Sea monsters (or sea serpents; same thing) have been covered here a fair amount over the years. And thanks to a brand-new book, it’s time to cover them once more…
Among those few truly noteworthy tomes on sea monsters or sea serpents, it remains that Bernard Heuvelmans’s 1968 In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents will forever be the great standard work. Such is its size, scope and impact. Notable others include Rupert Gould’s 1930 The Case for the Sea Serpent, Michael Bright’s 1988 There Are Giants in the Sea and Robert France’s Entangled of 2014. To this short list we can add Adrian Shine’s brand-new (2024) A Natural History of Sea Serpents, for noteworthy it most certainly is, and – I might add – for all the right reasons.
Caption: there aren’t really that many books on sea monsters that warrant repeat consultation, but the majority that exist are included in this photo. The new book that forms the focus of the review you’re reading now is in the middle. Image: Darren Naish.
I will say immediately that Shine’s volume should be prominently displayed at the front of any collection of these books, not tucked away or kept out of view. I say that because A Natural History of Sea Serpents is not just beautifully designed, compellingly argued, and well written, but also because it might be the most important book on the subject so far. I hold that view not just because of the case studies it reviews and reframes, but also because it provides a masterclass in how we should approach the entire subject going forward.
Adrian Shine is widely recognised as the preeminent expert on the Loch Ness monster, and if you’ve ever seen a TV documentary on Loch Ness or read any book on the topic it’s to be assumed that you know full well who Shine is, and certainly what he looks like. Of interest is that his expertise on the subject of Loch Ness has not so much been conveyed via his command of relevant facts and figures (to be sure, he knows them), but more via his skill in working out how we might test the performance of eyewitnesses claiming to see monsters in the loch.
Caption: Adrian Shine in the field. At left, a scene from the Scholarly Research of the Anomalous meeting, held at the Counting House in Edinburgh in February 2015. Loch Ness researcher Dick Raynor is at left, journalist and Forteana expert David Clarke at right. At right, Adrian (with Darren Naish on the left) at the Loch Ness Centre, Drumnadrochit; a photo from September 2016.
‘Doing science’ is as much about knowing how to test hypotheses, in addition to working out which hypotheses we should be testing in the first place, and what we have in Shine’s collected works is a decades-long exposition in how evidence pertaining to the Loch Ness phenomenon might and should be assessed (Shine 1984, 1993, 2006, Shine et al. 1988, 1993a, b, Paxton et al. 2016, 2025).
As ever, we here collide with the eternal issue of whether cryptozoology is, is not, can be, or cannot be a science, and then of whether someone ‘doing science’ is or is not a cryptozoologist. I am not aware of Shine leaning hard either way on that matter, but I am fully in agreement with his contention that investigations of monster sightings should (in general) begin with the assumption that witnesses saw something, it’s ‘just’ that that something was misinterpreted, misunderstood, misremembered or even misdescribed or misdrawn. Sometimes there are cultural reasons behind relevant events – this is one of the primary contentions of my 2017 Hunting Monsters (Naish 2017) – but also of utmost importance is that looking at animals is hard.
An evening at Regent’s Park in 2011. Proof enough that Shine and I are on the same page is that the book begins with his recounting of a 2011 meeting of the Zoological Society of London, titled Cryptozoology: Science or Pseudoscience?, in which one of the three speakers – a Dr Darren Naish – wrapped things up by arguing that “you can ‘do science’ with cryptozoological data, and I hope that we [have] succeeded in showing that at least some people interested in mystery animal reports are trying to look critically and objectively at the data” (Shine 2024, p. 1).
Caption: the ZSL meeting of July 2011 was quite the event and a list of people known for their association with cryptozoology were in attendance, Adrian included. At right, a 2011 version of this blog’s author with Adrian Shine. Images: Darren Naish; John Conway.
That meeting was phenomenally well attended, so much so that the society had to remove a partition wall at the back in order to allow guests to fill up a second room. And it’s good that Shine remembers it in positive terms; I, personally, was not far off from being a bright-eyed naïve literalist at that point, by then entering my post-Heuvelmans phase but still labouring under the assumption that there were real aquatic cryptids to find (Naish 2000, 2001).
Caption: more images from the 2011 ZSL meeting. At left, the ‘welcome to the meeting’ talk being delivered by Henry Gee, whose connection to the subject comes from his prominently publicised comments on the possible late survival of Homo floresiensis. At right, the cover slide for my talk, with me lurking in the darkness at the side. Several write-ups of this meeting exist, the most memorable being a Guardian piece by Carole Jahme. Images: Darren Naish; John Conway.
