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How Sea Monsters Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to you Stuff you should know from House Stuff
0:04
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
0:12
Speaker 1: Josh Clark. There's Charles to Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel.
0:16
Speaker 1: There's Nicola Tesla. It's stuff you should know. There's Johnny
0:20
Speaker 1: and Scott are there's your imaginary No, that was Sigmund
0:25
Speaker 1: the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No, Once again,
0:28
Speaker 1: the brief cultural divide expans between us from the seventies
0:33
Speaker 1: or earlier. Yeah, it was one of the Sid and
0:35
Speaker 1: Marty Croft shows. Hr puffin stuff. Yeah, Sigmund the Sea
0:38
Speaker 1: Monster and Johnny and Scott Warres Buddies. Yeah, he was
0:41
Speaker 1: like a you know, he's a dude in a suit.
0:45
Speaker 1: I reckon, but he was. He looked like a big
0:48
Speaker 1: blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare fuel with eyes.
0:51
Speaker 1: That was cool. Sid Marty Croft man. Yeah, their sensibilities
0:54
Speaker 1: scare me. Yeah. I went to the place once in Atlanta.
0:58
Speaker 1: You know, they had down at the Omni uh which
1:00
Speaker 1: is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid Marty Croft World
1:03
Speaker 1: or whatever, and I went down there once and looking
1:05
Speaker 1: back now, it was like a drug fueled indoor amusement part.
1:08
Speaker 1: You're like, why are there so many twenty year old
1:11
Speaker 1: tire Yeah? I never really put with kids. Yeah, uh yeah,
1:16
Speaker 1: I'm sure. I say this every single time that we
1:19
Speaker 1: talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen the Mr
1:22
Speaker 1: Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one of the best.
1:27
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show,
1:29
Speaker 1: but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's top five easy. Yeah.
1:34
Speaker 1: And that's sea monsters. Sea monsters, They're Gonna get you soon?
1:39
Speaker 1: Is that from a show? Okay? From this show? So, Chuck,
1:43
Speaker 1: are you familiar much with sea monsters when you're researching
1:46
Speaker 1: this where you like everybody knows all this sort of
1:49
Speaker 1: half and half? Yeah, I felt similar. There were a
1:53
Speaker 1: lot of stuff, a lot of things in here that
1:55
Speaker 1: I hadn't heard of, and the extra research we did
1:57
Speaker 1: too yielded some new insights. But one of the things
2:02
Speaker 1: that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably
2:04
Speaker 1: the thesis of this whole thing, is that we've been
2:08
Speaker 1: seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've been talking about sea
2:12
Speaker 1: monsters for millennia, and we still are like, have you
2:16
Speaker 1: heard of the montalk monster? Yes? Did you see pictures
2:19
Speaker 1: of that thing. Yeah, I remember when it came out. Okay,
2:22
Speaker 1: I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah, I feel bad
2:25
Speaker 1: for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yeah that
2:28
Speaker 1: in the two thousand eight um what was the beach?
2:32
Speaker 1: It was around Montalk, Yeah, but there was a specific beach,
2:36
Speaker 1: ditch planes beach. This girl and her three friends found
2:39
Speaker 1: this washed up Montalk monster. And I think what's funny
2:44
Speaker 1: is they still there's a trend here in naming these
2:47
Speaker 1: things sensationally throughout history, and we still do it. Because
2:52
Speaker 1: they could have called it like a decomposed raccoon, but
2:55
Speaker 1: they called it the Montalk monster. And the jury is
2:59
Speaker 1: not out. It is a decomposed raccoon, Yeah they I
3:02
Speaker 1: mean they pretty much think so. But it's not like
3:05
Speaker 1: you can't prove that. I mean, they have like a
3:07
Speaker 1: line of biologists from Montalk to Manhattan saying it's a raccoon.
3:12
Speaker 1: It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome.
3:15
Speaker 1: I've heard some other paleo zoologists say, like it maybe
3:18
Speaker 1: a sheep, though I think it was too small, or
3:21
Speaker 1: other animals. But it's definitely not a monster, a sea monster.
3:26
Speaker 1: But this is two thousand and eight we're talking about,
3:29
Speaker 1: and some weird thing washes up on a beach, and
3:32
Speaker 1: around the world people hear of the Montalk Monster except
3:35
Speaker 1: for me. Yeah, did you see the East River Monster?
3:38
Speaker 1: I heard that one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly
3:40
Speaker 1: a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking. But
3:42
Speaker 1: still they named it the East River Monster, and not
3:45
Speaker 1: a pig. That was you know, I don't know how
3:48
Speaker 1: the pig got there, right, the pig of East River
3:50
Speaker 1: or something like that. Yeah, it's probably like, you know,
3:52
Speaker 1: somewhere in Chinatown a pig was no good and the
3:55
Speaker 1: other thing in the river. That's what they do. Yeah. Um.
