December 30, 2014 • 36 mins
Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited with creating the universe. Even today when the sea washes something odd ashore we see monsters - we understand there's much more than appears above the surface.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles to Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel.
There's Nicola Tesla. It's stuff you should know. There's Johnny
and Scott are there's your imaginary No, that was Sigmund
(00:25):
the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No, Once again,
the brief cultural divide expans between us from the seventies
or earlier. Yeah, it was one of the Sid and
Marty Croft shows. Hr puffin stuff. Yeah, Sigmund the Sea
Monster and Johnny and Scott Warres Buddies. Yeah, he was
like a you know, he's a dude in a suit.
(00:45):
I reckon, but he was. He looked like a big
blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare fuel with eyes.
That was cool. Sid Marty Croft man. Yeah, their sensibilities
scare me. Yeah. I went to the place once in Atlanta.
You know, they had down at the Omni uh which
is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid Marty Croft World
or whatever, and I went down there once and looking
back now, it was like a drug fueled indoor amusement part.
(01:08):
You're like, why are there so many twenty year old
tire Yeah? I never really put with kids. Yeah, uh yeah,
I'm sure. I say this every single time that we
talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen the Mr
Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one of the best.
I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show,
(01:29):
but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's top five easy. Yeah.
And that's sea monsters. Sea monsters, They're Gonna get you soon?
Is that from a show? Okay? From this show? So, Chuck,
are you familiar much with sea monsters when you're researching
this where you like everybody knows all this sort of
(01:49):
half and half? Yeah, I felt similar. There were a
lot of stuff, a lot of things in here that
I hadn't heard of, and the extra research we did
too yielded some new insights. But one of the things
that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably
the thesis of this whole thing, is that we've been
seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've been talking about sea
(02:12):
monsters for millennia, and we still are like, have you
heard of the montalk monster? Yes? Did you see pictures
of that thing. Yeah, I remember when it came out. Okay,
I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah, I feel bad
for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yeah that
in the two thousand eight um what was the beach?
It was around Montalk, Yeah, but there was a specific beach,
(02:36):
ditch planes beach. This girl and her three friends found
this washed up Montalk monster. And I think what's funny
is they still there's a trend here in naming these
things sensationally throughout history, and we still do it. Because
they could have called it like a decomposed raccoon, but
they called it the Montalk monster. And the jury is
(02:59):
not out. It is a decomposed raccoon, Yeah they I
mean they pretty much think so. But it's not like
you can't prove that. I mean, they have like a
line of biologists from Montalk to Manhattan saying it's a raccoon.
It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome.
I've heard some other paleo zoologists say, like it maybe
a sheep, though I think it was too small, or
(03:21):
other animals. But it's definitely not a monster, a sea monster.
But this is two thousand and eight we're talking about,
and some weird thing washes up on a beach, and
around the world people hear of the Montalk Monster except
for me. Yeah, did you see the East River Monster?
I heard that one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly
a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking. But
(03:42):
still they named it the East River Monster, and not
a pig. That was you know, I don't know how
the pig got there, right, the pig of East River
or something like that. Yeah, it's probably like, you know,
somewhere in Chinatown a pig was no good and the
other thing in the river. That's what they do. Yeah. Um.
Also in two thousand six, um, there was one in Russia.
(04:04):
I didn't see where, but on a beach. Uh, something
washed up and they said sea monster. And it turned
out to be a beluga whale carcass, greatly decomposed, but
it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale.
But the point is is still in the twenty one century,
whenever the sea spits something up, we're like, this is
(04:24):
a monster. Clearly, obviously this is a monster. And then
biologists come along and say it's not a monster, but
it's this weird thing, or sometimes they say this is new.
Yeah it's not a monster, but this is new. And
this is the point finally that I'm trying to get to,
is that the the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent
(04:47):
of Earth's surface. Right, That's a lot of hiding places.
And I think humans have known and still no intuitively
that there's a lot of stuff down there that we
don't know about. We don't know what it is. But
over time we science has replaced superstition enough so that
while we still know there's stuff out there that we
don't know, we don't think of him as monsters. So
(05:07):
our mindset has changed somewhat. Yeah, But ultimately, the sea
is this place of unknown, unknown organisms that we're still
learning about. What's the of the deepest seas are still
uncompletely like, unresearched and undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took
away a little percentage of that with his Deep Sea Dive.
(05:31):
He took away a bit of my soul with every
movie he's made since Terminator Too. You like Terminator Too?
I didn't see that one. That's pretty good. Huh, Yeah,
I think that was that was a good one. Have
you not seen Titanic. Did you know that the there
was an alternate ending for it, where like they kept
(05:51):
the diamond or where something like the Titantanic didn't sink. Right,
it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
monsters though, which is not a sea monster. But did
(06:11):
you see the footage of the anglerfish? That's another great point. Yeah,
some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters.
I mean, the the anglerfish is one of the scariest
looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy and
uh it's real though, It's just you know, science is
It's not like, oh, what is this thing? They know
what the angler fish is exactly, but they live so deep.
(06:32):
I think until recently, it had never been filmed in
its habitat until like this year, until like three weeks ago. Yeah. Um,
apparently it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that we ever
photographed a whale underwater. Yeah. Interesting, two thousand six, I think, um,
or nineteen seventy six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh,
(06:54):
there's like the sea just coughs up new life to that. Yeah,
where were slightly more superstitious, we would have called monsters.