A Natural History of Sea Serpents describes Shine’s own personal journey through the subject of sea monster investigation, both as he recalls the history of sea monster sightings and gives us a tour of the various discussions and arguments provided by Rupert Gould’s in The Case for the Sea Serpent, a book that Shine was fortunate enough to encounter at a young age (Shine 2024, p. 3).
Across eight chapters (and there’s a prologue and epilogue to boot), Shine discusses multi-humped monsters of the sort associated with New England, multi-finned accounts, those sightings that involve slender appendages, horse-headed and dragon-like accounts of the sort associated with British Columbia, the Daedalus event of 1848, ‘necky’ sightings, the Valhalla creature of 1905, and a potential new explanation for some New England sea monster accounts.
Caption: thanks to images like these, authors – and the public – have tended to think that we have an incredibly firm view of what objects like the Daedalus sea monster of 1848 really looked like. The two shaded illustrations are from the Illustrated London News; the plainer one is from Gould’s The Case for the Sea Serpent. This is a pivotal case (in 2019, Charles Paxton and I argued that it was partly responsible for changing the public’s view of what sea monsters were and are like; Paxton & Naish 2019) and there’s a vast amount to say about it. Shine has an interesting take on it, one that makes me wish that I’d stuck with the hypothesis I endorsed in 2001 (Naish 2001).
The well informed natural historian. In assessing Shine’s interpretations, three generalisations – three valuable take-homes – stand out.
Firstly, consideration of an account requires that the author has a level of experience and knowledge of what known animals look like when observed in the field. On that point, authors have not been sufficiently catholic in their consideration of possible monster identities. This is not a novel argument. I remember being struck (and concerned) during the early 2000s when one of Shine’s colleagues and collaborators – Charles Paxton – made the exact same point: Charles’s argument was that those researchers interested in sea monster sightings have not considered a sufficient number of potential explanations when evaluating accounts. I was “concerned” because my experience at the time was highly deficient. Sure, I ‘know’ and have known for decades what basking sharks, cetaceans, molid sunfishes and so on look like in photos and art, but do I really ‘know’ what they look like in the field? Today, my experience of seeing big animals at sea is extensive, but there’s still a list of animals that I haven’t seen at all, and some of those that I have seen I’ve only seen once or twice, always in a familiar and expected part of their range, and (so far) while they adopt familiar swimming poses and perform typical behaviours.
Caption: a montage of big marine animals I’ve seen within recent years, all around the shores of the UK or in the north-east Atlantic. There are no mystery or unknown species here (even though some of these specific images don’t reveal the key traits that might demonstrate their identity); we’re seeing an assortment of seals, beaked whales and rorquals. Images: Darren Naish.
It's not the case that Shine’s (or Paxton’s) argument posits anything like out-of-the-box thinking, since it’s truer to describe it as… I don’t know, simply ‘well-informed’, involving a more thorough understanding of what big marine animals look like and what they do. This is the very anathema of the “it must have been an oarfish” logic that still looms large (Shine terms this the ‘universal’ approach, since it involves the author naively assuming that a single explanation has universal application across multiple accounts). Part of the reason that this ‘well-informed’ approach is so hard to employ is that our knowledge is still so deficient. That said, a key point Shine makes is that this was certainly more so in the past, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries given the impact of industrial whaling and the nature of maritime travel (Shine 2024, p. 211).
Take the famous Valhalla incident of 1905, in which the ornithologists Michael Nicoll and Edmund Maede-Waldo observed a large, purportedly long-necked animal with a squared-off dorsal fin off the coast of Brazil. I didn’t want to steal Shine’s thunder on this case, but the primacy of his argument is that those previously interpreting the account (this includes myself) have essentially been unable to appreciate key elements that appear to show what the animal most likely was. And, yes, this means that I’m giving up on Cameron McCormick’s otariid suggestion (Naish 2017, p. 50).
Caption: just as with the Daedalus object shown above, artistic depictions of the Valhalla creature are not necessarily especially realistic renditions of whatever was seen. This whole montage is a slide from a talk I used to give.
A point worth making in connection with the ‘well-informed’ approach is that a number of potential explanations exist for various accounts, at least some of which will always remains remain on the table, and none of which – in the absence of time travel – can ever be falsified. I suppose we have to have faith in the idea that self-correction will occur over time; we’ll never really know which proposed identity for a given sighting is the ‘most correct’, but the point is that some have higher explanatory power than others.
Caption: one of many sea monster sightings that might be explainable, Shine proposes, is the HMY Osborne account of June 1877, made off the coast of northern Sicily. As shown in the montage here (from Shine 2024), a row of fins were seen initially, then an immense creature with two “large flappers”. It has been tempting to interpret the latter as a big turtle but – as shown in the montage here – it could well have been a humpback. The fins (which were of irregular height) were most likely of different animals, presumably dolphins. Image: Shine (2024).