3:59
Speaker 1: Also in two thousand six, um, there was one in Russia.
4:04
Speaker 1: I didn't see where, but on a beach. Uh, something
4:08
Speaker 1: washed up and they said sea monster. And it turned
4:11
Speaker 1: out to be a beluga whale carcass, greatly decomposed, but
4:14
Speaker 1: it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale.
4:17
Speaker 1: But the point is is still in the twenty one century,
4:20
Speaker 1: whenever the sea spits something up, we're like, this is
4:24
Speaker 1: a monster. Clearly, obviously this is a monster. And then
4:28
Speaker 1: biologists come along and say it's not a monster, but
4:30
Speaker 1: it's this weird thing, or sometimes they say this is new.
4:36
Speaker 1: Yeah it's not a monster, but this is new. And
4:39
Speaker 1: this is the point finally that I'm trying to get to,
4:41
Speaker 1: is that the the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent
4:47
Speaker 1: of Earth's surface. Right, That's a lot of hiding places.
4:51
Speaker 1: And I think humans have known and still no intuitively
4:54
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of stuff down there that we
4:56
Speaker 1: don't know about. We don't know what it is. But
4:59
Speaker 1: over time we science has replaced superstition enough so that
5:03
Speaker 1: while we still know there's stuff out there that we
5:05
Speaker 1: don't know, we don't think of him as monsters. So
5:07
Speaker 1: our mindset has changed somewhat. Yeah, But ultimately, the sea
5:13
Speaker 1: is this place of unknown, unknown organisms that we're still
5:18
Speaker 1: learning about. What's the of the deepest seas are still
5:23
Speaker 1: uncompletely like, unresearched and undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took
5:27
Speaker 1: away a little percentage of that with his Deep Sea Dive.
5:31
Speaker 1: He took away a bit of my soul with every
5:33
Speaker 1: movie he's made since Terminator Too. You like Terminator Too?
5:37
Speaker 1: I didn't see that one. That's pretty good. Huh, Yeah,
5:40
Speaker 1: I think that was that was a good one. Have
5:42
Speaker 1: you not seen Titanic. Did you know that the there
5:46
Speaker 1: was an alternate ending for it, where like they kept
5:51
Speaker 1: the diamond or where something like the Titantanic didn't sink. Right,
5:58
Speaker 1: it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
6:01
Speaker 1: ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
6:05
Speaker 1: what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
6:09
Speaker 1: monsters though, which is not a sea monster. But did
6:11
Speaker 1: you see the footage of the anglerfish? That's another great point. Yeah,
6:16
Speaker 1: some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters.
6:20
Speaker 1: I mean, the the anglerfish is one of the scariest
6:22
Speaker 1: looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy and
6:25
Speaker 1: uh it's real though, It's just you know, science is
6:28
Speaker 1: It's not like, oh, what is this thing? They know
6:29
Speaker 1: what the angler fish is exactly, but they live so deep.
6:32
Speaker 1: I think until recently, it had never been filmed in
6:34
Speaker 1: its habitat until like this year, until like three weeks ago. Yeah. Um,
6:41
Speaker 1: apparently it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that we ever
6:44
Speaker 1: photographed a whale underwater. Yeah. Interesting, two thousand six, I think, um,
6:50
Speaker 1: or nineteen seventy six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh,
6:54
Speaker 1: there's like the sea just coughs up new life to that. Yeah,
7:00
Speaker 1: where were slightly more superstitious, we would have called monsters.
7:03
Speaker 1: So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
7:06
Speaker 1: it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
7:10
Speaker 1: the different kind of monsters we came up with really
7:12
Speaker 1: kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
7:16
Speaker 1: goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
7:19
Speaker 1: stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
7:23
Speaker 1: like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
7:26
Speaker 1: the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
7:30
Speaker 1: sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
7:33
Speaker 1: creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
7:37
Speaker 1: and Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, that's
7:41
Speaker 1: where the universe came from. Was Tiamat, right, And then
7:44
Speaker 1: eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, um, she became what's
7:49
Speaker 1: known as the chaos monster, and she was slain by
7:54
Speaker 1: a male hero as and then the world was created
7:58
Speaker 1: from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
8:00
Speaker 1: creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here,
8:03
Speaker 1: not all of the sea monsters that depends on the
8:05
Speaker 1: culture and the religion. Uh. Some of them were benevolent.
8:08
Speaker 1: I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
8:14
Speaker 1: The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
8:18
Speaker 1: and this is a question of mine, dude, is do
8:21
Speaker 1: do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamat are
8:25
Speaker 1: one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
8:28
Speaker 1: the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesothamian gods saying, don't
8:34
Speaker 1: even bring that here, like you created the world, I
8:37
Speaker 1: slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
8:41
Speaker 1: a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
8:44
Speaker 1: and other religions. And some people take great offense to that.
