for many people because it’s a real creature.
But I’ve always felt I’ve long felt it doesn’t really qualify.
So, yeah, I like your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been saying for a while that the use of coelacanths as analogues for the prehistoric survivor idea, the fact that, hey, if this lineage of fishes could persist from the Cretaceous to the present day without us realising until 1936, then surely, please yourselves…
And then bacillus and mosasaur and whatever else could survive as well.
Well, no.
No, there’s just a lot of reasons to reject that claim.
Well, reject it as a good argument.
So coelacanths are living coelacanths, which are really quite different from a lot of fossil coelacanths we know of.
But living coelacanths are abyssal deep sea specialists.
They don’t come to the surface.
So far as we know, they don’t come to the surface at all.
They don’t breathe air.
They are off the continental shelf.
They don’t hang around estuaries or coasts.
They have no need to come to the surface.
They have no need to frequent places where people might see them.
And if we imagine that plesiosaurs or bacillosaurs or whatnot survived, all of those animals are, they are, those are all animals that must spend a lot of time at the surface.
They must frequent coastal waters for reasons of like their ecology, you know, where they need to get their food and where they breed and whatnot.
And, of course, the bones, the skeletons of animals like plesiosaurs and whatnot, their bones are big, identifiable.
They roll around for a long time on the seafloor before being broken to bits.
Coelacanth bones, again, those are the modern coelacanths, are really very difficult to identify, very kind of like highly modified, reduced.
Their individual bones are almost impossible to identify.
If you find an individual coelacanth bone, good luck telling us that it’s a coelacanth, whereas you can’t say the same for the groups of fossil whales and reptiles that have been part of the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
So, yeah, I think there’s more to it as well, but the whole argument that coelacanths are good analogues is just not really a good proposal.
They’re not particularly monstrous, which I think there’s something about the original definition of what should be a part of cryptozoology had that sort of…
marquee value.
We’re not looking for a new kind of newt, right?
We’re looking for something a little exceptional, something that would be the subject of folklore.
And there’s not a lot of folklore outside of the Atlanteans.
Now they love their coelacanth stories down there, but you know, up here on the surface where we have to breathe air, there’s not a lot of coelacanth folklore.
And it just doesn’t feel like it’s filling that niche of turning folklore into fact, which seems to be an obsession in the original sort of cryptozoology.
Yeah, when coelacanth became known, thanks to Marjorie Courtney Latimer’s discovery and J.L.B.
Smith writing about it, they did then find other people in East Africa saying, oh yeah, we do know this fish and we do catch it very rarely.
So it might be that local people…
did catch these fishes occasionally but yeah it wasn’t remarkable enough for anyone to really make a big deal out of it and whether that means it’s in the same ballpark as something like a you know 40 foot long marine reptile is again like a thing worth pointing out
Well, unfortunately, we’re going to have to start wrapping things up, but we just have a couple of little questions we want to throw in at the end here.
So you note in your article that cryptozoologists aren’t pseudoscientists and they don’t promote anti-scientific views, but that their work involves a lot of speculation well beyond what the data supports.
And that’s a pretty measured take.
So how do you navigate that line with your work, being sceptical of the claims while also being fair to these people who are making them?
Yes, I think it’s quite important.
You’ll agree with me here that it doesn’t really work when we just…
I’ve been quite frustrated with the history of scepticism that comes from some people, by no means all people that mark themselves as sceptics, in the…
we mustn’t use a kind of knee-jerk, what I’ve called automatic scepticism, just like, oh, that’s such a ridiculous idea, I’m not going to take it seriously.
So, you know, there’s people that have written about Bigfoot and their first argument is, it’s such a stupid idea, it’s not even worth considering.
It’s like, well, I kind of see why you’re saying that, you know, we know why you’re saying that, but it’s not good enough in terms of the quality of evidence that we have.
So I think it’s fairer to people that endorse the existence of given cryptids who in cases do so because they’ve had experiences themselves that they can’t explain.
That’s fair enough.
I think if you put yourself in their position, they are coming up with serious arguments that might support the validity of the thing.
And, yeah, if we then drill down into those, we can show why.
Well, no, if you if you evaluate that scientifically, you know, you should have evidence for this by now.
Does that eyewitness evidence stand up?
What are the prior experiences of that specific witness?
So, yes, I just don’t think it’s.
Yeah, it’s not.
I think it’s easy to reject cryptozoology as pseudoscience.
This has become a bit of a hot topic in recent years due to the behavior of certain editors at Wikipedia.
They’ve just got this blanket dismissal of cryptozoology as pseudoscience.
Whereas a lot of it is not.