So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
the different kind of monsters we came up with really
kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
(07:16):
goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
(07:37):
and Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, that's
where the universe came from. Was Tiamat, right, And then
eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, um, she became what's
known as the chaos monster, and she was slain by
a male hero as and then the world was created
(07:58):
from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here,
not all of the sea monsters that depends on the
culture and the religion. Uh. Some of them were benevolent.
I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
(08:18):
and this is a question of mine, dude, is do
do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamat are
one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesothamian gods saying, don't
even bring that here, like you created the world, I
slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
(08:41):
a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
and other religions. And some people take great offense to that.
Others don't what that that it's not No, this is
the word of God period. There is no crossover. That's
just coincidence. Um, twenty leagues under the sea. I think
(09:02):
Jules Verne this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
seventy he wrote that great great book. Uh, and he said,
either we do know all the right varieties of beings
which people our planet, where we do not. If we
do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to
reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
(09:24):
and other kinds of even new species, to which the
character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
it kind of plays to the point um that if
there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
are deep in the jungles, or deep under the sea
because people would have seen them. So it makes it
(09:45):
exotic in uh, sort of grabby as means of religion
or literature, you know, lore, right, Plus the Jules Verne
was writing in well, this is eighteen seventy when he
wrote Twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is a
time when a lot of the old myths and legends
and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
(10:08):
that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, but
it's not actually a kraken. It's an it's it's yeah,
or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
(10:29):
a fan of mythology. They are. There are tons and
tons of cool stories about sea creatures and sea monsters,
all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one Cetus named by
the Romans. King Cepheus had a wife named Cassiopeia maybe
ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what, my
(10:49):
daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
And of course, um, she's like, yeah, I said it. Yeah,
And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
come up and kill your daughter. Kill kill Setis. And Perseus,
of course, is always saving the day. So he apparently
was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he just chopped off,
(11:13):
flying around, and uh, it just happened to pass by.
Uh was it Persephone who was about to be eaten
and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right, I'll take care
of Setis on my way home. My swords bloody already.
Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never saw the remake
of that, did you see that? I didn't either. I
(11:35):
just remember release the crack and yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah,
that's right. Even Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh,
lines of dialogue, because that very particular set of skills
was also a big thing for months, four different movies.
I was just in the one Are you sure? Yeah,
(11:56):
take him? Yeah, it was pretty good movie, by the way,
sure sure. Did not see the sequel though, Taken to
Electric Boogaloo. Yeah. I thought it was weird when he
started breaking. Yeah, he's doing the worm, but like not
even very well. I would have thought they'd get like
a body double who was like a professional dancer. Well,
he did not have a particular set at skills when
it came to being on the cardboard. Now, Chuck, we'll
(12:19):
we'll talk a little more about um mythology and what
it reveals about humans and sea monsters right after this,
So Chucky, you're talking about Perseus slaying setis um. Homer's
Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah,
(12:43):
and there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah, Sila
or skilla and uh scharibdis charybdis. Uh. These two point
out an important and ongoing um feature of some of
these stories with are that maybe they might symbolize something
else real. Yes, either a sea monster or in this case,
(13:07):
maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common
thing another cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
this is kind of a this is one thesis on
why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory. Yeah,
(13:29):
a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
So that quote or that description of Scylla's described as
having twelve ft six heads atop, long sinuous necks and
mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
that's probably a reef, right, and then sure just lay
(13:51):
on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters.
There probably a whirlpool, right, So it's story saying maybe
don't go there exact exactly. Did you read that thing
on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell you about this
for a second. Okay, there is this, um, this whole
exploration that's trying to figure out how to express say
(14:16):
so like, if you have nuclear waste and you need
to put it away for ten thousand years and to
keep people away from it for ten thousand years, you
have to figure out a way to warn people away
from it for ten thousand years. Well, how could you
possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's a
lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is called
nuclear semiotics, and one of the ways to probably the
(14:41):
most agreed upon way, is to create this thing called
the nuclear Priesthood, which is this group of learned people
who know the secret of this nuclear waste site but
purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
(15:01):
something to the site that will get passed down and
passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area, live
around it will know, like, you don't want to go there,
You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
radiation anymore, but this foolklore will get passed along and along,
and they're saying like that may be the best way
to pass along information. And that's exactly what um what
(15:23):
the idea. One interpretation of what sea monsters are is.
It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
lives in there, or to play near the water. You
don't want you don't want a carp to take you away.
It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much. It's
not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works
(15:46):
and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
you said, the kraken um possibly being the giant squid,
or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
There's always been stories of the kracking terrorizing ships off
of Iceland and Norway, and the kracking is noted because
(16:08):
it is huge, like one point five a mile to
a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
If you see a if you're a sailor back then
and you don't know about biology and things yet and
you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
(16:28):
of a human head, it might make you think that's
a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide
with legs as as large as the sailing mast capable
of pulling down a ship. Well, I mean it gets
the point across the people back on land. Like, wow,
that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
(16:49):
How big do these squids get? They get to like
forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
even bigger called the colossal squid. Yeah, that's so much bigger.
It's its own um species, I believe um. And it
lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
basis of the kracking. It's probably just a regular old
giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
(17:11):
those things. They are very scary and they're very very big.
Plus also, the idea of the crack and may have
first come about before sightings of giant squid. They may
have been taken from whalers who found like crazy scars
on whales, who may have found like bits of tentacles,
like huge tentacles in the whales stomachs, things like that,
(17:33):
and been like, what did this come from? Yeah, the beak,
because they did find a giant squid once, but the
sailors cut it up and used it for bait. But
they preserved the beak, and that just fueled the legend
even more and more. So that's the that's another interpretation
of sea monsters is that they came from misunderstood or
(17:54):
embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that were familiar with. Now,
so it's the same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well,
your sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um.