8:48
Speaker 1: Others don't what that that it's not No, this is
8:52
Speaker 1: the word of God period. There is no crossover. That's
8:56
Speaker 1: just coincidence. Um, twenty leagues under the sea. I think
9:02
Speaker 1: Jules Verne this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
9:05
Speaker 1: seventy he wrote that great great book. Uh, and he said,
9:08
Speaker 1: either we do know all the right varieties of beings
9:11
Speaker 1: which people our planet, where we do not. If we
9:15
Speaker 1: do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
9:17
Speaker 1: in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to
9:20
Speaker 1: reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
9:24
Speaker 1: and other kinds of even new species, to which the
9:27
Speaker 1: character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
9:32
Speaker 1: it kind of plays to the point um that if
9:36
Speaker 1: there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
9:40
Speaker 1: are deep in the jungles, or deep under the sea
9:42
Speaker 1: because people would have seen them. So it makes it
9:45
Speaker 1: exotic in uh, sort of grabby as means of religion
9:49
Speaker 1: or literature, you know, lore, right, Plus the Jules Verne
9:53
Speaker 1: was writing in well, this is eighteen seventy when he
9:56
Speaker 1: wrote Twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is a
9:58
Speaker 1: time when a lot of the old myths and legends
10:02
Speaker 1: and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
10:08
Speaker 1: that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, but
10:12
Speaker 1: it's not actually a kraken. It's an it's it's yeah,
10:16
Speaker 1: or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
10:19
Speaker 1: you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
10:24
Speaker 1: because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
10:27
Speaker 1: that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
10:29
Speaker 1: a fan of mythology. They are. There are tons and
10:33
Speaker 1: tons of cool stories about sea creatures and sea monsters,
10:35
Speaker 1: all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one Cetus named by
10:39
Speaker 1: the Romans. King Cepheus had a wife named Cassiopeia maybe
10:47
Speaker 1: ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what, my
10:49
Speaker 1: daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
10:53
Speaker 1: And of course, um, she's like, yeah, I said it. Yeah,
10:56
Speaker 1: And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
10:58
Speaker 1: dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
11:01
Speaker 1: come up and kill your daughter. Kill kill Setis. And Perseus,
11:06
Speaker 1: of course, is always saving the day. So he apparently
11:09
Speaker 1: was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he just chopped off,
11:13
Speaker 1: flying around, and uh, it just happened to pass by.
11:17
Speaker 1: Uh was it Persephone who was about to be eaten
11:21
Speaker 1: and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right, I'll take care
11:24
Speaker 1: of Setis on my way home. My swords bloody already.
11:28
Speaker 1: Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never saw the remake
11:32
Speaker 1: of that, did you see that? I didn't either. I
11:35
Speaker 1: just remember release the crack and yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah,
11:39
Speaker 1: that's right. Even Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh,
11:45
Speaker 1: lines of dialogue, because that very particular set of skills
11:49
Speaker 1: was also a big thing for months, four different movies.
11:54
Speaker 1: I was just in the one Are you sure? Yeah,
11:56
Speaker 1: take him? Yeah, it was pretty good movie, by the way,
11:58
Speaker 1: sure sure. Did not see the sequel though, Taken to
12:02
Speaker 1: Electric Boogaloo. Yeah. I thought it was weird when he
12:04
Speaker 1: started breaking. Yeah, he's doing the worm, but like not
12:09
Speaker 1: even very well. I would have thought they'd get like
12:11
Speaker 1: a body double who was like a professional dancer. Well,
12:14
Speaker 1: he did not have a particular set at skills when
12:16
Speaker 1: it came to being on the cardboard. Now, Chuck, we'll
12:19
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little more about um mythology and what
12:23
Speaker 1: it reveals about humans and sea monsters right after this,
12:30
Speaker 1: So Chucky, you're talking about Perseus slaying setis um. Homer's
12:36
Speaker 1: Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah,
12:43
Speaker 1: and there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah, Sila
12:47
Speaker 1: or skilla and uh scharibdis charybdis. Uh. These two point
12:54
Speaker 1: out an important and ongoing um feature of some of
12:59
Speaker 1: these stories with are that maybe they might symbolize something
13:02
Speaker 1: else real. Yes, either a sea monster or in this case,
13:07
Speaker 1: maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common
13:11
Speaker 1: thing another cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
13:16
Speaker 1: supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
13:21
Speaker 1: this is kind of a this is one thesis on
13:25
Speaker 1: why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory. Yeah,
13:29
Speaker 1: a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
13:33
Speaker 1: So that quote or that description of Scylla's described as
13:38
Speaker 1: having twelve ft six heads atop, long sinuous necks and
13:42
Speaker 1: mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
13:46
Speaker 1: that's probably a reef, right, and then sure just lay
13:51
Speaker 1: on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters.
