Sea Monsters,

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Sea monsters are sea-dwelling, mythical or legendary creatures, often believed to be of immense size.

Marine monsters can take many forms, including sea dragons, sea serpents, or multi-armed beasts; they can be slimy or scaly, often spouting jets of water. Often they are pictured threatening ships.

Sightings and legends
Historically, decorative drawings of heraldic dolphins and sea monsters were frequently used to illustrate maps, such as the Carta marina. This practice died away with the advent of modern cartography. Nevertheless, stories of sea monsters and eyewitness accounts which claim to have seen these beasts persist to this day. Such sightings are often catalogued and studied by folklorists and cryptozoologists.

Sea monster accounts are found in virtually all cultures that have contact with the sea. Eyewitness accounts come from all over the world. For example, Avienus relates of Carthaginian explorer Himilco's voyage "...there monsters of the deep, and beasts swim amid the slow and sluggishly crawling ships." (lines 117-29 of Ora Maritima). Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed to have encountered a lion-like monster with "glaring eyes" on his return voyage after formally claiming St. John's, Newfoundland (1583) for England. Another account of an encounter with a sea monster comes from July 1734. Hans Egede, a Danish/Norwegian missionary reported that on a voyage to Gothaab/Nuuk on the western coast of Greenland:

[There] appeared a very terrible sea-animal, which raised itself so high above the water, that its head reached above our maintop. It had a long, sharp snout, and blew like a whale, had broad, large flippers, and the body was, as it were, covered with hard skin, and it was very wrinkled and uneven on its skin; moreover, on the lower part it was formed like a snake, and when it went under water again, it cast itself backwards, and in doing so, it raised its tail above the water, a whole ship length from its body. That evening, we had very bad weather.
Other reports are known from the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans (e.g. see Heuvelmans 1968).

A more recent development has been the mysterious "Bloop" picked up by hydrophonic equipment since 1997. While matching the audio characteristics of an animal, it was deemed too large to be a whale. Investigations thus far have been inconclusive.

It is debatable what these modern "monsters" might be. Possibilities include frilled shark, basking shark, oarfish, giant squid, seiches, or whales. For example Ellis (1999) suggested the Egede-rellis-phooba monster might have been a giant squid. Other hypotheses are that modern-day monsters are surviving specimens of giant marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaur or plesiosaur, from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, or extinct whales like Basilosaurus.

In 1892, Anthonid Cornelis Oudemans, then director of the Royal Zoological Gardens at The Hague saw the publication of his The Great Sea Serpent which suggested that many sea serpent reports were best accounted for as a previously unknown giant, long-necked pinniped.

It is likely that many other reports of sea monsters are misinterpreted sightings of shark and whale carcasses, floating kelp, logs or other flotsam such as abandoned rafts, canoes and fishing nets.

Alleged sea monster carcasses
Sea monster corpses have been reported since recent antiquity (Heuvelmans 1968). Unidentified carcasses are often called globsters. The alleged plesiosaur netted by the Japanese trawler Zuiyo Maru off New Zealand caused a sensation in 1977 and was immortalized on a Brazilian postage stamp before it was suggested by the FBI to be the decomposing carcass of a basking shark. Likewise, DNA testing confirmed that an alleged sea monster washed up on Fortune Bay, Newfoundland in August, 2001, was a sperm whale.

Another modern example of a "sea monster" was the strange creature washed up on the Chilean sea shore in July, 2003. It was first described as a "mammoth jellyfish as long as a bus" but was later determined to be another corpse of a sperm whale. Cases of boneless, amorphic globsters are sometimes believed to be gigantic octopuses, but it has now been determined that sperm whales dying at sea decompose in such a way that the blubber detaches from the body, forming featureless whitish masses that sometimes exhibit a hairy texture due to exposed strands of collagen fibers. The analysis of the Zuiyo Maru carcass revealed a comparable phenomenon in decomposing basking shark carcasses, which lose most of the lower head area and the dorsal and caudal fins first, making them resemble a plesiosaur.

A globster, or blob, is an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shore of an ocean or other body of water. It is distinguished from a normal beached carcass by being hard to identify, at least by initial untrained observers, and by creating controversy as to its identity. Globsters may present such a puzzling appearance that their nature remains controversial even after being officially identified by scientists. Some globsters lack bones or other recognisable structures, while others may have have bones, tentacles, flippers, eyes or other features that can help narrow down the possible species. In the past these were often described as sea monsters, and myths and legends about such monsters may often have started with the appearance of a globster. Globsters are most frequently studied in the field of cryptozoology.

The term globster was coined by Ivan T. Sanderson in 1962 to describe the Tasmanian carcass of 1960, which was said to have "no visible eyes, no defined head, and no apparent bone structure."

