Halloween special: Nessie & the kraken

Hi, Vicky. Hi, Shane. Do you want to play a game? Are you a fan of Saw? Did you ever see the movie Saw? Did you ever see the movie Saw? Yeah. No, I've seen like the previews for it. I know what you're referring to. So, okay. Oh, no. Okay. Do you want to play a game? Is that what it is? Yes, that's it. This isn't about Saw, but today I do have a little... Immediately off track. No, no. We're going back. Okay. I have a quiz for you. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm excited. Sure. Okay. I'm weirdly excited. Yeah. And this is going to be Halloween themed since this is coming out on Halloween. Okay. My first question for you is what two creatures make up a griffin? Can you picture a griffin? Yes, I can picture. I think I could picture a griffin. What do you think? Something with wings and something with claws. A lion and an eagle. I don't know. Something with wings. Yes. No, really? Yeah. Look at you, Vicky. Oh, good. Okay. You are. You're just... All right. We're one for one. I'm clapping for myself. Okay. So, I have a multiple choice question for you now. Okay. So, which of these is not a nickname for mermaids? Is it a siren, a nyad, a kelpie, or a syrenia? Okay. It's B or D. Nyad or syrenia. Nyad. Yeah. Okay. Nyad. So, wrong. Wrong on both accounts. It's actually a... What do you mean? It's a kelpie. Yeah. Oh, kelpie? That sounded so correct. I know. I made that up. Oh, good job. So, let me put it this way, actually. A kelpie is a thing, but it's a shape-shifting organism that does often take the shape of a mermaid, but it doesn't have to be a mermaid. Mythology is fun. I don't know. All right. Moving on. I don't know. I'd like to go to the separate producers on that one. Moving on. Moving on. Okay. So, one more quick one for you. Okay. Okay. So, I'm going to give you the different names of Bigfoot, and you should guess what region of the world that they originated from. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah. So, start with Sasquatch. Where do you think the word Sasquatch came from, or what part of the world? Appalachia. No, that's not... I don't know. I just feel like that's where Bigfoot lives. Yeah. I mean... Sasquatch. Sasquatch. No. No, no, no, no. Oh, like North America, I think, for sure. I feel like... I think, for sure. I really put my foot down on that. Like Alaska, Canada. That way. Canada. There you go. All right. Why did I decide it's from North Carolina? Okay. Yeah. And this is a really great audio medium to just watch you think, but then we just have seconds of dead air, which is really fun. Oh, sorry. Should I make thinking sounds? I came up... No. I came up with a quiz, so this is on me. All right. What about Yeti? Oh, I wish... Okay. I wish you had given me all the names at once, and then let me circle back to them individually, because I feel like I'm going to use up my choices. Yeti. I feel like is a Nepal name. It is Nepal. Look at you. All right. I'm doing fist pumps. I'm fist pumping for myself. What about a Yowie? Oh, I've never heard that before in my life. Yowie. I'll say Florida. Oh, actually, no. The answer is not that. Yowie. I don't know that you'll guess it. It's from Australia. Australia. Oh, that sounds so correct. I had to Google that one. Last one for you, though. Okay. A skunk ape. A skunk ape. You've actually already said it. That's North Carolina? That's Florida. That's Florida. Of course it's Florida. A skunk ape. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, there's actually a skunk ape museum down in Everglades area. I did not go to, but I passed it. It's pretty fantastic. That's worth. You got to go back. Next time I'm there. Just as a reminder for folks why we're doing this, this is the second of a couple episodes we've brought back about monsters and legend and their connection to science. Also bringing back the voice of my former co-host, our former colleague, Nancy. So you'll hear this episode will be myself and Nancy and some hopefully spooky but also really engaging stories about myths and legends and monsters. Very cool. Science is fascinating, but don't just take my word for it. Join us as we hear stories from scientists for everyone. I'm Shane Hanlon. And I'm Nancy Boppe. And I'm Vicki Thompson. And this is Third Pod from the Sun. So like I said up top, this is the second episode in a two-part series where we're looking at mythical creatures, the animals that inspired them. And this one, and this is just, this is just coincidence, but we're talking about two sea creatures. And so we're going to start with the kraken. What's a kraken? I know. I mean, actually, I heard it was like, bring on the kraken. Isn't that from a movie? Yeah. Well, there was. So the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had that in it. It's a mythical sea creature that we're going to learn more about. And so we'll bring in our first interviewee to talk about it. So my name is Rodrigo Salvador and I'm a curator of invertebrates at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. And I actually specialize in snails, land snails mostly. And as a curator, my job is to conduct research on mollusks and to look after, take care and expand our collection of mollusks and also do outreach activities in the museum. Okay. That still does not explain what a kraken is. Oh, we're getting there. All right. Just, just wait. Let's start in the beginning. So as for my interest, it kind of