We don’t all have the chance to all see the same thing. The second major take-home is that what people have reported – that is, what they think they’ve seen, which you’ll note is not the same as what they have seen – depends very much on the circumstances of observation, and this is something that isn’t static, but has changed over the course of history.
Among the most familiar and vexing of sea monster accounts are those concerning long lines of repeating humps, most famously associated with the coastal seas off New England. Robert France argued that these can be explained as sightings of large animals – big tuna, perhaps – entangled in netting, the ‘humps’ being rows of cork or glass floats (France 2019). Shine’s (2024) interpretation of these observations is also tied to human use of the sea, but this time to the new steamships that were plying the seas at the same time, and creating new kinds of wakes that people simply hadn’t seen before (pp. 32-36). These wakes can persist on the surface for at least 20 minutes, and their individual ‘humps’ look solid and inky black. The case is surprisingly good and emerged from Shine’s experience at Loch Ness (Shine 2024, p. 36).
Caption: it isn’t true that multi-humped aquatic monster sightings only come from places where people used nets lined with multiple rounded floats, since these illustrations all depict observations reported from Loch Ness. This montage is included in Shine (2024) but the individual drawings come originally from Rupert Gould’s 1934 The Loch Ness Monster and Others (I own a 1976 reprint, but am still in quest of a first edition).
On original sources. Finally, the third take-home is one always worth repeating, and it’s one that’s become paramount to me in my time as a researcher on mystery animals: finding and considering the original source is paramount. A great many classic monster accounts are most widely known thanks to retellings in popular books and articles written – it’s important to note – by authors generally doing their best to make the account as sensational as possible.
Shine (2024) doesn’t discuss the U-28 account of July 1915 (in which an immense ‘marine saurian’ was blasted skyward by the explosion of the torpedoed British steamer the Iberian) but it’s one of the best examples of this sort of thing. Thanks to archival research, we can say with confidence today that the event never happened, and that authors like Heuvelmans (1968), who assumed that it did, relied on those aforementioned popular retellings (in this case, Richard Hennig’s 1957 book Les Grandes Enigmes de l’Univers).
Caption: the alleged U-28 event of 1915 is one of the most famous sea monster accounts. It did not happen (if you want the full details, I wrote a TetZoocryptomegathread which you can find here). The reason for the montage here is to emphasize that Heuvelmans (1968) relied on popular retellings – where the animal was depicted as a sort of flippered marine reptile (as shown in the two images at right) – and not on the original discussions of the event. In the first illustration, shown here at left, the animal looked very much as if it was based on a stuffed baby crocodile… which I think it was.
Time and time again, Shine shows via his checking of original sources that the version of a sea monster account we usually regard as canonical is – yikes – quite a bit flawed. One of the biggest problems here is the popularity of sea monster accounts, since journalists cannot, of course, help but commission artists to depict what the witnesses saw. The impact of this precise phenomenon and what it means for our imagining of unusual, rare events has been addressed several times by Fortean researcher and historian Mike Dash; see his 2010 Our Artist Pictures What the Witness Saw. The Daedalus event of 1848, the Pauline sighting of 1877 and many others – yes, even the Valhalla incident – have all been affected by misreporting and misrepresentation.
I like to think that I’m familiar with most of these misreportings, or embellishings, but one in particular was new to me: the classic illustration of the 1893 SS Umfuli observation from the South Atlantic. It shows a long-necked creature with a lumpy back and massive body. But… nope! Shine (2024, pp. 134-135) shows that this depiction is simply not realistic based on what was described in the original report. In fact, it now seems that the creature can be explained by a known species.
Caption: one of the best long-necked, or plesiosaur-like, sea monster illustrations that’s based on an eyewitness account is this take on the SS Umfuli encounter of 1893. But that long, elevated neck with a distinct head at the end is simply not an accurate depiction of what was described at all. As Shine (2024, pp. 134-135) explains, it was actually said to be shaped like a conger eel, and that ‘neck’ was described as a long upper jaw that was seen to open and close.
On that note: as much as I’d like to say more about the specific identities that Shine proposes, I’m going to apply uncharacteristic self-restraint. The book is simply full of nuggets that propose basking sharks, killer whales, beaked whales, grey whales, rorquals, humpbacks, leatherback sea turtles and so on as the true identities behind many of our most cherished sea monster accounts. Time and again, I found myself thinking of Thomas Huxley’s immortal line “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that”.