Many globsters have initially been described as gigantic octopuses, although they later turned out to be the decayed carcasses of whales or large sharks. As with the "Chilean Blob" of 2003, many are masses of whale blubber which have been released from decaying whale corpses. Others initially thought to be dead Plesiosaurs later turned out to be the decayed carcases of basking sharks. Others remain unexplained. Giant and colossal squid may also explain some globsters, particularly those which are tentatively identified as monster octopuses.

Some Globsters have only been examined after they had decomposed too much to be used as evidence for a new species, or have been destroyed, as happened with the famous "Cadborosaurus willsi" carcass, found in 1937. However, Canadian scientists did in fact perform a DNA analysis of the Newfoundland Blob which indicated that the tissue was from a sperm whale. In their resulting paper, the authors point out a number of superficial similarities between the Newfoundland Blob and other famous globsters, concluding a similar origin for those globsters is likely.

The St. Augustine Monster is the name given to a large unidentified carcass, originally postulated to be the remains of a gigantic octopus, that washed ashore on the United States coast near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1896. It is sometimes referred to as the Florida Monster or St. Augustine Giant Octopus, and is one of the earliest recorded examples of a globster. The species that the carcass supposedly represented has been assigned the binomial names "Octopus giganteus" (Latin: giant octopus) and "Otoctopus giganteus" (Greek prefix: oton = ear; giant-eared octopus), although these are not valid under the rules of the ICZN.

Recent analysis suggests that the St. Augustine Monster was a large mass of the collagenous matrix of whale blubber, likely from a sperm whale.

The St Augustine globster

Legendary sea monsters

Capricorn, Babylonian Water-Goat, in the Zodiac
Charybdis, of Homer
Coinchenn, from whose bone the Gae Bulg is made in Celtic mythology
Curruid, the sea monster who killed the Coinchenn
Jörmungandr, the Norse Midgard Serpent.
Kraken are legendary sea monsters of gargantuan size, said to have dwelled off the coasts of Norway and Iceland. The sheer size and fearsome appearance attributed to the beasts have made them common ocean-dwelling monsters in various fictional works (see Kraken in popular culture). The legend may actually have originated from sightings of real giant squid or Colossal Squid that are estimated to grow to 14 metres (46 feet) in length, including the tentacles. These creatures normally live at great depths, but have been sighted at the surface and reportedly have "attacked" small ships.
Leviathan Leviathanwas a Biblical sea monster referred to in the Old Testament (Psalm 74:13-14; Job 41; Isaiah 27:1).

The word leviathan has become synonymous with any large aquatic monster or creature. In Modern Hebrew, it simply means "whale".

Loch Ness Monster
Ogopogo Buy this Ogopogo T Shirt
Proteus
Scylla, of Homer
Sirens, of Homer
The Rainbow Fish
Tiamat, the constellation Cetus
Beebe's Monster

Historically reported sea monsters
Sea monsters actually reported first or second hand include

A giant octopus by Pliny. N.B. Not the giant octopus of the Pacific.
Mermaids
The sea monk, or sometimes monk-fish, was a sea monster found off the coast of Denmark almost certainly in 1546 (Paxton & Holland 2005). It was said to be a "fish" that looked superficially like a monk. It was described and pictured in the fourth volume of Conrad Gesner's famous Historia Animalium. Gesner also referenced a similar monster found in the Firth of Forth, according to Boethius, and a sighting off the coast of Poland in 1531.

In his epic poem La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde, the poet Guillaume du Bartas referenced the 16th century sea monk sightings as part of a poetic observation that all things on land and in the air had an equivalent in the sea

Sea serpents are a kind of sea monster either wholly or partly serpentine. Sightings have been reported for hundreds of years, and recent work by Bruce Champagne indicates that there have been 1,200 or more all told. Sea serpents have been seen from both ship and shore, and by multiple people at once, groups that sometimes count scientists among their number. Despite the numerous sightings, though, no credible physical evidence has been recorded and it is uncertain whether or not the serpents actually exist.
Tritons by Pliny

Currently reported specific sea monsters
"Cadborosaurus willsi", nicknamed "Caddy", is the name given to a sea serpent reported to be living on the Pacific Coast of North America. Its name is derived from Cadboro Bay in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Greek root word "sauros" meaning lizard or reptile. The animal is similar in form and behavior to various popularly named lake monsters such as "Ogopogo" of deep interior lakes of British Columbia and to the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland.

There have been more than 300 sightings during the past 200 years, including San Francisco Bay, California and Deep Cove in Saanich Inlet, B. C., Supporters of the creature have reported identifying breeding sites in the Strait of Georgia, B. C.

Colossal Claude & Marvin the Monster, Mouth of the Columbia River
Champ, of Lake Champlain, NY/VT
Chessie of the Chesapeake Bay
Lusca

Fictional sea monsters
Cthulhu, of H. P. Lovecraft Godzilla Ebirah Hydra The Krakens in The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham The Vensephone It from It Came From Beneath the Sea