13:55
Speaker 1: There probably a whirlpool, right, So it's story saying maybe
13:58
Speaker 1: don't go there exact exactly. Did you read that thing
14:02
Speaker 1: on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell you about this
14:06
Speaker 1: for a second. Okay, there is this, um, this whole
14:10
Speaker 1: exploration that's trying to figure out how to express say
14:16
Speaker 1: so like, if you have nuclear waste and you need
14:19
Speaker 1: to put it away for ten thousand years and to
14:21
Speaker 1: keep people away from it for ten thousand years, you
14:24
Speaker 1: have to figure out a way to warn people away
14:27
Speaker 1: from it for ten thousand years. Well, how could you
14:30
Speaker 1: possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's a
14:34
Speaker 1: lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is called
14:36
Speaker 1: nuclear semiotics, and one of the ways to probably the
14:41
Speaker 1: most agreed upon way, is to create this thing called
14:44
Speaker 1: the nuclear Priesthood, which is this group of learned people
14:49
Speaker 1: who know the secret of this nuclear waste site but
14:54
Speaker 1: purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
14:58
Speaker 1: so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
15:01
Speaker 1: something to the site that will get passed down and
15:03
Speaker 1: passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area, live
15:07
Speaker 1: around it will know, like, you don't want to go there,
15:10
Speaker 1: You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
15:13
Speaker 1: radiation anymore, but this foolklore will get passed along and along,
15:16
Speaker 1: and they're saying like that may be the best way
15:19
Speaker 1: to pass along information. And that's exactly what um what
15:23
Speaker 1: the idea. One interpretation of what sea monsters are is.
15:26
Speaker 1: It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
15:28
Speaker 1: want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
15:30
Speaker 1: all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
15:32
Speaker 1: lives in there, or to play near the water. You
15:34
Speaker 1: don't want you don't want a carp to take you away.
15:38
Speaker 1: It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much. It's
15:43
Speaker 1: not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works
15:46
Speaker 1: and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
15:49
Speaker 1: So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
15:53
Speaker 1: you said, the kraken um possibly being the giant squid,
15:57
Speaker 1: or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
16:01
Speaker 1: There's always been stories of the kracking terrorizing ships off
16:04
Speaker 1: of Iceland and Norway, and the kracking is noted because
16:08
Speaker 1: it is huge, like one point five a mile to
16:11
Speaker 1: a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
16:16
Speaker 1: the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
16:18
Speaker 1: If you see a if you're a sailor back then
16:21
Speaker 1: and you don't know about biology and things yet and
16:24
Speaker 1: you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
16:28
Speaker 1: of a human head, it might make you think that's
16:31
Speaker 1: a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
16:33
Speaker 1: embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide
16:36
Speaker 1: with legs as as large as the sailing mast capable
16:41
Speaker 1: of pulling down a ship. Well, I mean it gets
16:43
Speaker 1: the point across the people back on land. Like, wow,
16:47
Speaker 1: that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
16:49
Speaker 1: How big do these squids get? They get to like
16:51
Speaker 1: forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
16:55
Speaker 1: even bigger called the colossal squid. Yeah, that's so much bigger.
16:58
Speaker 1: It's its own um species, I believe um. And it
17:03
Speaker 1: lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
17:06
Speaker 1: basis of the kracking. It's probably just a regular old
17:09
Speaker 1: giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
17:11
Speaker 1: those things. They are very scary and they're very very big.
17:15
Speaker 1: Plus also, the idea of the crack and may have
17:18
Speaker 1: first come about before sightings of giant squid. They may
17:22
Speaker 1: have been taken from whalers who found like crazy scars
17:27
Speaker 1: on whales, who may have found like bits of tentacles,
17:30
Speaker 1: like huge tentacles in the whales stomachs, things like that,
17:33
Speaker 1: and been like, what did this come from? Yeah, the beak,
17:37
Speaker 1: because they did find a giant squid once, but the
17:39
Speaker 1: sailors cut it up and used it for bait. But
17:42
Speaker 1: they preserved the beak, and that just fueled the legend
17:45
Speaker 1: even more and more. So that's the that's another interpretation
17:48
Speaker 1: of sea monsters is that they came from misunderstood or
17:54
Speaker 1: embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that were familiar with. Now,
17:59
Speaker 1: so it's the same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well,
18:02
Speaker 1: your sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
18:06
Speaker 1: you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
18:09
Speaker 1: maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um.
