Modern-day artistic representation of what the Stronsay
beast might have looked like if it had literally resembled in life the eyewitness
descriptions of it in death (© Tim Morris)
Down through the centuries,
countless reports of mysterious sea ‘monsters’ have been reported, often grouped
together within that infamously heterogeneous cryptozoological conglomerate popularly
known collectively as the Great Sea Serpent. In most cases, such reports consist
entirely of eyewitness sightings, unsubstantiated by anything tangible that can
be directly examined afterwards by interested researchers. Occasionally, however,
physical evidence IS obtained…
Perhaps the most famous of such cases occurred at Stronsay, one
of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland. On 26 September 1808, farmer John
Peace was fishing east of Rothiesholm Point when he saw what seemed to be the
carcase of a whale, cast up onto the rocks, above which were flocks of circling
seabirds. He rowed up to it in his boat and examined it, and found that it was
a very peculiar-looking creature, which did not resemble anything known to him.
At that same time, another farmer, George Sherar, was watching Peace from the
shore, and was able to confirm all of this. About 10 days later, moreover, he
was able to see it for himself, because it was washed ashore on Stronsay, lying
on its belly just below the high tide mark.
When
Sherar discovered it there, he measured it, and found it to be 55 ft long. At least
two other eyewitnesses (the afore-mentioned Peace and carpenter Thomas Fotheringhame)
also measured it, and they obtained the same result. It was very serpentine,
almost eel-like in general build, but possessed a 15-ft neck, a small head, and
a long mane running along its back to the end of its tail. Most bizarre of all,
however, was that it seemed to have three pairs of legs, and each foot had five
or six toes. Sherar salvaged some vertebrae and the skull of this extraordinary
creature – duly dubbed the Stronsay beast.
From the Wernerian Natural History Society's memoirs
for 1808-1810, published in 1811, a sketch of the Stronsay sea serpent based upon
eyewitness George Sherar's description and agreed by Sherar to be "an exact
resemblance" of what he saw (public domain)
Details
of its discovery and description ultimately reached Patrick Neill, secretary of
Edinburgh's Wernerian Natural History Society, and at a meeting of the society
on 19 November 1808 Neill released some details on this subject. At the next
meeting, on 14 January 1809, he gave the Stronsay beast a formal scientific
name - Halsydrus pontoppidani *, 'Pontoppidan's water snake of the sea' (after Erik
Pontoppidan, an 18th-Century Norwegian bishop who had collected many
sea serpent reports).
Erik Pontoppidan (public domain)
At that same meeting, Scottish anatomist Dr John Barclay, who
had examined some of the beast's remains in Orkney, presented a paper in which
he described the vertebrae, skull, and one of the creature's legs. His paper,
accompanied with detailed diagrams, was published in 1811, within the society's
memoirs, and attracted a great deal of attention. The vertebrae were very
striking, resembling cotton reels, and were cartilaginous, but with
calcification that radiated from the centre of each vertebra in a star-like
pattern. The leg was also cartilaginous, but was not a real, jointed leg at
all; it was merely a fin.
Dr John Barclay, 1820 portrait (public domain)
To many people, these features meant little, but they meant a
great deal to the eminent naturalist Sir Everard Home, who was working at that
time upon an exhaustive study of the basking shark Cetorhinus maximus -
the world's second largest species of shark, but generally harmless, living on
plankton. When Home heard about the Stronsay beast, he felt sure that it must
have been a shark. This is because the only creatures to have cartilaginous
vertebrae are sharks and rays, and the only creatures to have cartilaginous
vertebrae with star-shaped calcification are sharks. Furthermore, when he
compared the Stronsay beast's vertebrae, skull, and other salvaged remains with the corresponding
portions of a known specimen of basking shark, they matched very closely.
Sir Everard Home (public domain)
Yet the long-necked, six-legged, mane-bearing Stronsay beast looked
nothing like a basking shark - so how could this drastic difference in
appearance be resolved? In fact, it was quite simple.
Stronsay beast vertebrae, an engraving from Barclay's
1811 paper (public domain)
When basking shark carcases begin to decompose, the entire gill
apparatus falls away, taking with it the shark's characteristic jaws, and
leaving behind only its small cranium and its exposed backbone, which have the
appearance of a small head and a long neck. The triangular dorsal fin also rots
away, sometimes leaving behind the rays, which can look a little like a mane -
especially when the fish's skin also decays, allowing the underlying muscle
fibres and connective tissue to break up into hair-like growth.
