Over recent years, 1000s of people shared articles proclaiming that "a surprising number of sea serpents were whale penises". There's a core bit of correctness here, but mostly it's... not correct, and here's more info (brief thread)...
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Firstly, the hypothesis (which was published by the excellent Charles Paxton and colleagues in 2005) was suggested to explain one specific sea monster account (Hans Egede's 1734 sighting off Greenland)... (cont)
And that's just about it. Paxton et al. in fact specifically noted that they weren't trying to, ahem, expand their penis hypothesis to apply to all or in fact many sea serpent sightings...
In fact, the Pauline case is controversial: Robert France has more recently argued that no penises were involved; it was instead, he says, a case where a whale was entangled in discarded rope (France has interpreted about all sea serpent sightings as cases of entanglement)..
It’s very disappointing that after Lake Monster Traditions was published we have yet another Sea Serpent mono-explanation to join the ranks of Oarfish and Giant Squid. It’s saying more about (admittedly important!) modern issues than why people see monsters.
The 'sea serpents were mostly penises' stuff also mentioned in passing the whole 'the kraken was a giant squid' thing... which is complicated. Bottom line, the kraken was NOT based on Architeuthis, though the two did become conflated during the 1800s... cont
Ironically, Charles Paxton is the one who's mostly responsible for pointing this out (in an article called 'Why giant squid are red herrings'). I summarised his argument in my book Hunting Monsters...
I came to say the same thing. "If I had a nickel for every sea serpent that turned out to be a whale penis, I'd have fifteen cents. Which isn't a lot, but it's still weird it happened three times..." type of energy, you know?
Comments