18:15
Speaker 1: And you see a giant squid, you might write in
18:17
Speaker 1: your journal that I've seen the kracking. It makes perfect sense,
18:21
Speaker 1: sure you know, and it spreads and takes shape over time,
18:25
Speaker 1: little scurvy going on. The kracking is not the only one. Um.
18:29
Speaker 1: That's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
18:34
Speaker 1: So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
18:38
Speaker 1: It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
18:41
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it was. It was in the the Old Testament.
18:45
Speaker 1: It may have been the Mesopotamian god. That's what I said. Yeah,
18:48
Speaker 1: but Leviathan always is sort of a catch all word
18:51
Speaker 1: now for any like large unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
18:54
Speaker 1: apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah. Um,
18:58
Speaker 1: which again it was probably well, well, yeah, it could
19:01
Speaker 1: have also been a sea serpents. So stea serpents are
19:03
Speaker 1: there are their own things. Um the uh, the Norse
19:08
Speaker 1: had a legend of the yourman gander. There's mornwatt in
19:13
Speaker 1: there and everything. And that was apparently, um, one of
19:17
Speaker 1: Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby that was
19:22
Speaker 1: created when Loki, his brother and a woman named on
19:26
Speaker 1: Garboda I guess, had um the sex of the gods,
19:31
Speaker 1: and created this creature, a sea serpent that wrapped around
19:35
Speaker 1: the globe supposedly. Yeah, and um, that's just one example
19:39
Speaker 1: of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake. And there's
19:44
Speaker 1: a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of
19:48
Speaker 1: sea serpents, huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Um,
19:53
Speaker 1: schools of porpoises, yeah, along the line together. There's one
19:57
Speaker 1: thing though, that could have accounted for all sighting of
20:00
Speaker 1: sea serpents. It's called the or fish. Did you see
20:02
Speaker 1: this thing? Yeah? It is huge and um, if an
20:05
Speaker 1: or fish was was swimming in the water, it could
20:08
Speaker 1: be undulating up and down and it looks like little
20:11
Speaker 1: spiny humps coming in and out of the water, So
20:14
Speaker 1: that that makes sense. Sure they get up to you,
20:16
Speaker 1: I think, um, thirty or forty, Yeah they can. I
20:21
Speaker 1: mean there's there's plenty of photos of you know, like
20:24
Speaker 1: tin dudes on a beach holding one up because it
20:27
Speaker 1: takes tin dudes. It's not like they all want their
20:30
Speaker 1: hand on the little fish exactly, you know. And these
20:34
Speaker 1: aren't photoshop either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures too,
20:36
Speaker 1: but or fishes are huge and they look like big,
20:39
Speaker 1: slimy kind of serpentine fish. And then chuck. Mer people
20:45
Speaker 1: were another kind of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth.
20:52
Speaker 1: That's a That's another thing that stuck out to me,
20:54
Speaker 1: is there where there are legends around the world from culture,
21:00
Speaker 1: was there separated by space and time that had similar stories,
21:06
Speaker 1: um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
21:10
Speaker 1: a lot of these people cited similar things and came
21:14
Speaker 1: up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
21:16
Speaker 1: were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
21:19
Speaker 1: seen splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
21:22
Speaker 1: find a mermaid? But mermaids were not um looked upon
21:26
Speaker 1: kindly because they would yuh and this article points out
21:29
Speaker 1: they would at the their best they would just forget
21:32
Speaker 1: that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
21:35
Speaker 1: And if the worst, they would do so on purpose
21:38
Speaker 1: and take the men down under the water and lights
21:41
Speaker 1: out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah sorry, Tom Hanks, Sorry
21:44
Speaker 1: for the rest of your career. Darryl, his career was
21:48
Speaker 1: pretty lousy after splash liing it. Well, uh yeah, what
21:53
Speaker 1: um she Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she
21:57
Speaker 1: was not a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him
22:00
Speaker 1: and gave him breath right, Well, that's the Hollywood ification
22:05
Speaker 1: of the Mermaid legend. Or like aerial from Little Mermaid
22:11
Speaker 1: and that dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess
22:15
Speaker 1: it was VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it
22:17
Speaker 1: went to DVD, probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, yeah,
22:23
Speaker 1: I get bored and blank. So um. The whole mer
22:28
Speaker 1: creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
22:33
Speaker 1: apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
22:36
Speaker 1: that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
22:42
Speaker 1: I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
22:44
Speaker 1: underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
22:48
Speaker 1: twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile neolithic
22:52
Speaker 1: artifact area. It's pretty cool Doggerland, that's what it is,
22:55
Speaker 1: not dog Land. So um, they had their own things
22:58
Speaker 1: called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpie is
23:02
Speaker 1: that the the kelpie. I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly,
23:10
Speaker 1: but this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which
23:13
Speaker 1: are actually horses that live in the sea that can
23:18
Speaker 1: sometimes change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures.