A Natural History of Sea Serpents is extremely well illustrated and does a great job of depicting the interpretations and specific eyewitness events referred to in the text. We owe special credit to Shine’s collaborator – his wife Maralyn – for the excellent work here. Many of the photos are in colour and the book simply looks great, with a very pleasing picture to text ratio (I am not ashamed to say that I like pictures, and I know I’m not alone). In particular, I really appreciate the images that show – sometimes via superimposition of the animal such that you can see the whole of it through the water – how a proposed identity might explain a given account. Inspired, I’d like to suggest that we should get into the habit of producing illustrations of this sort as standard when proposing identifications.
Caption: this montage illustrates the fact that some long objects depicted in illustrations (note those words) as representing the necks and heads of long-necked animals actually sound – if you read the written version of events – more like whales engaging in breaching or head-slapping. The case illustrated here was reported by people aboard the City of Baltimore when in the Gulf of Aden (between Yemen and Somalia) in 1879. The digitally composited humpback and minke photos at bottom show what the observations in question might actually have involved.
Shine writes well, and the book is immaculately edited. The index is thorough. On mistakes, the putting of ‘family-level’ taxonomic names in italics is a no-no that should have been caught, and a printing error affects the look of the text on one page (p. 184) of my copy.
Concluding thoughts. If it’s not already abundantly clear, I really like this book. A few years ago, cryptozoologist and author Karl Shuker noted that we’re in a golden age of cryptozoological books. I’m still wavering on that view. Sure, there are a lot of books out there on the subject now, but a great many are poor and shoddy and don’t contribute anything of value. What at least some monster advocates and promoters dislike is that the books that do have value are the sceptical ones. This perception of ‘value’ isn’t an idiosyncratic preference (I may be what many term ‘a sceptic’, but in fact I dislike knee-jerk or faux scepticism); instead, that ‘value’ more reflects the fact that the sceptical works involve the deep investigation and analysis that proper research should.
Shine’s new book has this in spades. This is a brilliant discussion of classic cases, many of which now have a revised interpretation, and it essentially covers the entire gamut of sea monster diversity. I should add that Shine (2024) appropriately cites and discusses the work of his predecessors and contemporaries in extremely fair fashion – a rare thing in the cryptozoological literature – and he also knows who and what should be ignored for reasons of bias or sophistry (his text on pp. 211-212 makes veiled reference to a specific pro-monster author I ignore where possible). Given the pre-eminence of Shine’s expertise as a well-informed natural historian, as discussed above, A Natural History of Sea Serpents has – unusually for a cryptozoology-themed book – proper relevance to people interested in known marine species, among them big sharks, cetaceans familiar or otherwise, and sea turtles. It should be read by people interested in marine wildlife in general, not just by the niche cryptozoological crowd.
Caption: A Natural History of Sea Serpents has an excellent picture to text ratio, and these pages are a good demonstration of that. Very interesting photos, reproduced in colour and in good resolution.
I will be coming back to this book again and again, am destined to cite it in probably every article I publish on sea monsters for the remainder of my tenure, and I congratulate the author, his illustrator (Maralyn Shine), and the publishers in a job so well done.
Shine, A. 2024. A Natural History of Sea Serpents. Whittles Publishing, Caithness. ISBN 978-1-84995-588-1, softback, illustrated, index, pp. 233. Here from the publisher. £18.99.
For previous Tet Zoo articles on sea monsters and related topics, see…
Books on the Loch Ness Monster 1: Ronald Binns’s The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded, March 2019
Books on the Loch Ness Monster 2: Gareth Williams’s A Monstrous Commotion, March 2019
Usborne’s All About Monsters, April 2019
Sea Monster Sightings and the ‘Plesiosaur Effect’, April 2019
Books on the Loch Ness Monster 3: The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness, August 2019
A Review of Robert L. France’s Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent, November 2019
The 1972 Loch Ness Monster Flipper Photos, August 2020
Monsters of the Deep, a Ground-Breaking Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall, October 2020
The Lake Dakataua ‘Migo’ Lake Monster Footage of 1994, February 2021
What Was the Montauk Monster? A Look Back to 2008, October 2021
Santa Cruz’s Duck-Billed Elephant Monster, Definitively Identified, November 2021
Nessie Point and Counterpoint; Who Owns the ‘Facts’ on the Loch Ness Monster?, November 2024
A Cryptozoologist’s Bibliography: Matt Bille’s Of Books and Beasts, February 2024
Refs - -
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Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters. Arcturus, London.
Paxton, C. G. M. & Naish, D. 2019. Did nineteenth century marine vertebrate fossil discoveries influence sea serpent reports? Earth Sciences History 38, 16-27.
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