Darren Naish Profile picture
Apr 8, 2021 9 tweets 3 min read Read on X
By now about a million of you have shared the 'a surprising number of sea serpents were whale penises' thing. It's good, it's all good, but I have some comments... (brief thread)..
Firstly, the hypothesis (which was published by the excellent Charles Paxton @CharlesPaxton4 and colleagues in 2005) was suggested to explain one specific sea monster account (Hans Egede's 1734 sighting off Greenland)... (cont)
... with one additional encounter - the Pauline sighting of 1875, made off the coast of Brazil - also suggested as a whale wang sighting...
And that's just about it. Paxton et al. in fact specifically noted that they weren't trying to, ahem, expand their penis hypothesis to apply to all or in fact many sea serpent sightings...
In fact, the Pauline case is controversial: Robert France has more recently argued that no penises were involved; it was instead, he says, a case where a whale was entangled in discarded rope (France has interpreted about all sea serpent sightings as cases of entanglement)..
The 'sea serpents were mostly penises' stuff has also mentioned in passing the whole 'the kraken was a giant squid' thing... which is complicated. Bottom line, the kraken was NOT based on Architeuthis, though the two did become conflated during the 1800s... cont
Ironically, Charles Paxton is the one who's mostly responsible for pointing this out (in an article called 'Why giant squid are red herrings'). I summarised his argument in my book Hunting Monsters...
Finally, confusing some readers is the fact that the 'it was penises all along' stuff was accompanied by the Surgeon's Photo, aka Wilson photo... a hoaxed image from 1934 purported to show #Nessie, and thus with no link to sea serpents or whale penises! cont...
Now, don't get me wrong, please: I'm not complaining about the Paxton et al. whale penis hypothesis, nor am I at all unhappy with the new sharing of the idea or the way it's been enthusiastically promoted. I'm just clearing up some minor details; this has been a PSA.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Darren Naish

Darren Naish Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TetZoo

Mar 30
Yes, it's time another #TetZoocryptomegathread. In previous megathreads, I've covered several #LochNessMonster photos, including Hugh Gray's from 1933, Peter O'Connor's of 1960, and the Shiels 'muppet' of 1977. Time for another one!

Image
Image
Image
Yes, you've heard of the #LochNessMonster, but maybe you don't know that a key piece of evidence long used to support its reality was a grainy bit of cine film, taken in 1960 by an aeronautical engineer from Reading in southern England…

Image
Image
Image
This thread might be the longest and most complex so far, so hold tight. As ever, remember that I cover both sceptical and 'pro-monster' takes on the case concerned. The case I'm referring to concerns Tim Dinsdale's Foyers Bay footage of April 1960... Image
Read 182 tweets
Oct 4, 2023
For something like four decades, Dr Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina has been arguing that everyone is wrong about #dinosaurs. His newest book is Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. Here's a quick thread on its contents... 1/n
Image
Image
The book - RTBAD from hereon - is not an instruction manual for palaeozoophiles (art by @Book_Rat), nor does it include homage or reference to the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone. Rather, it’s composed of 23 essays on the state of dinosaur science as Feduccia sees it today... 2/n
Image
Image
@Book_Rat Early parts of RTBAD express Feduccia's disapproval of the power-hungry, juvenile popularists of our age. Some "have Twitter accounts with large followers [sic], dealing with everything from paleontological discoveries to sports and politics!" I'm among this awful lot ... 3/n Image
Read 12 tweets
Jun 14, 2023
Welcome to a somewhat overdue (mega)thread devoted to the @AppleTV / @bbcstudios series #PrehistoricPlanet season 2 (#prehistoricplanet2 if you will), streaming NOW, and specifically to the first episode: ISLANDS... Image
Islands is one of my favourite episodes of #PrehistoricPlanet2. We knew early on that we’d cover stories relevant to the Late Cretaceous island faunas of Romania and Madagascar (since both places have revealed numerous amazing Late Cretaceous island-dwelling animals), but…
... what else could we show? The producer for this episode – Paul Stewart – worked really hard to find appropriate stories, and succeeded in focusing on amazing animals doing interesting things…
Read 120 tweets
Mar 13, 2023
If you're interested in science you're familiar with Piltdown man, formally named Eoanthropus dawsoni in 1912 but shown to be hoaxed in 1953. What you may not be familiar with is the DUALIST CONTENTION, and here's a thread on it... ImageImage
Yes, the one thing that every single person who’s heard of Piltdown man knows is that it was eventually determined to be a hoax. What’s discussed less frequently is that early 20th century views on Piltdown man were -far more complex- than popularly portrayed...
Acceptance of Eoanthropus as a valid proto-human (as per the Margaret Flinsch illustration here) might have been the 'mainstream' view that made it into textbooks and encyclopedias, but it certainly wasn’t the only one, nor was this acceptance wholesale or uncontroversial... Image
Read 13 tweets
Mar 12, 2023
For no reason, a thread of things I have saved on my phone. 1. TREES
2. PREHISTORIC PLANET FANART
3. CATS
Read 10 tweets
Oct 8, 2022
In 1967, the #DSRV #Alvin was attached by a #swordfish at a depth of c 600m. The swordfish charged the vessel at speed and got virtually the whole of its rostrum embedded in Alvin's hull. The fish survived ascent to the surface but was killed and eaten. Cont...
#Swordfish (and other billfishes) have often rammed large objects at speed - their broken rostra have been recovered from ship hulls, turtle shells and baleen whale heads. In 2016, one rammed a diver doing maintenance on a Brazilian oil platform and impaled his air tank...
A 2021 study by Patrick Jambura et al. described a case in which a dead Bigeye thresher shark was discovered with a partial #swordfish rostrum embedded in its gill region. You can read that study here... link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(