(18:15):
And you see a giant squid, you might write in
your journal that I've seen the kracking. It makes perfect sense,
sure you know, and it spreads and takes shape over time,
little scurvy going on. The kracking is not the only one. Um.
That's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
(18:38):
It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
I'm sorry it was. It was in the the Old Testament.
It may have been the Mesopotamian god. That's what I said. Yeah,
but Leviathan always is sort of a catch all word
now for any like large unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah. Um,
(18:58):
which again it was probably well, well, yeah, it could
have also been a sea serpents. So stea serpents are
there are their own things. Um the uh, the Norse
had a legend of the yourman gander. There's mornwatt in
there and everything. And that was apparently, um, one of
Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby that was
(19:22):
created when Loki, his brother and a woman named on
Garboda I guess, had um the sex of the gods,
and created this creature, a sea serpent that wrapped around
the globe supposedly. Yeah, and um, that's just one example
of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake. And there's
(19:44):
a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of
sea serpents, huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Um,
schools of porpoises, yeah, along the line together. There's one
thing though, that could have accounted for all sighting of
sea serpents. It's called the or fish. Did you see
this thing? Yeah? It is huge and um, if an
(20:05):
or fish was was swimming in the water, it could
be undulating up and down and it looks like little
spiny humps coming in and out of the water, So
that that makes sense. Sure they get up to you,
I think, um, thirty or forty, Yeah they can. I
mean there's there's plenty of photos of you know, like
tin dudes on a beach holding one up because it
(20:27):
takes tin dudes. It's not like they all want their
hand on the little fish exactly, you know. And these
aren't photoshop either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures too,
but or fishes are huge and they look like big,
slimy kind of serpentine fish. And then chuck. Mer people
were another kind of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth.
(20:52):
That's a That's another thing that stuck out to me,
is there where there are legends around the world from culture,
was there separated by space and time that had similar stories,
um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
a lot of these people cited similar things and came
(21:14):
up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
seen splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
find a mermaid? But mermaids were not um looked upon
kindly because they would yuh and this article points out
they would at the their best they would just forget
that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
(21:35):
And if the worst, they would do so on purpose
and take the men down under the water and lights
out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah sorry, Tom Hanks, Sorry
for the rest of your career. Darryl, his career was
pretty lousy after splash liing it. Well, uh yeah, what
um she Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she
(21:57):
was not a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him
and gave him breath right, Well, that's the Hollywood ification
of the Mermaid legend. Or like aerial from Little Mermaid
and that dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess
it was VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it
went to DVD, probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, yeah,
(22:23):
I get bored and blank. So um. The whole mer
creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
(22:44):
underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile neolithic
artifact area. It's pretty cool Doggerland, that's what it is,
not dog Land. So um, they had their own things
called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpie is
that the the kelpie. I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly,
(23:10):
but this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which
are actually horses that live in the sea that can
sometimes change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures.
But every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie, this
is supposedly associated with it, including lock Nest. And it
(23:30):
wasn't until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like
a c creature that we think of her today, when
some dinosaur bones please asaur bones were found around lock Nests,
saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Before
that it was just a kelpie. We could probably do
a full show on Nessy just it um has been
(23:51):
pretty much disproven um unequivocally of course, because there is
no Lockness Monster. But I just think things like that
are need and when we did one big Foot, it's
more about just the legend and the war around it Unlock.
Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did,
Rena Hertzog? No, I didn't know he did one of us.
It was I think it was. He did a mockumentary,
(24:16):
but not like a Christopher Guest documentary, just bo documentary
waiting for Waiting for nessy Um, where it just looked
like he was I can't remember the name it where
he was searching for the Lotness Monster and saw, you know,
caught it on camera, but it made it, he made
it seem real. I think it was Rena Hertzog. It
was good, of course. You know it sounds a little
dishonest for Verner Herzog. Well, I don't. I don't think
(24:38):
he was trying to pass it off. I think, yeah,
I'll look that up. It may not be him, but
someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
on on cable? Nol says it was her talking Okay, yeah,
I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
(24:59):
Old talk to a lot more than Jerry does. Um,
so chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation
for where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
(25:22):
All right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
monster around the time of Please Asaur. I believe it's
what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
They said, well, this is this must be one of
Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
(25:45):
a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
You mentioned, um, the Chinese having a legend of some
sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
ft long. Um, oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
The Guizoo dragons. Yeah, they were basically marine reptiles called
(26:07):
kecha source whi they they But they were lucky like
if you found one of these skeletons, you kept it
because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you
got your hands on, and it would bring you a
good fortune. That's right. And I know what earlier we
were talking about just the early explorers, and uh, you
can't fault some of these dudes because they were you know,
(26:31):
this one article you said they were literally an unchartered
waters and it was before the rise of science, and
all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
oceanic map from the fundreds, it's gonna have some sea
monsters drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it
(26:53):
was a time when before there were you know, before
observational data came along. We pretty much was sort of
like the n in it today. You pretty much just
rewrote earlier history books over and over until they finally
got a little smarter and saying, you know what, maybe
we should really observe something and then write about it
for real. And this didn't really lead to any anything
(27:15):
more substantiated, you know, well for a while, sure, but um,
it was they called a transitional era in this article,
which kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
(27:37):
like a whale, right, and then it's similarly a natural
um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a c bishop.