started very early. I mean, the first memory of like receiving a book as a gift was a, was a book about Greek mythology that I got from my sister. And I kind of immediately got into it. And ever since then, it's just been a sort of expansion of it. So I've always liked to read about these monsters, the stories about the gods, et cetera. And this was independent of your kind of scientific interest. You just have this interest in Greek mythology. Completely independent. Okay. Because when I was a child, of course, I was interested in dinosaurs. Sure. It's all child, all children are. But then that kind of faded away a little bit. I got into a computer, I got into engineering in university, actually. And then I dropped out and changed to biology. So I kind of lost the, I don't know, kind of lost the interest in all the dinosaurs and the living world at some point, but then got back in it. And I mean, in between there was Dungeons and Dragons, of course. And I suppose that after I, I started biology, one thing just led to another in a natural way. Kind of the initial interest then was in Greek mythology. Yeah. I suppose that's, that has to do with Dungeons and Dragons. I'm always suggested Dungeon Master. So I have to prepare adventures, make up, like come up with monsters, et cetera. So I already had the interest in mythology. So I was kind of looking into several monsters that kind of started off as a sort of a common animal and just the legend just built up. And the Kraken was just one of them. But then there came one day that I, that I thought, well, I could actually write an article about this Kraken. I'm already like studying malacology. So it just felt natural. And so I started to investigate it, the story behind it, all the reports that we have in the literature about sightings of these monsters, et cetera. And that goes back to the 12th century in Norway. So that's the first like actual report of a Kraken, if you believe it. And the thing is back then there were several like sea monsters around and there is this very old manuscript written by a King of Norway in the 12th century. And he lists all sorts of sea monsters. A Kraken is just one of them. But I think what happened in time as the centuries just passed, all these monsters, some of them, they kind of were not strong enough, I suppose, in the folklore, in the people's minds, et cetera. And they just kind of faded away. And the Kraken was just a strong enough monster to survive in people's memory, I suppose. There's mention of Kraken going back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, right? The connection you're making, and I want to ask, is this a connection unique to you or there are other folks out there who have like looked at Kraken and thought, okay, it's probably, these people are probably seeing a giant squid. So yeah, in the very first reports, we don't have actually much information besides the fact that the Kraken was gigantic. So at first, it had a sort of amorphous quality to it. Some people said it was like a mountain or an island. So you can also imagine the proportions of the monster. But then it kind of started to evolve along the centuries. So we have representations of the Kraken as like a giant humanoid, like a giant lobster, and a giant cephalopod too, of course. But the thing is, by the time you reach the 18th century, the Kraken already had a sort of established cephalopod look. And it was such a strong image in the minds of the Nordic countries that Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, the modern biological classification, actually included the Kraken as a cephalopod in his book. You know, the original book, Sistema Natura, that kind of defined and started the biological, the system of biological classification, it had the Kraken listed as a real animal under cephalopod. I found it really interesting that the Kraken was listed as a species in and of itself. But it turns out there's a lot of murkiness in the, is it a squid or is it a Kraken realm? So I asked Rodrigo for some clarity. When was the first description of a giant squid as something separate and apart from this, like as itself? When did that first description happen? That was in Greece, actually. So it's Aristotle, I think, fourth century. And that's funny because back then they knew that there were squids, normal squids, and there was a giant version of squids. It was a different animal. And they actually just treated it as an animal, not a monster. And they had plenty of monsters. So you were left wondering why there's one that's not a monster. But anyway, they treated it as a real animal. Was there Kraken? And then as people found out that there's also this thing out there that potentially could be the Kraken, did they come together kind of separately? Because I think in my mind, it was giant squid. And it turns out the thing that people thought was a Kraken was actually always just a giant squid. But from the way you describe it, it's that the Kraken wasn't always a squid. It was this thing in the sea that was destroying stuff. So it's very possible that the animal that started the whole thing was actually a giant squid. We can never be like 100% sure about it. But there are good indications of it. So if you go back to other reports of the Kraken along the centuries, you will find something like there's a bishop, Pontoppidan, in Norway. And he wrote extensively about the Kraken. And that was the first moment when it was