Its head resembled a dog\u2019s, its downturned nose a camel\u2019s, and at the end of its reptilian body was the tail of horse. Witnesses say it was covered in a thin white film. When the remains of a strange creature were pulled from the stomach of a sperm whale, most of those present agreed: it was a sea monster \u2013 or at least something unknown living in the depths off Canada\u2019s west coast.<\/p>\n
Crews at the whaling station in the archipelago of Haida Gwaii assembled a platform of wooden boxes and laid out the 3-metre (10ft) carcass, using a white sheet to display the curiosity that had baffled veteran whalers.<\/p>\n
A photo of the creature, called the \u201cCadborosaurus\u201d<\/a>, by locals, appeared on the front page of a local newspaper on 31 October 1937, adding to the growing lore that a marine cryptid \u2013 a creature unknown to science \u2013 and at times supposedly measuring three times as long, stalked the waters.<\/p>\n Samples of the mysterious discovery have long disappeared and all that remains are a handful of black and white images.<\/p>\n John Kirk, president of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club<\/a>, is adamant the carcass was of an unknown species<\/a> hiding at the edge of human understanding in the emerald depths of the Salish Sea. He cites first-hand accounts of the discovery, including an interview with a flenser who helped remove the carcass.<\/p>\n \u201cThe scientific world, of which we are a part, is always looking for excuses not to allow new animals into the catalogue. And quite frankly, I find that notion absolutely cockamamie,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The \u2018Cadborosaurus\u2019 was laid out on a white sheet by whalers and photographed for the local newspaper. Photograph: John Kirk\/BCSCC\/Alamy<\/p>\n One of the few pieces of the carcass sent for identification was shipped to a museum in Victoria, 400 nautical miles (740km) south-east of Haida Gwaii. It was disposed of after the museum\u2019s director \u2013 not a trained zoologist \u2013 suggested it was from a foetal baleen whale.<\/p>\n \u201cWe lost a massive discovery here because of misidentification,\u201d Kirk says. \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s a horror story of how flippant scientists can sometimes be in regard to these kinds of things.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markWith a long spinal cord and a small head at the end, it looks like a mythological sea serpentBen Speers-Roesch, University of New Brunswick<\/p>\n But almost 90 years later, many scientists say the images simply show a decomposing basking shark \u2013 a giant and ancient fish that once thrived off Vancouver Island before being slaughtered to virtual local extinction. Today, the basking shark shares the cryptid\u2019s fate: often misidentified and rarely, if ever, seen by veterans of the ocean.<\/p>\n Because sharks have no bones, the change from living creature to carcass is a profound transformation. When basking sharks decay, their massive gill-basket \u2013 the structure that most defines the lumbering fish \u2013 collapses. What remains is a long neck-like structure and a small head. The breaking down of muscle fibres and cartilage can give fins a furry, feather-like appearance.<\/p>\n \u201cWith a long spinal cord and a small head at the end, it looks like a mythological sea serpent,\u201d says Ben Speers-Roesch, a professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick. \u201cUnless you know what you are looking at or have familiarity with it, it\u2019s not intuitive what this creature might have been.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1977, the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiy\u014d Maru pulled a creature from the depths off the coast of New Zealand that resembled a long-lost dinosaur. The discovery prompted a flurry of excitement from scientists who claimed it was an unknown species, until an analysis of amino acids in the muscle tissue suggested it was a basking shark.<\/p>\n The Zuiy\u014d Maru carcass, pulled from the sea off New Zealand in 1977, was thought to be an unknown species but tissue analysis revealed it to be a basking shark. Photograph: Zuiyo-maru<\/p>\n Speers-Roesch says this is called the \u201cpseudo-plesiosaur carcass\u201d phenomenon, when decomposed basking sharks appear to have a long neck, small head, and large paddles \u2013 all hallmarks of a prehistoric plesiosaur.<\/p>\n He concedes that the 1937 photo from Canada diverges from typical carcasses because of how it was displayed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mystery has persisted because it has elements that are not as easily identifiable as a basking shark. It does look a little bit different in a couple of ways,\u201d he says, adding that on rare occasions, young basking sharks have been found in the stomach of sperm whales. \u201cBut so much of the carcass captures what we know about basking sharks and how they decompose. Even if you\u2019re well educated, you can really make poor interpretations of what you are observing.\u201d<\/p>\n With no surviving samples and only a handful of photographs, the question of what the mysterious creature was can never be resolved definitively. But the real story, say scientists, is not so much the mystery of a species that might exist, but the tragic end of one that did. Now, amid a push to protect<\/a> the waters of the Pacific and the vulnerable species that remain, a rare sighting of a basking shark in 2024 has renewed interest in the species and in the long-forgotten campaign that wiped them from the coastal waters.