So the c bishop was this thing that was supposedly
caught and taken to the king of Poland because it
was this fish like creature that had like a meter
(28:00):
and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
the sign of the cross and everything, and later on
somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
of the cross. But if you look at the squid
a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
(28:21):
that's kind of like the robes, you know. So maybe
that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously to this,
we're talking like the sixteenth century, there was a pretty
much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
had an an analogy in the sea, catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
(28:42):
all that stuff. And uh, in some cases they were right,
there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
them that, right, the sea horse to um. But all
that kind of it was a rough time for science.
It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah, because you know,
like you said, things were mistaken, like a whale and
(29:04):
a walrus might be a monster when it's just a
whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of
tales that you know, when it's repeated over and over,
you get the sense it is just one of those
like urban legends back then. I guess it wasn't urban
back then, though, what would it be, just a seafaring legend. Yeah,
um of whales being mistaken for islands, and like a
(29:28):
ship will land on the whale and build a you know,
and route down basically get off the ship and build
a fire, and then the whale I guess who was
just chilling out at the surface, says, hey, there's a
fire on my back, and I'm gonna take your boat
underwater and swallow you hole. I'm to be aware of
the you know, whatever they called that, whatever culture called
(29:48):
that particular whale exactly now we just call it a whale,
and again probably end on their backs. It was an
embellish story, but the there there. It was based on
the sighting of a whale before they called it whales,
and back when everybody lied about everything, they saw another
culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends,
where the Lakota and Dakota Sioux. They came up with
(30:11):
something called um the Umhla. Yeah, I think that's about
right from from dinosaur bones found in around the Missouri River,
and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
(30:33):
them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. Basically
thunderbirds got what they knew is that it wasn't a tonka,
that's a buffalo, right, Yea, they were pretty sure. You know, Um,
that's apparently where the legends of the psych the cyclops
came from from Native Americans. No, from um finding like
(30:55):
old like elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in
the middle. Well, clearly there was a race of giants
that just had one eye. No, there were elephants. You know,
we often joked like they were done back then. Of
course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out.
It's like to make stuff up. They didn't have TV
(31:15):
or anything back then, and like we said a lot
of that. A lot of the stuff was yeh was
um legend to keep you know, voters from going in
a maybe a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or
to keep the children away from the water. And like
the ghost story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh,
(31:36):
nuclear semioto nuclear semiotic? Man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
out in ten thousand years. Um, what else do you
got anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents. Um,
(31:56):
just take a look at the angler fish video and
tell me if you came upon that. And see we
also didn't point out that this was before deep not
even deep sea exploration, like this is before underwater exploration.
People are just riding around on the top of the ocean.
So we're fascinated with it and we've gone to the
depths that we can attain at this point, which just
(32:16):
pretty deep. I wish I would look that up. I
don't know how deep we can go, how deep James
Cameron can go. Oh he goes deep, buddy, But um,
think about back then, man, when they couldn't, Like, you're
how scary that would be? Right? When these strange creatures
are like you see a giant squid, yeah, and you're
just partially seeing if you can't see it underwater. There
(32:37):
has no idea before the diving bell, even like there was,
or the butterfly. That's right? Yea, do you like that one?
I finally saw that movie by the way, hardcore man. Yeah,
really good. Uh. If you want to know more about
the diving bell and the butterfly or about sea monsters,
you can type those words into the search bar how
(32:58):
stuff works dot com. And since I said search parts,
time for listener mail, I do call this uh. Opah
is German for grandpa. I thought it was Greek for
like good times. Maybe I don't know really, yeah, Opah, Well,
I'm sure those are just three letters together, might be
(33:20):
something in Greek. But like my brother in law, Carston,
his German and his grandfather was I'm sorry his father.
His grandfather was Opa, but his dad was native Germans,
so my nieces called him opah. A says this lady's
I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast. Oh how
appropriate with a family story that Lucy relates My great
(33:43):
grandfather Opah left Germany when he was fourteen pre war
to work as a sailor, came to the US and
was a member of the U. S Coast Guard. One day,
he was part of a team that was clearing a
harbor of some old sunken chips. To do so, they
use the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water
to blast the wood of art and then gathered the debris.
His team wrote out in a fourteen foot rowboat to
(34:05):
gather up the wood shards and noticed the blast had
killed the fish they floated to the tops of The
crew brought them into the boat as well, waste not whatnot.
As they were going about their business, they came across
the sixteen foot hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly
it would be a great source of food, so despite
their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you
see where this is headed. Well. As it turns out,
(34:26):
the blast is strong enough to kill small fish, but
only stunned larger animals. The shark slowly started to regain
consciousness in the rowboat, and being confused and out of water,
was not pleased. It got to the point that it
was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the
boat and likely injured or killed the crew members. So
in the midst of this chaos are able to flag
down a sailor on a larger vessel proceeded to shoot
(34:47):
the thing to death while it was still in the boat. Um,
all of the crew members were safe and they still
got to feast on hammerhead shark, but now had a
much more exciting story. Uh. And you mentioned in the
whaling podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in
small boats to get the whale, and we're often injured
and killed. I thought you might find this interesting, and
I was hoping you can give a shout out to
(35:09):
my sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in
two thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get
to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh
and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is
uh Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian and Wendy
and Rachel uh ha ha ha. Thanks for listening and
for spreading the word and for being uh sisters. Way
(35:31):
to go being sisters. Yeah, thanks for writing in Wendy. Yeah, yeah,
thanks Wendy, Um and Chuck. This is our last episode
of two thousand fourteen, oh man, the longest year. So
we want to say happy new year everybody, and I
want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife,
you me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the
(35:54):
rights free version. No, that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh
it's a good one, so it's not rights free. Yeah,
happy birthday you me. Happy New Year to all of
you great people out there in podcast land. Will see
you next year for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com? Yeah,
Welcome to you Stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles to Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel.