clearly a cephalopod. I mean, despite the huge colossal size he assigns to the monster, there are some things like the fact that it could make the waters around it dark. So that's kind of a cephalopod thing, you know, expelling ink to warn off predators, etc. So I think those were the very first signs that it was related to a cephalopod. Of course, anything that back then in the 12th century, even before that, anything that people would see while they were crossing from Norway to Iceland, anything that they would see floating around and it was kind of big, people would get scared of it, you know? I know with Kraken, there are these kind of these myths and stories of Kraken taking down ships and causing all of this damage. So assuming that giant squids are actually Krakens, is there evidence that giant squids have ever done anything like this? Have they ever taken down a ship or anything like that? Is there any validity to the myths that were told in the past? No, definitely not. So I suppose that seeing one of those like on the surface of the water might scare you quite a lot, especially if you were traveling around in a flimsy wooden boat back then. But the reality is that when squids are floating underwater like that, especially the giant squid which lives deep underwater, so they usually reach the surface when they have already spawned their eggs and are dying. So they would not be able in any sense to attack a ship or anything. But the thing is they might still, well they still have their defense mechanisms, so that includes of course releasing ink underwater and they can also spout water through a structure called a funnel, that's how they move with jet propulsion. But if they do that in the surface and people see like just a jet of water, so that that might scare someone. Sure. And it's very likely that when they got back home they wanted to tell the story and these stories just kind of increased a little bit, like every time they were told. And then that's how you end up with a monster. Yeah, I can imagine over the years they become more and more exaggerated as the stories get passed on. Yeah, just add one other detail. And of course if you are telling a good story about monster, it needs to be big, it needs to be able to sink a ship and eat its entire crew, this sort of thing. So Nancy, now do you know what a kraken is? Yes, I do. Do you enjoy learning in our podcast interviews? Always. Well, we wanted to, or didn't want to, but we happened to end up sticking with this theme of aquatic monsters. And we talked to someone else who has some expertise on these linkages between real-life animals and the mythical monsters. So my name is Danielle Serratos. I'm the Director Curator at the Fundy Geological Museum, which is located in Parsborough, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy, which is worldwide famous for having the highest tides in the world. I specialize in researching Mesozoic marine reptiles, which would include plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs. Mosasaurs have been fairly popular in media for the past couple of years due to Jurassic World and the quite voracious mosasaur that's in the water pen in that movie. But more recently I've been working on Canada's oldest dinosaurs, the prosauropods, and the earliest reptiles, as well as the reptiles that were living alongside those Canada's earliest dinosaurs. So moving more into the land environments. I think it'd be helpful to place folks in time. So when was the Mesozoic, when was the period where these animals that we're going to be talking about lived? So I'm actually going to go on a bit of a tangent here because providing a quick overview of Mesozoic marine reptiles is not like really all that quick. Fair enough. So the Mesozoic was the geological era from 252 to 66 million years ago and includes the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. So that's the Mesozoic part. The marine reptiles is a bit more complicated. So they're reptiles the same way that dinosaurs were, but there are some pretty significant differences between marine reptiles and dinosaurs. The biggest one is marine reptiles, there's a lot of fossil evidence that they gave birth to live young. So instead of laying eggs the way that dinosaurs did. A notable exception would be turtles, which just goes to show that classifying animals can be a really tricky problem. Marine reptiles, they also lived in the ocean, or at least in brackish waters like an estuarine system. The only aquatic dinosaur that we currently know of is the Spinosaurus and it seems to have stuck to freshwater. So that designation of mostly being on land versus mostly being in the ocean is a pretty clear delineation. And then lastly, marine reptiles had fins or flippers, whereas dinosaurs had and have toes with claws. So it's important to keep in mind that these evolutionary relationships are incredibly complicated. And general statements in science should always come with a caveat. For example, dinosaurs evolved from some reptiles, the same way birds evolved from some dinosaurs. But that doesn't mean that birds are actually reptiles. They just share many characteristics due to sharing ancestors. Nancy? Yes? Do you know your geologic epochs, your time scales? Mesozoic, Jurassic, Cenozoic. I have no idea, I'm just saying words. This is why we had Danielle. What about your different aquatic reptiles, right? Like Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs, Icthosaurs? Devasaurs, Myrosaurs. Well, we