<\/p>\n Cast of a basking shark: a rare sighting of one of the creatures in British Columbia waters in 2024 has renewed interest in the species. Photograph: Chronicle\/Alamy<\/p>\n In 1955, the federal government devised a plan to kill off the sharks. Its strategy relied on a large blade fixed to the bow of a patrol ship, called a \u201crazor-billed shark slasher\u201d by local media.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause basking sharks fed at the surface, crews could lower the blade and run them over,\u201d says Scott Wallace, a former fisheries scientist who wrote the 2007 federal government report that determined the basking shark was endangered and largely extinct in British Columbia waters. \u201cThey simply cut them in half.\u201d<\/p>\n The sharks\u2019 only crime was to have inadvertently wandered into nets laid by anglers to catch salmon.<\/p>\n \u201cAnything that interacted with salmon or the salmon fishery was killed off as a way of thinking that they could again manage the ocean,\u201d says Wallace, who co-authored the book Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC\u2019s Gentle Giants. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t long before basking sharks were added to the official \u2018nuisance list\u2019 and they became a target.\u201d<\/p>\n A ship developed to kill basking sharks, called a \u2018razor-billed shark slasher\u2019 by local media, was featured in Popular Mechanics magazine. Photograph: Popular Mechanics<\/p>\n At the same time, officials were shooting seals and sea lions around fishing grounds and river mouths. In the early 1960s, Canada\u2019s fisheries ministry installed a .50-calibre machine gun on an island, a weapon typically used against armoured vehicles and low-flying aircraft. Its sole purpose was to kill orcas. The high-powered gun was never used, but the message was clear: the ocean\u2019s giants were something to be destroyed, not respected.<\/p>\n The government estimates it killed at least 413 basking sharks with the boats over the next 14 years. At the same time, as many as 1,500 sharks may have been killed by entanglement. There was also a brief attempt to create a commercial fishery for their liver oil, but experts say it is unclear how many sharks were slaughtered from that effort. All told, as many as 2,600<\/a> \u2013 more than 90% of the population \u2013 was eradicated.<\/p>\n Now, federal law makes it illegal to kill, harm or capture a basking shark if it is found off the coast of British Columbia. The government has an official recovery strategy and action plan, and the sharks are protected by the strongest wildlife protections in Canadian law. But Canada\u2019s fisheries department also concedes it could take 200 years<\/a> for the sharks to recover to a healthy population.<\/p>\n An illustration of the plesiosaurus, a large marine reptile that lived during the early Jurassic period, from 1908. Photograph: Florilegius\/Universal Images Group\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cThere are periods of time \u2013 often decades \u2013 that they [basking sharks] just disappear,\u201d says Wallace. \u201cAnd then all of a sudden, they return. Maybe it\u2019s the ocean conditions \u2013 we really don\u2019t know. But there is a chance, and it\u2019s slim, that they\u2019re still in the area, out of human view.\u201d<\/p>\n While the tragic story of the demise of the basking shark is indisputable, the \u201cpseudo-plesiosaur carcass\u201d phenomenon is not enough to sway some that the mysterious creature in the 1930s photograph is something that is identifiable.<\/p>\n \u201cThe carcass is most certainly not a basking shark,\u201d says Kirk. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not a reptile. Whatever it is, it must be a mammal because it possesses hair and it doesn\u2019t resemble any of the orders of marine mammals today in those waters.\u201d<\/p>\n A basking shark feeding at the surface on plankton off the Isle of Coll, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. Photograph: Nature Picture Library\/Alamy<\/p>\n For Kirk and cryptozoologists, the prospect of something eluding scientific acceptance is a powerful draw and underscores their relentless hunt.<\/p>\n In 2010, while walking his dog, Kirk says he encountered an unknown creature in the waters where British Columbia\u2019s Fraser River empties into the Salish Sea. Its head was \u201cpointed\u201d and the neck extended from the water \u201clike a stovepipe\u201d with a hump curled behind. The encounter was a \u201cbreathtaking experience\u201d and left him stunned.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I will tell you: in my nearly four decades living in the region, one thing I\u2019ve never seen is a basking shark,\u201d he says. \u201cNot sure if I ever will.\u201d<\/p>\n Speers-Roesch understands the urge to look at a century-old photograph and believe something unexplored still lurks in the ocean. But the nexus of human senses and the natural world is a space rife with error. Under the right conditions, a carcass can look nothing like the living animal. When a dead racoon washed up on a shore on Long Island, in New York state, word spread quickly<\/a> that the bloated, hairless carcass was an unknown creature, called the \u201cMontauk monster\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cHumans will always be curious about the unknown,\u201d says Speers-Roesch. \u201cThere are still profound mysteries and species in the ocean that we know very, very little about, and probably even species of relatively large animals that are yet to be discovered or described. But when you actually look at the creatures that are known to exist in the ocean, it\u2019s even more spectacular and powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Its head resembled a dog\u2019s, its downturned nose a camel\u2019s, and at the end of its reptilian body…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-655545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}