There's Nicola Tesla. It's stuff you should know. There's Johnny
and Scott are there's your imaginary No, that was Sigmund
(00:25):
the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No, Once again,
the brief cultural divide expans between us from the seventies
or earlier. Yeah, it was one of the Sid and
Marty Croft shows. Hr puffin stuff. Yeah, Sigmund the Sea
Monster and Johnny and Scott Warres Buddies. Yeah, he was
like a you know, he's a dude in a suit.
(00:45):
I reckon, but he was. He looked like a big
blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare fuel with eyes.
That was cool. Sid Marty Croft man. Yeah, their sensibilities
scare me. Yeah. I went to the place once in Atlanta.
You know, they had down at the Omni uh which
is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid Marty Croft World
or whatever, and I went down there once and looking
back now, it was like a drug fueled indoor amusement part.
(01:08):
You're like, why are there so many twenty year old
tire Yeah? I never really put with kids. Yeah, uh yeah,
I'm sure. I say this every single time that we
talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen the Mr
Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one of the best.
I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show,
(01:29):
but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's top five easy. Yeah.
And that's sea monsters. Sea monsters, They're Gonna get you soon?
Is that from a show? Okay? From this show? So, Chuck,
are you familiar much with sea monsters when you're researching
this where you like everybody knows all this sort of
(01:49):
half and half? Yeah, I felt similar. There were a
lot of stuff, a lot of things in here that
I hadn't heard of, and the extra research we did
too yielded some new insights. But one of the things
that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably
the thesis of this whole thing, is that we've been
seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've been talking about sea
(02:12):
monsters for millennia, and we still are like, have you
heard of the montalk monster? Yes? Did you see pictures
of that thing. Yeah, I remember when it came out. Okay,
I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah, I feel bad
for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yeah that
in the two thousand eight um what was the beach?
It was around Montalk, Yeah, but there was a specific beach,
(02:36):
ditch planes beach. This girl and her three friends found
this washed up Montalk monster. And I think what's funny
is they still there's a trend here in naming these
things sensationally throughout history, and we still do it. Because
they could have called it like a decomposed raccoon, but
they called it the Montalk monster. And the jury is
(02:59):
not out. It is a decomposed raccoon, Yeah they I
mean they pretty much think so. But it's not like
you can't prove that. I mean, they have like a
line of biologists from Montalk to Manhattan saying it's a raccoon.
It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome.
I've heard some other paleo zoologists say, like it maybe
a sheep, though I think it was too small, or
(03:21):
other animals. But it's definitely not a monster, a sea monster.
But this is two thousand and eight we're talking about,
and some weird thing washes up on a beach, and
around the world people hear of the Montalk Monster except
for me. Yeah, did you see the East River Monster?
I heard that one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly
a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking. But
(03:42):
still they named it the East River Monster, and not
a pig. That was you know, I don't know how
the pig got there, right, the pig of East River
or something like that. Yeah, it's probably like, you know,
somewhere in Chinatown a pig was no good and the
other thing in the river. That's what they do. Yeah. Um.
Also in two thousand six, um, there was one in Russia.
(04:04):
I didn't see where, but on a beach. Uh, something
washed up and they said sea monster. And it turned
out to be a beluga whale carcass, greatly decomposed, but
it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale.
But the point is is still in the twenty one century,
whenever the sea spits something up, we're like, this is
(04:24):
a monster. Clearly, obviously this is a monster. And then
biologists come along and say it's not a monster, but
it's this weird thing, or sometimes they say this is new.
Yeah it's not a monster, but this is new. And
this is the point finally that I'm trying to get to,
is that the the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent
(04:47):
of Earth's surface. Right, That's a lot of hiding places.
And I think humans have known and still no intuitively
that there's a lot of stuff down there that we
don't know about. We don't know what it is. But
over time we science has replaced superstition enough so that
while we still know there's stuff out there that we
don't know, we don't think of him as monsters. So
(05:07):
our mindset has changed somewhat. Yeah, But ultimately, the sea
is this place of unknown, unknown organisms that we're still
learning about. What's the of the deepest seas are still
uncompletely like, unresearched and undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took
away a little percentage of that with his Deep Sea Dive.
(05:31):
He took away a bit of my soul with every
movie he's made since Terminator Too. You like Terminator Too?
I didn't see that one. That's pretty good. Huh, Yeah,
I think that was that was a good one. Have
you not seen Titanic. Did you know that the there
was an alternate ending for it, where like they kept
(05:51):
the diamond or where something like the Titantanic didn't sink. Right,
it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
monsters though, which is not a sea monster. But did
(06:11):
you see the footage of the anglerfish? That's another great point. Yeah,
some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters.
I mean, the the anglerfish is one of the scariest
looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy and
uh it's real though, It's just you know, science is
It's not like, oh, what is this thing? They know
what the angler fish is exactly, but they live so deep.
(06:32):
I think until recently, it had never been filmed in
its habitat until like this year, until like three weeks ago. Yeah. Um,
apparently it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that we ever
photographed a whale underwater. Yeah. Interesting, two thousand six, I think, um,
or nineteen seventy six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh,
(06:54):
there's like the sea just coughs up new life to that. Yeah,
where were slightly more superstitious, we would have called monsters.
So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
the different kind of monsters we came up with really
kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
(07:16):
goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
(07:37):
and Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, that's
where the universe came from. Was Tiamat, right, And then
eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, um, she became what's
known as the chaos monster, and she was slain by
a male hero as and then the world was created
(07:58):
from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here,
not all of the sea monsters that depends on the
culture and the religion. Uh. Some of them were benevolent.