23:23
Speaker 1: But every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie, this
23:26
Speaker 1: is supposedly associated with it, including lock Nest. And it
23:30
Speaker 1: wasn't until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like
23:34
Speaker 1: a c creature that we think of her today, when
23:37
Speaker 1: some dinosaur bones please asaur bones were found around lock Nests,
23:41
Speaker 1: saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Before
23:45
Speaker 1: that it was just a kelpie. We could probably do
23:47
Speaker 1: a full show on Nessy just it um has been
23:51
Speaker 1: pretty much disproven um unequivocally of course, because there is
23:56
Speaker 1: no Lockness Monster. But I just think things like that
23:59
Speaker 1: are need and when we did one big Foot, it's
24:00
Speaker 1: more about just the legend and the war around it Unlock.
24:05
Speaker 1: Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did,
24:07
Speaker 1: Rena Hertzog? No, I didn't know he did one of us.
24:11
Speaker 1: It was I think it was. He did a mockumentary,
24:16
Speaker 1: but not like a Christopher Guest documentary, just bo documentary
24:19
Speaker 1: waiting for Waiting for nessy Um, where it just looked
24:23
Speaker 1: like he was I can't remember the name it where
24:25
Speaker 1: he was searching for the Lotness Monster and saw, you know,
24:29
Speaker 1: caught it on camera, but it made it, he made
24:31
Speaker 1: it seem real. I think it was Rena Hertzog. It
24:33
Speaker 1: was good, of course. You know it sounds a little
24:35
Speaker 1: dishonest for Verner Herzog. Well, I don't. I don't think
24:38
Speaker 1: he was trying to pass it off. I think, yeah,
24:41
Speaker 1: I'll look that up. It may not be him, but
24:43
Speaker 1: someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
24:45
Speaker 1: if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
24:48
Speaker 1: there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
24:52
Speaker 1: on on cable? Nol says it was her talking Okay, yeah,
24:57
Speaker 1: I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
24:59
Speaker 1: Old talk to a lot more than Jerry does. Um,
25:02
Speaker 1: so chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation
25:06
Speaker 1: for where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
25:11
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
25:22
Speaker 1: All right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
25:28
Speaker 1: so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
25:31
Speaker 1: monster around the time of Please Asaur. I believe it's
25:35
Speaker 1: what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
25:39
Speaker 1: They said, well, this is this must be one of
25:41
Speaker 1: Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
25:45
Speaker 1: a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
25:48
Speaker 1: You mentioned, um, the Chinese having a legend of some
25:54
Speaker 1: sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
25:57
Speaker 1: ft long. Um, oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
26:01
Speaker 1: The Guizoo dragons. Yeah, they were basically marine reptiles called
26:07
Speaker 1: kecha source whi they they But they were lucky like
26:11
Speaker 1: if you found one of these skeletons, you kept it
26:14
Speaker 1: because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you
26:16
Speaker 1: got your hands on, and it would bring you a
26:18
Speaker 1: good fortune. That's right. And I know what earlier we
26:22
Speaker 1: were talking about just the early explorers, and uh, you
26:27
Speaker 1: can't fault some of these dudes because they were you know,
26:31
Speaker 1: this one article you said they were literally an unchartered
26:33
Speaker 1: waters and it was before the rise of science, and
26:37
Speaker 1: all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
26:41
Speaker 1: you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
26:44
Speaker 1: oceanic map from the fundreds, it's gonna have some sea
26:48
Speaker 1: monsters drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it
26:53
Speaker 1: was a time when before there were you know, before
26:56
Speaker 1: observational data came along. We pretty much was sort of
26:59
Speaker 1: like the n in it today. You pretty much just
27:01
Speaker 1: rewrote earlier history books over and over until they finally
27:06
Speaker 1: got a little smarter and saying, you know what, maybe
27:07
Speaker 1: we should really observe something and then write about it
27:11
Speaker 1: for real. And this didn't really lead to any anything
27:15
Speaker 1: more substantiated, you know, well for a while, sure, but um,
27:20
Speaker 1: it was they called a transitional era in this article,
27:23
Speaker 1: which kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
27:26
Speaker 1: early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
27:29
Speaker 1: what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
27:32
Speaker 1: still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
27:37
Speaker 1: like a whale, right, and then it's similarly a natural
27:42
Speaker 1: um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a c bishop.