got a quick background on kind of the eras. Now I really wanted to ask Danielle to dive into Plesiosaurs in particular and their influence on kind of these myths that we're going to be talking about. Plesiosaurs were around mostly from the end of the Jurassic through the end of the Cretaceous or the mass extinction event that wiped out almost all the dinosaurs and all the marine reptiles that we were talking about as far as Plesiosaurs, Icthosaurs, and Mosasaurs go. So when we talk about marine reptiles, especially during the Mesozoic era, so during the age of dinosaurs, we're talking about four major groups, Plesiosaurs being my area of interest, but there's also Mosasaurs, which people would associate with the Jurassic world movies. I was going to ask about that. And then Icthosaurs, which are very, very popular in England because the first Icthosaurs skeleton was found on the Jurassic coast in Dorset. And turtles. So of course, turtles are still around today, but they look vastly different than they did during the age of dinosaurs. In fact, Archelon, which was a turtle that is hundreds of millions years old at this point, was roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. So she's interested in these prehistoric reptiles, but how does that lead to her interest in Loch Ness Monster? I have been a science communicator for the majority of my career in paleontology, and inevitably when you work with Plesiosaurs, you have to learn about the Loch Ness Monster. It's just something that comes with the territory. So the Loch Ness Monster is a story that most likely dates back about 1500 years ago to the Pictish Standing Stones in the Scottish Highlands. So nowadays, these Pictish Standing Stones are more frequently associated with the term Water Horse or Kelpie. But these depictions have fins and flippers, which really encourages that connection to prehistoric Plesiosaurs and other Mesozoic marine reptiles to some extent as well. Like you alluded, the Icthosaurs, while they look different, a lot of these mythological creatures have a weird accumulation of different types of body parts. So it's totally fair game to say that Icthosaurs would be a part of this inspiration as well. Well, Icthosaurs, skeletons and fossils would be. There was like a lot of chimeras, right? Essentially just pulling different body parts from different organisms to make the thing of your choosing almost. Absolutely. And that totally makes sense when you think about it from a paleontological perspective, because so often the fossils that we find are not articulated, which just means that we find individual bones kind of scattered about and moved in different areas relative to how they would have been connected when the animal was still alive. So going back to the Loch Ness Monster, there's this story of a missionary who, in the year 565, claims to have come upon a swimmer being attacked by a monster in the lake, in the Loch, which was recorded in his biography. And then the history of digging up fossils predates the written word, but there were significant advances in what would become the field of paleontology in the early 1800s when Mary Anning, who we talked about before, when Mary Anning discovered the first Icthosaurs and the first complete Plesiosaur at the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it's so incredibly important for the fossils that we find there. So 110 years later from her discovery of that Plesiosaurus, a local couple made newspaper headlines claiming to have seen an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the loch surface. A year later, so this would have been the early 30s, 1930s, a physician published a picture of the long-necked monster, but a deathbed confession from a stepbrother 60 years later revealed that the photo had been an elaborate hoax that they had made with wood and a toy submarine. Oh wow. Yeah. That's dedication. It is. And it's funny how that part of the story is not commonly known. A lot of people know about the surgeon's photograph, but very few people know that there was an official retraction of that photograph. That's how retractions work, unfortunately. True. Yeah. So while we're drawn to this idea of these dark monsters, especially in the ocean, I think it really draws from this idea that humans love a good mystery, right? They really love the idea of this is phenomenal or extraordinary, and let's tell this story and not worry about the pesky facts that redact it later. So I guess, when were the first connections? So people talk about stories for, what you said, like 1500 years almost. When did the connections first start happening between these stories and these supposed first-hand accounts to, oh, but it could actually be this, or it could be backed up by the fossil record, or whatever it might be? When did that start happening? The first well-documented evidence that people were tying fossils and the rock record to these mythological stories like the Loch Ness Monster probably weren't appearing until the early 1900s. Fossils were really being bought and sold for museums and private collectors in the late 1800s, but it was mostly a hobby for people, especially in the UK at that time. Yes, there was scientific research going on, but it was a beginning field at that time, and it was very insular. It was very classist. It was very sexist. So there were very few people that had access to that