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  • 2021-04-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the Loch Ness Monster Just a Whale Penis? (en)
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  • A number of explanations have been offered to explain a series of supposed sightings of a sea serpent at Loch Ness, a large, deep, freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands. Some have hypothesized that the Loch Ness Monster, known as Nessie, was really just a giant eel or possibly an odd shaped log. Others held that Nessie was a prehistoric plesiosaur that somehow survived extinction. In April 2021, another theory was popularized on the internet: The Loch Ness Monster is really just a whale penis: While the picture on the left is one of the most famous ones to supposedly show the Loch Ness Monster, and while the picture on the right truly shows a whale penis, we can say with confidence that these objects are not the same. The picture supposedly showing the Loch Ness Monster is widely known as the surgeon's photograph, as it was reportedly taken by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson. This picture was published by the Daily Mail in 1934 and served as a source of speculation about a legendary lake-dwelling beast for decades. While several other sightings followed the surgeon's photograph, this picture was revealed to be a hoax in the 1990s when Christian Spurling, one of the man involved in this hoax, confessed shortly before his death. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Spurling, a skilled model maker, teamed up with Wilson and their friend Marmaduke Wetherell to create a hoax picture of a sea serpent using a toy submarine and an 18-inch clay model: 16 Mar 1994, Wed Sioux City Journal (Sioux City, Iowa) Newspapers.com In other words, the Loch Ness Monster isn't a whale penis because the Loch Ness Monster is a toy submarine. While a whale penis may not be the answer to all of our Nessie questions, whale penises may truly have been the culprits behind some old sea serpent sightings. In 2005, a team of researchers published a paper in the Archives of Natural History that examined an account of a sea serpent sighting off the coast of Greenland by a missionary named Hans Egede in 1734. Egede drew a picture of the alleged creature and described it as a most dreadful monster. Egede wrote, as recounted in the 1883 book Travellers' Tales: A Book of Marvels: The Archives of Natural History paper analyzed Egede's account and drawing and identified several whales that may have been this most dreadful monster. Additionally, the author's noted that it was possible that the serpent-like tail was the snake-like penis of a large baleen whale: The authors noted that they were not suggesting that all sea serpent sightings were misidentified whale penises. However, they do point to at least one other sea serpent sighting that had some of the same whale-penis indicators as the Egede account. In 1875, the crew of a ship named the Pauline witnessed what they believed was a sea serpent attacking a group of whales. A description of the incident from Capt. Drevar was published in the North Whales Chronicle a few years afterward in 1877: While we can't say for certain what Drevar saw in 1875, we can say that this description reminded us of a BBC Earth video that showed sperm whales as they prepared to breed: While the famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster certainly wasn't a case of mistaken whale-penis identity, and while whale-penis sightings probably can't explain every sea serpent sighting throughout history, it is plausible that some of these sea serpents were attached to the bottom of a whale. (en)
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