27:50
Speaker 1: So the c bishop was this thing that was supposedly
27:52
Speaker 1: caught and taken to the king of Poland because it
27:56
Speaker 1: was this fish like creature that had like a meter
28:00
Speaker 1: and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
28:04
Speaker 1: talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
28:07
Speaker 1: the sign of the cross and everything, and later on
28:10
Speaker 1: somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
28:13
Speaker 1: of the cross. But if you look at the squid
28:16
Speaker 1: a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
28:19
Speaker 1: got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
28:21
Speaker 1: that's kind of like the robes, you know. So maybe
28:24
Speaker 1: that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously to this,
28:28
Speaker 1: we're talking like the sixteenth century, there was a pretty
28:32
Speaker 1: much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
28:37
Speaker 1: had an an analogy in the sea, catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
28:42
Speaker 1: all that stuff. And uh, in some cases they were right,
28:45
Speaker 1: there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
28:49
Speaker 1: them that, right, the sea horse to um. But all
28:55
Speaker 1: that kind of it was a rough time for science.
28:58
Speaker 1: It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah, because you know,
29:02
Speaker 1: like you said, things were mistaken, like a whale and
29:04
Speaker 1: a walrus might be a monster when it's just a
29:07
Speaker 1: whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of
29:10
Speaker 1: tales that you know, when it's repeated over and over,
29:13
Speaker 1: you get the sense it is just one of those
29:15
Speaker 1: like urban legends back then. I guess it wasn't urban
29:19
Speaker 1: back then, though, what would it be, just a seafaring legend. Yeah,
29:23
Speaker 1: um of whales being mistaken for islands, and like a
29:28
Speaker 1: ship will land on the whale and build a you know,
29:31
Speaker 1: and route down basically get off the ship and build
29:33
Speaker 1: a fire, and then the whale I guess who was
29:36
Speaker 1: just chilling out at the surface, says, hey, there's a
29:39
Speaker 1: fire on my back, and I'm gonna take your boat
29:41
Speaker 1: underwater and swallow you hole. I'm to be aware of
29:45
Speaker 1: the you know, whatever they called that, whatever culture called
29:48
Speaker 1: that particular whale exactly now we just call it a whale,
29:51
Speaker 1: and again probably end on their backs. It was an
29:54
Speaker 1: embellish story, but the there there. It was based on
29:58
Speaker 1: the sighting of a whale before they called it whales,
30:00
Speaker 1: and back when everybody lied about everything, they saw another
30:04
Speaker 1: culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends,
30:08
Speaker 1: where the Lakota and Dakota Sioux. They came up with
30:11
Speaker 1: something called um the Umhla. Yeah, I think that's about
30:20
Speaker 1: right from from dinosaur bones found in around the Missouri River,
30:25
Speaker 1: and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
30:27
Speaker 1: evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
30:30
Speaker 1: and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
30:33
Speaker 1: them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. Basically
30:36
Speaker 1: thunderbirds got what they knew is that it wasn't a tonka,
30:42
Speaker 1: that's a buffalo, right, Yea, they were pretty sure. You know, Um,
30:47
Speaker 1: that's apparently where the legends of the psych the cyclops
30:50
Speaker 1: came from from Native Americans. No, from um finding like
30:55
Speaker 1: old like elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in
30:59
Speaker 1: the middle. Well, clearly there was a race of giants
31:03
Speaker 1: that just had one eye. No, there were elephants. You know,
31:08
Speaker 1: we often joked like they were done back then. Of
31:09
Speaker 1: course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out.
31:12
Speaker 1: It's like to make stuff up. They didn't have TV
31:15
Speaker 1: or anything back then, and like we said a lot
31:17
Speaker 1: of that. A lot of the stuff was yeh was
31:20
Speaker 1: um legend to keep you know, voters from going in
31:25
Speaker 1: a maybe a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or
31:28
Speaker 1: to keep the children away from the water. And like
31:31
Speaker 1: the ghost story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh,
31:36
Speaker 1: nuclear semioto nuclear semiotic? Man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
31:40
Speaker 1: Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
31:44
Speaker 1: nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
31:49
Speaker 1: out in ten thousand years. Um, what else do you
31:53
Speaker 1: got anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents. Um,
31:56
Speaker 1: just take a look at the angler fish video and
31:59
Speaker 1: tell me if you came upon that. And see we
32:01
Speaker 1: also didn't point out that this was before deep not
32:04
Speaker 1: even deep sea exploration, like this is before underwater exploration.
32:09
Speaker 1: People are just riding around on the top of the ocean.