I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
(08:18):
and this is a question of mine, dude, is do
do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamat are
one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesothamian gods saying, don't
even bring that here, like you created the world, I
slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
(08:41):
a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
and other religions. And some people take great offense to that.
Others don't what that that it's not No, this is
the word of God period. There is no crossover. That's
just coincidence. Um, twenty leagues under the sea. I think
(09:02):
Jules Verne this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
seventy he wrote that great great book. Uh, and he said,
either we do know all the right varieties of beings
which people our planet, where we do not. If we
do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to
reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
(09:24):
and other kinds of even new species, to which the
character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
it kind of plays to the point um that if
there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
are deep in the jungles, or deep under the sea
because people would have seen them. So it makes it
(09:45):
exotic in uh, sort of grabby as means of religion
or literature, you know, lore, right, Plus the Jules Verne
was writing in well, this is eighteen seventy when he
wrote Twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is a
time when a lot of the old myths and legends
and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
(10:08):
that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, but
it's not actually a kraken. It's an it's it's yeah,
or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
(10:29):
a fan of mythology. They are. There are tons and
tons of cool stories about sea creatures and sea monsters,
all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one Cetus named by
the Romans. King Cepheus had a wife named Cassiopeia maybe
ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what, my
(10:49):
daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
And of course, um, she's like, yeah, I said it. Yeah,
And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
come up and kill your daughter. Kill kill Setis. And Perseus,
of course, is always saving the day. So he apparently
was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he just chopped off,
(11:13):
flying around, and uh, it just happened to pass by.
Uh was it Persephone who was about to be eaten
and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right, I'll take care
of Setis on my way home. My swords bloody already.
Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never saw the remake
of that, did you see that? I didn't either. I
(11:35):
just remember release the crack and yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah,
that's right. Even Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh,
lines of dialogue, because that very particular set of skills
was also a big thing for months, four different movies.
I was just in the one Are you sure? Yeah,
(11:56):
take him? Yeah, it was pretty good movie, by the way,
sure sure. Did not see the sequel though, Taken to
Electric Boogaloo. Yeah. I thought it was weird when he
started breaking. Yeah, he's doing the worm, but like not
even very well. I would have thought they'd get like
a body double who was like a professional dancer. Well,
he did not have a particular set at skills when
it came to being on the cardboard. Now, Chuck, we'll
(12:19):
we'll talk a little more about um mythology and what
it reveals about humans and sea monsters right after this,
So Chucky, you're talking about Perseus slaying setis um. Homer's
Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah,
(12:43):
and there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah, Sila
or skilla and uh scharibdis charybdis. Uh. These two point
out an important and ongoing um feature of some of
these stories with are that maybe they might symbolize something
else real. Yes, either a sea monster or in this case,
(13:07):
maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common
thing another cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
this is kind of a this is one thesis on
why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory. Yeah,
(13:29):
a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
So that quote or that description of Scylla's described as
having twelve ft six heads atop, long sinuous necks and
mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
that's probably a reef, right, and then sure just lay
(13:51):
on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters.
There probably a whirlpool, right, So it's story saying maybe
don't go there exact exactly. Did you read that thing
on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell you about this
for a second. Okay, there is this, um, this whole
exploration that's trying to figure out how to express say
(14:16):
so like, if you have nuclear waste and you need
to put it away for ten thousand years and to
keep people away from it for ten thousand years, you
have to figure out a way to warn people away
from it for ten thousand years. Well, how could you
possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's a
lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is called
nuclear semiotics, and one of the ways to probably the
(14:41):
most agreed upon way, is to create this thing called
the nuclear Priesthood, which is this group of learned people
who know the secret of this nuclear waste site but
purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
(15:01):
something to the site that will get passed down and
passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area, live
around it will know, like, you don't want to go there,
You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
radiation anymore, but this foolklore will get passed along and along,
and they're saying like that may be the best way
to pass along information. And that's exactly what um what
(15:23):
the idea. One interpretation of what sea monsters are is.
It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
lives in there, or to play near the water. You
don't want you don't want a carp to take you away.
It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much. It's
not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works
(15:46):
and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
you said, the kraken um possibly being the giant squid,
or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
There's always been stories of the kracking terrorizing ships off
of Iceland and Norway, and the kracking is noted because
(16:08):
it is huge, like one point five a mile to
a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
If you see a if you're a sailor back then
and you don't know about biology and things yet and
you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
(16:28):
of a human head, it might make you think that's
a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide
with legs as as large as the sailing mast capable
of pulling down a ship. Well, I mean it gets
the point across the people back on land. Like, wow,
that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
(16:49):
How big do these squids get? They get to like
forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
even bigger called the colossal squid. Yeah, that's so much bigger.
It's its own um species, I believe um. And it
lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
basis of the kracking. It's probably just a regular old
giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
(17:11):
those things. They are very scary and they're very very big.
Plus also, the idea of the crack and may have
first come about before sightings of giant squid. They may
have been taken from whalers who found like crazy scars
on whales, who may have found like bits of tentacles,
like huge tentacles in the whales stomachs, things like that,
(17:33):
and been like, what did this come from? Yeah, the beak,
because they did find a giant squid once, but the
sailors cut it up and used it for bait. But
they preserved the beak, and that just fueled the legend
even more and more. So that's the that's another interpretation
of sea monsters is that they came from misunderstood or
(17:54):
embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that were familiar with. Now,
so it's the same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well,
your sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um.