It’s like parascience.
It’s something happening in parallel to proper science.
But it’s I still don’t think it’s actually pseudoscience per se.
Yeah, that’s I think our stance as well to address the claims, but not dismiss out of hand.
Yeah, we’ve taken the…
Shine has that phrase he likes to talk about being a sympathetic skeptic.
And I think we’ve done the presumption of sincerity, like the idea that while the claims may be weird or strange or unusual or unlikely, that we’d like to at least start with the assumption that the person making them is not a hoaxer or doing so in bad faith.
I mean…
And I think that’s one of the big take-home things on sea monsters.
Yes, there are these hoaxes in there, like the U-28 encounter, and there’s a few others as well, but mostly it seems to be people misunderstanding what they saw because, and this is Shine’s primary point, that we are not good observers when it comes to weird, big animals seen at sea.
We do not generally have good experience of what we’re looking at.
I think if we wrote a book of monster talk, things we’ve learned, don’t trust your memory and people are not good observers.
And it’s very likely you don’t know enough to make a good judgment.
Like that’s, those are like three really core ideas that, you know, even mundane stuff, like how a taphonomy works with dead animals leading to, you know, mutilation suspicions and conspiracies.
It’s like,
A lot of that, if you just knew more about how animals decay, you would know that this is not that mysterious.
But who has time when there’s a good story to be told?
I don’t know.
Oh, so wrapping up, I wanted to say something like, I really miss you doing your podcast.
But when I went to look and see what you’re up to lately, you’re not lazy.
You’re a busy guy.
So do you want to talk?
I’ve got a big list of things I could list off.
Why don’t you hit the highlights of what you’ve been working on?
Where can people find you today, Darren?
Yeah, the podcast does still exist, but we only get to do it very occasionally.
So I’m most active at tetrapodsologytetzu.com, where I share thoughts, articles and drawings on all the animals that I’m interested in.
I’m generally busy with, I’m doing books all the time.
I’ve got a big book I’m putting together at the moment about cryptozoology, which I definitely want to talk about when it’s out, which will maybe be 2027 or 28.
I’ve just finished a long stint working in TV.
I worked for the BBC Natural History Unit, brilliant job, and helped bring together the Apple TV series Prehistoric Planet Ice Age, which is streaming now on Apple TV.
So do have a look at that if you’re interested in ice age animals.
And Hunting Monsters is still in print, but only as an e-book.
So if you don’t have what I think is quite an interesting, sceptical volume on monsters and cryptozoology, where we’re at as of when I wrote the book, 2016, 2017, then please do get Hunting Monsters.
The e-book is incredibly cheap.
It’s just a few dollars.
Nice.
So I guess that’s it for today.
Although clearly we could just chat a long ass time.
That’s when the new book comes out.
Definitely.
We’ll, we’ll be in touch.
Yeah, please, please do stay in touch.
And I’m, I’m so glad that you’re out there getting some good word out on these, these, these topics besides just, that’s not real.
Shut up about it.
Cause that’s not a really great, that’s not a great talking point.
I, I, you know, monsters are great.
That’s great.
So, yeah, indeed.
So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us again.
Yeah, thank you.
We know you’re so busy.
Yeah, for real.
Thanks.
And you got to work with Attenborough.
That’s really freaking cool.
I did, yeah.
Me and Dave.
Yeah, it’s his 100th birthday in this month, May 2026.
Amazing.
I’m going to his birthday next week, I think.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, for real.
I mean, obviously, I’m sure this is true of you too, but I’ve been watching him since I was a little child.
Oh, yeah.
Familiar voice.
Oh, my God.
So that’s so great.
Well, say hello for me.
I know he gets to see us too when we watch TV, right?
That’s how that works.
Yeah, he’s always talking about your podcast.
That’s why I always put on pants before I watch his shows.
That’s important.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
It was great talking to you both.
Likewise.
Thank you.
Yeah, have a good weekend.
Take care.
You too.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a conversation with Darren Nash about sea monsters, source material, and why a story told by witnesses may be completely outperformed by an imaginative illustration.
Darren’s article, Monsters of the Deep, is in Geology Today.
And if it’s behind a pail, I’ll do what Darren suggests and ask him for a copy.
You can find his writing and artwork at Tetrapod Zoology.
That’s tetzoo.com.
And his book, Hunting Monsters, is still available as an e-book.
Check the show notes for links.
He’s also got a new cryptozoology book in the works.
So we’ll definitely be having him back when that’s ready.
And if you haven’t seen Prehistoric Planet Ice Age on Apple TV, which Darren worked on with the BBC Natural History Unit,
It’s definitely worth a look.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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