32:11
Speaker 1: So we're fascinated with it and we've gone to the
32:13
Speaker 1: depths that we can attain at this point, which just
32:16
Speaker 1: pretty deep. I wish I would look that up. I
32:18
Speaker 1: don't know how deep we can go, how deep James
32:20
Speaker 1: Cameron can go. Oh he goes deep, buddy, But um,
32:25
Speaker 1: think about back then, man, when they couldn't, Like, you're
32:28
Speaker 1: how scary that would be? Right? When these strange creatures
32:31
Speaker 1: are like you see a giant squid, yeah, and you're
32:33
Speaker 1: just partially seeing if you can't see it underwater. There
32:37
Speaker 1: has no idea before the diving bell, even like there was,
32:41
Speaker 1: or the butterfly. That's right? Yea, do you like that one?
32:46
Speaker 1: I finally saw that movie by the way, hardcore man. Yeah,
32:50
Speaker 1: really good. Uh. If you want to know more about
32:52
Speaker 1: the diving bell and the butterfly or about sea monsters,
32:56
Speaker 1: you can type those words into the search bar how
32:58
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. And since I said search parts,
33:00
Speaker 1: time for listener mail, I do call this uh. Opah
33:07
Speaker 1: is German for grandpa. I thought it was Greek for
33:11
Speaker 1: like good times. Maybe I don't know really, yeah, Opah, Well,
33:17
Speaker 1: I'm sure those are just three letters together, might be
33:20
Speaker 1: something in Greek. But like my brother in law, Carston,
33:24
Speaker 1: his German and his grandfather was I'm sorry his father.
33:28
Speaker 1: His grandfather was Opa, but his dad was native Germans,
33:31
Speaker 1: so my nieces called him opah. A says this lady's
33:36
Speaker 1: I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast. Oh how
33:39
Speaker 1: appropriate with a family story that Lucy relates My great
33:43
Speaker 1: grandfather Opah left Germany when he was fourteen pre war
33:46
Speaker 1: to work as a sailor, came to the US and
33:48
Speaker 1: was a member of the U. S Coast Guard. One day,
33:50
Speaker 1: he was part of a team that was clearing a
33:52
Speaker 1: harbor of some old sunken chips. To do so, they
33:55
Speaker 1: use the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water
33:59
Speaker 1: to blast the wood of art and then gathered the debris.
34:02
Speaker 1: His team wrote out in a fourteen foot rowboat to
34:05
Speaker 1: gather up the wood shards and noticed the blast had
34:07
Speaker 1: killed the fish they floated to the tops of The
34:10
Speaker 1: crew brought them into the boat as well, waste not whatnot.
34:13
Speaker 1: As they were going about their business, they came across
34:15
Speaker 1: the sixteen foot hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly
34:19
Speaker 1: it would be a great source of food, so despite
34:21
Speaker 1: their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you
34:23
Speaker 1: see where this is headed. Well. As it turns out,
34:26
Speaker 1: the blast is strong enough to kill small fish, but
34:28
Speaker 1: only stunned larger animals. The shark slowly started to regain
34:31
Speaker 1: consciousness in the rowboat, and being confused and out of water,
34:35
Speaker 1: was not pleased. It got to the point that it
34:38
Speaker 1: was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the
34:40
Speaker 1: boat and likely injured or killed the crew members. So
34:43
Speaker 1: in the midst of this chaos are able to flag
34:45
Speaker 1: down a sailor on a larger vessel proceeded to shoot
34:47
Speaker 1: the thing to death while it was still in the boat. Um,
34:51
Speaker 1: all of the crew members were safe and they still
34:53
Speaker 1: got to feast on hammerhead shark, but now had a
34:55
Speaker 1: much more exciting story. Uh. And you mentioned in the
34:59
Speaker 1: whaling podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in
35:02
Speaker 1: small boats to get the whale, and we're often injured
35:03
Speaker 1: and killed. I thought you might find this interesting, and
35:06
Speaker 1: I was hoping you can give a shout out to
35:09
Speaker 1: my sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in
35:11
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get
35:14
Speaker 1: to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh
35:17
Speaker 1: and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is
35:20
Speaker 1: uh Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian and Wendy
35:23
Speaker 1: and Rachel uh ha ha ha. Thanks for listening and
35:27
Speaker 1: for spreading the word and for being uh sisters. Way
35:31
Speaker 1: to go being sisters. Yeah, thanks for writing in Wendy. Yeah, yeah,
35:35
Speaker 1: thanks Wendy, Um and Chuck. This is our last episode
35:39
Speaker 1: of two thousand fourteen, oh man, the longest year. So
35:42
Speaker 1: we want to say happy new year everybody, and I
35:45
Speaker 1: want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife,
35:48
Speaker 1: you me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the
35:54
Speaker 1: rights free version. No, that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh
35:58
Speaker 1: it's a good one, so it's not rights free. Yeah,
36:00
Speaker 1: happy birthday you me. Happy New Year to all of
36:02
Speaker 1: you great people out there in podcast land. Will see
36:05
Speaker 1: you next year for more on this and thousands of
36:12
Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com? Yeah,