Sea Monsters
DECEMBER 2005
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Sea Monsters
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By Virginia Morell
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“Some years ago I was on a boat one night. We were tied up, at the end of a mirror-calm day. And then the boat was rocked by three big waves. I was sure it must be Nessie swimming past,” says Steve Feltham, a self-appointed one-man Nessie-watcher in his 40s. You might expect such a person to be a bit wild-eyed, but Feltham is anything but kooky. He’d been hooked on the Nessie legend as a kid and moved here in 1991 to dedicate himself to his project: “Nessie-Sery Independent Research.” But the only apparent evidence of research is a pair of mounted binoculars, which he happily lets visitors peer through while answering their questions. Because most boil down to one—“Have you seen it yet?”—Feltham plans to rename his project: haveyouseenityet.com.
“If the site keeps half of them from asking me that bloody question . . . ,” he says, his voice trailing off.
Of his near Nessie encounter, Feltham says: “It wasn’t Nessie. I’ve since learned that it’s the aftermath of storms and the shape of the loch that cause those kinds of waves.” He pauses. “But I still think there’s something out there that’s unexplained. I’ve seen other things and heard about things that I haven’t figured out yet. That’s why I stay.”
Just then a young man and woman saunter up to Feltham’s umbrella-shaded table. “Can we ask you a question?” the man says.
“Yes, of course,” Feltham replies.
The couple eye him intently; they look worriedly hopeful, like children about to ask their elders if Santa Claus exists. “Have you seen it yet?”
“No,” Feltham answers politely, as if this is the first time the question has been posed. “Not yet.”
Feltham believes that a large fish—perhaps a catfish—is most likely the cause of many sightings (although he doesn’t tell this to the couple). “I don’t think they’re monsters,” he says. “Whatever they are, they’re very timid animals; they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
That wasn’t always the case. The first written account of the monster was in a seventh-century book on the life of the Irish saint Columba. One of his companions was swimming across the River Ness at the head of the loch when an “aquatic monster” surfaced and, “giving an awful roar,” attacked “with its mouth wide open.” The others were “stupeļ¬ed with terror,” but St. Columba coolly made the sign of the cross and commanded the beast to stop. It fled at once.
In those days people most likely imagined the Loch Ness monster as a sea serpent or a water kelpie, a diabolical beast with a horse’s head—creatures said to lurk in the lakes and coastal waters of Scandinavia and Scotland. Nessie only morphed into a plesiosaur many years after the first fossil of a strange marine reptile was discovered in 1719 in a quarry in Nottinghamshire, England.
By the early 1800s fossil hunters had unearthed more plesiosaur skeletons as well as those of other ancient marine reptiles, including big-eyed, dolphin-shaped ichthyosaurs and the shorter necked pliosaurs with their massive jaws and huge, crushing teeth. Dinosaurs had yet to be scientifically recognized, and the huge sea monsters of the past—none of them dinosaurs—gripped the public’s imagination, especially after artists began painting scenes of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and giant crocodiles writhing in combat. “Those paintings put a plesiosaur-like animal into the public mind,” says Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, noting that nothing shaped like a plesiosaur swims in the oceans today.
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