(18:15):
And you see a giant squid, you might write in
your journal that I've seen the kracking. It makes perfect sense,
sure you know, and it spreads and takes shape over time,
little scurvy going on. The kracking is not the only one. Um.
That's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
(18:38):
It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
I'm sorry it was. It was in the the Old Testament.
It may have been the Mesopotamian god. That's what I said. Yeah,
but Leviathan always is sort of a catch all word
now for any like large unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah. Um,
(18:58):
which again it was probably well, well, yeah, it could
have also been a sea serpents. So stea serpents are
there are their own things. Um the uh, the Norse
had a legend of the yourman gander. There's mornwatt in
there and everything. And that was apparently, um, one of
Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby that was
(19:22):
created when Loki, his brother and a woman named on
Garboda I guess, had um the sex of the gods,
and created this creature, a sea serpent that wrapped around
the globe supposedly. Yeah, and um, that's just one example
of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake. And there's
(19:44):
a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of
sea serpents, huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Um,
schools of porpoises, yeah, along the line together. There's one
thing though, that could have accounted for all sighting of
sea serpents. It's called the or fish. Did you see
this thing? Yeah? It is huge and um, if an
(20:05):
or fish was was swimming in the water, it could
be undulating up and down and it looks like little
spiny humps coming in and out of the water, So
that that makes sense. Sure they get up to you,
I think, um, thirty or forty, Yeah they can. I
mean there's there's plenty of photos of you know, like
tin dudes on a beach holding one up because it
(20:27):
takes tin dudes. It's not like they all want their
hand on the little fish exactly, you know. And these
aren't photoshop either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures too,
but or fishes are huge and they look like big,
slimy kind of serpentine fish. And then chuck. Mer people
were another kind of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth.
(20:52):
That's a That's another thing that stuck out to me,
is there where there are legends around the world from culture,
was there separated by space and time that had similar stories,
um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
a lot of these people cited similar things and came
(21:14):
up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
seen splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
find a mermaid? But mermaids were not um looked upon
kindly because they would yuh and this article points out
they would at the their best they would just forget
that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
(21:35):
And if the worst, they would do so on purpose
and take the men down under the water and lights
out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah sorry, Tom Hanks, Sorry
for the rest of your career. Darryl, his career was
pretty lousy after splash liing it. Well, uh yeah, what
um she Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she
(21:57):
was not a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him
and gave him breath right, Well, that's the Hollywood ification
of the Mermaid legend. Or like aerial from Little Mermaid
and that dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess
it was VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it
went to DVD, probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, yeah,
(22:23):
I get bored and blank. So um. The whole mer
creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
(22:44):
underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile neolithic
artifact area. It's pretty cool Doggerland, that's what it is,
not dog Land. So um, they had their own things
called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpie is
that the the kelpie. I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly,
(23:10):
but this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which
are actually horses that live in the sea that can
sometimes change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures.
But every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie, this
is supposedly associated with it, including lock Nest. And it
(23:30):
wasn't until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like
a c creature that we think of her today, when
some dinosaur bones please asaur bones were found around lock Nests,
saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Before
that it was just a kelpie. We could probably do
a full show on Nessy just it um has been
(23:51):
pretty much disproven um unequivocally of course, because there is
no Lockness Monster. But I just think things like that
are need and when we did one big Foot, it's
more about just the legend and the war around it Unlock.
Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did,
Rena Hertzog? No, I didn't know he did one of us.
It was I think it was. He did a mockumentary,
(24:16):
but not like a Christopher Guest documentary, just bo documentary
waiting for Waiting for nessy Um, where it just looked
like he was I can't remember the name it where
he was searching for the Lotness Monster and saw, you know,
caught it on camera, but it made it, he made
it seem real. I think it was Rena Hertzog. It
was good, of course. You know it sounds a little
dishonest for Verner Herzog. Well, I don't. I don't think
(24:38):
he was trying to pass it off. I think, yeah,
I'll look that up. It may not be him, but
someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
on on cable? Nol says it was her talking Okay, yeah,
I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
(24:59):
Old talk to a lot more than Jerry does. Um,
so chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation
for where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
(25:22):
All right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
monster around the time of Please Asaur. I believe it's
what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
They said, well, this is this must be one of
Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
(25:45):
a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
You mentioned, um, the Chinese having a legend of some
sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
ft long. Um, oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
The Guizoo dragons. Yeah, they were basically marine reptiles called
(26:07):
kecha source whi they they But they were lucky like
if you found one of these skeletons, you kept it
because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you
got your hands on, and it would bring you a
good fortune. That's right. And I know what earlier we
were talking about just the early explorers, and uh, you
can't fault some of these dudes because they were you know,
(26:31):
this one article you said they were literally an unchartered
waters and it was before the rise of science, and
all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
oceanic map from the fundreds, it's gonna have some sea
monsters drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it
(26:53):
was a time when before there were you know, before
observational data came along. We pretty much was sort of
like the n in it today. You pretty much just
rewrote earlier history books over and over until they finally
got a little smarter and saying, you know what, maybe
we should really observe something and then write about it
for real. And this didn't really lead to any anything
(27:15):
more substantiated, you know, well for a while, sure, but um,
it was they called a transitional era in this article,
which kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
(27:37):
like a whale, right, and then it's similarly a natural
um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a c bishop.