Additionally, the end of the backbone only runs into the top
fluke of the tail, which means that during decomposition the lower tail fluke
falls off, leaving behind what looks like a long slender tail. The pectoral and
sometimes the pelvic fins remain attached, but become distorted, so that they
can (with a little imagination!) look like legs with feet and toes. The
resulting deceptively plesiosaur-like carcase is popularly (and fittingly)
dubbed a pseudo-plesiosaur.
Finally, male sharks have a pair of leg-like copulatory organs
called claspers, which would yield a third pair of 'legs', as happened with the
Stronsay beast. Suddenly, a male basking shark has become a hairy six-legged long-necked
sea serpent!
How a basking shark carcase decomposes into a
pseudo-plesiosaur (© Markus Bühler/Journal
of Cryptozoology)
Over the years, almost all of the Stronsay beast's preserved
remains have been lost or destroyed, but three vertebrae are retained in Edinburgh's
Royal Museum of Scotland - the last remnants of Stronsay's world-famous hexapodal
sea serpent. Its mystery, conversely, continues to the present day, and for
very good reason. The longest conclusively-identified basking shark that
has been accurately measured was a truly exceptional specimen caught in 1851 in
Canada's Bay of Fundy; whereas the average length for its species is under 26
ft, this veritable monster was a mighty 40 ft 3 in. Yet even that is almost 15
ft less than the length claimed by eyewitnesses for the Stronsay beast.
Even the largest scientifically-measured specimen of the world's biggest fish -
the whale shark Rhincodon typus - was only(!) 41.5 ft long.
Accordingly, in 2008 archaeogeneticist Dr Yvonne Simpson, who had
been studying the Stronsay beast's few preserved remains since 2001, was reported
in various media interviews as stating that due to its size she wondered whether
it may have been some other species of shark rather than a basking shark, and was
hoping to conduct DNA tests upon some newly-recovered bone fragments from this contentious
carcase that had been given to her by a private collector (Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2008). However, nothing further seems to
have emerged regarding this potentially exciting prospect.
Some cryptozoologists have also questioned whether the 55-ft
Stronsay beast really was a basking shark, speculating that it may have
belonged to a still-unknown, giant relative. One of the world's largest known
sharks, the formidable megamouth Megachasma pelagios, remained wholly
unknown to humankind until 15 November 1976, when the first recorded specimen
was accidentally hauled up from the sea near the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Consequently,
the prospect of undiscovered species of extra-large shark still eluding
scientific discovery in modern times is far from being as unlikely as one might
otherwise assume.
Alternatively, might the Stronsay beast simply have been an exceptionally
large specimen of basking shark after all? In a Facebook comment concerning this
classic sea monster carcase posted on 16 October 2019, American cryptozoologist
Ken Gerhard offered the following pertinent thoughts:
Of course there were more outsized fish
in those days - before population explosions, pollution and aggressive,
industrialized fishing took hold. Perhaps the Stronsay Beast represented one of
the last monster-sized basking sharks?
This is the possibility that I personally consider most reasonable.
A third option is that the latter beast's size may have been measured
inaccurately by its eyewitnesses – the option favoured by Home, who discounted the
claimed 55-ft total length in favour of a more conservative yet still very impressive
36 ft. Yet if so, it seems very strange that three separate people measured it (one
of whom, Thomas Fotheringhame, was a carpenter and therefore skilled in accurate
measurement) and all obtained the same 55-ft total length for it. As is so often
true with cryptozoological cases that date back quite considerably, it is likely
that no conclusive answer will ever be obtained, so the controversy surrounding
the Stronsay beast seems destined to persist indefinitely.
Having said that: during December 1941, history somewhat repeated
itself in the Orkneys when a strange carcase, 25 ft long, was washed ashore at
Scapa Flow. Its superficially prehistoric, plesiosaurian appearance was
presumably sufficient for Provost J.G. Marwick, who had documented it in detail
in a local newspaper account (Orkney Blast, 30 January 1942), to dub
this enigma 'Scapasaurus'. Fortunately, a single vertebra from its remains was
preserved and retained at London's Natural History Museum, which readily identified
it as a basking shark.
* Taxonomic tail-note: Halsydrus pontoppidani Neill, 1809 is currently designated as a junior synonym of the basking
shark's officially-recognised binomial name, Cetorhinus maximus Gunnerus,
1765.
Basking shark (public domain)
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