So the c bishop was this thing that was supposedly
caught and taken to the king of Poland because it
was this fish like creature that had like a meter
(28:00):
and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
the sign of the cross and everything, and later on
somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
of the cross. But if you look at the squid
a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
(28:21):
that's kind of like the robes, you know. So maybe
that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously to this,
we're talking like the sixteenth century, there was a pretty
much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
had an an analogy in the sea, catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
(28:42):
all that stuff. And uh, in some cases they were right,
there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
them that, right, the sea horse to um. But all
that kind of it was a rough time for science.
It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah, because you know,
like you said, things were mistaken, like a whale and
(29:04):
a walrus might be a monster when it's just a
whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of
tales that you know, when it's repeated over and over,
you get the sense it is just one of those
like urban legends back then. I guess it wasn't urban
back then, though, what would it be, just a seafaring legend. Yeah,
um of whales being mistaken for islands, and like a
(29:28):
ship will land on the whale and build a you know,
and route down basically get off the ship and build
a fire, and then the whale I guess who was
just chilling out at the surface, says, hey, there's a
fire on my back, and I'm gonna take your boat
underwater and swallow you hole. I'm to be aware of
the you know, whatever they called that, whatever culture called
(29:48):
that particular whale exactly now we just call it a whale,
and again probably end on their backs. It was an
embellish story, but the there there. It was based on
the sighting of a whale before they called it whales,
and back when everybody lied about everything, they saw another
culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends,
where the Lakota and Dakota Sioux. They came up with
(30:11):
something called um the Umhla. Yeah, I think that's about
right from from dinosaur bones found in around the Missouri River,
and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
(30:33):
them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. Basically
thunderbirds got what they knew is that it wasn't a tonka,
that's a buffalo, right, Yea, they were pretty sure. You know, Um,
that's apparently where the legends of the psych the cyclops
came from from Native Americans. No, from um finding like
(30:55):
old like elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in
the middle. Well, clearly there was a race of giants
that just had one eye. No, there were elephants. You know,
we often joked like they were done back then. Of
course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out.
It's like to make stuff up. They didn't have TV
(31:15):
or anything back then, and like we said a lot
of that. A lot of the stuff was yeh was
um legend to keep you know, voters from going in
a maybe a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or
to keep the children away from the water. And like
the ghost story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh,
(31:36):
nuclear semioto nuclear semiotic? Man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
out in ten thousand years. Um, what else do you
got anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents. Um,
(31:56):
just take a look at the angler fish video and
tell me if you came upon that. And see we
also didn't point out that this was before deep not
even deep sea exploration, like this is before underwater exploration.
People are just riding around on the top of the ocean.
So we're fascinated with it and we've gone to the
depths that we can attain at this point, which just
(32:16):
pretty deep. I wish I would look that up. I
don't know how deep we can go, how deep James
Cameron can go. Oh he goes deep, buddy, But um,
think about back then, man, when they couldn't, Like, you're
how scary that would be? Right? When these strange creatures
are like you see a giant squid, yeah, and you're
just partially seeing if you can't see it underwater. There
(32:37):
has no idea before the diving bell, even like there was,
or the butterfly. That's right? Yea, do you like that one?
I finally saw that movie by the way, hardcore man. Yeah,
really good. Uh. If you want to know more about
the diving bell and the butterfly or about sea monsters,
you can type those words into the search bar how
(32:58):
stuff works dot com. And since I said search parts,
time for listener mail, I do call this uh. Opah
is German for grandpa. I thought it was Greek for
like good times. Maybe I don't know really, yeah, Opah, Well,
I'm sure those are just three letters together, might be
(33:20):
something in Greek. But like my brother in law, Carston,
his German and his grandfather was I'm sorry his father.
His grandfather was Opa, but his dad was native Germans,
so my nieces called him opah. A says this lady's
I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast. Oh how
appropriate with a family story that Lucy relates My great
(33:43):
grandfather Opah left Germany when he was fourteen pre war
to work as a sailor, came to the US and
was a member of the U. S Coast Guard. One day,
he was part of a team that was clearing a
harbor of some old sunken chips. To do so, they
use the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water
to blast the wood of art and then gathered the debris.
His team wrote out in a fourteen foot rowboat to
(34:05):
gather up the wood shards and noticed the blast had
killed the fish they floated to the tops of The
crew brought them into the boat as well, waste not whatnot.
As they were going about their business, they came across
the sixteen foot hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly
it would be a great source of food, so despite
their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you
see where this is headed. Well. As it turns out,
(34:26):
the blast is strong enough to kill small fish, but
only stunned larger animals. The shark slowly started to regain
consciousness in the rowboat, and being confused and out of water,
was not pleased. It got to the point that it
was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the
boat and likely injured or killed the crew members. So
in the midst of this chaos are able to flag
down a sailor on a larger vessel proceeded to shoot
(34:47):
the thing to death while it was still in the boat. Um,
all of the crew members were safe and they still
got to feast on hammerhead shark, but now had a
much more exciting story. Uh. And you mentioned in the
whaling podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in
small boats to get the whale, and we're often injured
and killed. I thought you might find this interesting, and
I was hoping you can give a shout out to
(35:09):
my sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in
two thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get
to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh
and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is
uh Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian and Wendy
and Rachel uh ha ha ha. Thanks for listening and
for spreading the word and for being uh sisters. Way
(35:31):
to go being sisters. Yeah, thanks for writing in Wendy. Yeah, yeah,
thanks Wendy, Um and Chuck. This is our last episode
of two thousand fourteen, oh man, the longest year. So
we want to say happy new year everybody, and I
want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife,
you me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the
(35:54):
rights free version. No, that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh
it's a good one, so it's not rights free. Yeah,
happy birthday you me. Happy New Year to all of
you great people out there in podcast land. Will see
you next year for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com? Yeah,
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