information, even though they were being put in museums. The fossils weren't necessarily being put together accurately. There was a lot of confusion and building from the ground up in that field at that time. So I would say fairly confidently that those sorts of, I guess, interactions or relations between mythological creatures and actual fossils, full fossil skeletons at least, being compared wasn't happening until the early 1900s. When talking to Danielle, I found it interesting that the Loch Ness Monster, let's say, truthers, they like to use fossil evidence to say that, yes, the monster existed and may still exist, and that was the case dating back hundreds of years, using these fossils to support their claims. I wanted to know, though, kind of the opposite. I was wondering when folks started looking at the fossil record and using current technology to say, yes, something like this may have existed in our history, but most certainly does not now. I think when you talk about using scientific evidence of fossils, specifically with plesiosaurs, to sort of debunk this idea of the Loch Ness Monster, that idea had been around probably as long as the Surgeon's Photograph had been a thing. However, the evidence has really accumulated strongly and been strongly presented in the last probably 30 to 40 years. There's this desire for this compelling horror story that there's this lake monster that's going to come out and attack innocent bystanders, right? But extensive LIDAR sweeps across the Loch Ness and the surrounding area have pretty definitively verified that nothing near the size of a plesiosaur is living in that lake, and nothing really on that size scale would even be possible to survive in Loch Ness at this point, just because we have a really good understanding of what size these animals would have been on a global distribution, not just in the UK. And these were large marine reptiles. I mean, we're talking anywhere between 3 and 11 meters long. They were sizable creatures. And the fossil evidence shows us that they all lived in saltwater to brackish water, and of course the Loch Ness is freshwater. So that's another indicator that there's no scientific evidence to really support this idea that they'd still be living in a freshwater environment. Now, to top it all off, there's also this idea that we really understand ecological niches and food webs and these big picture ideas about how animal communities live nowadays. And yes, that's comparing them to modern species, but we have enough fossil evidence to talk confidently about what resources would be necessary for animals like plesiosaurs to have survived. And the Loch Ness simply doesn't have that size or that level of resources to support even one plesiosaur, let alone generations needed to survive, you know, the past, well, at least the past 66 million years. Are there still people out there who fervently believe that Loch Ness is still there? And I guess, can you speak to, do you know any of their arguments or why they would still think this? Well, there are definitely people who still believe the Loch Ness monster is real. Even people who are not invested in it, they just casually assume that's true because they know someone who has said it or they read some article online or, you know, watch some fake documentary or something. So there's definitely people who are kind of casually interested in that idea and also vehemently believe that the Loch Ness monster is real and it's simply outsmarted everyone who's gone looking for it. You know, the excuses abound, right? So we're talking about the Loch Ness monster, but do like other countries have these kind of same similar myths like the Loch Ness? So one of the most famous examples of people thinking they had found a live plesiosaur would have been in the 70s off the coast of Japan. There was a fishing vessel that brought up a carcass that when they pulled it up with their, I believe it was a trawling net, it had this really elongated neck. The skull still had some dead tissue on it and the fins did as well, but a lot of the ribs were exposed and a lot of the cartilage, you know, bone-like structures were exposed. So it was very decayed and it had been scavenged upon. So it wasn't clear what the animal was. So people took photos from, I want to say from the docks when the boat came in and it just plastered global newspapers. You know, it was this massive headline of, you know, fisher folk discover prehistoric, you know, ocean dinosaur or something, right? And it actually took a little while to figure out what was going on there. So they did end up contacting some of their local scientists there in Japan and they did some DNA testing, of course, which technology was not as advanced as it is today, but in the 70s, that was still a possibility, right? So they eventually figured out that it had been a thrasher shark skeleton, that the cartilage that makes up their bones of a shark were still fresh enough that the skeleton stayed together, still held together mostly by muscle that had not yet been scavenged and eaten. And so a lot of the exterior, like the skin and a lot of the soft organs were missing, but that musculature and that cartilage was still there enough to kind of keep it together. And thrasher sharks, actually, when you take away a lot of their ribs and organs, they look like they have really long necks. Throughout this conversation, I was really interested. Why do folks find this so intriguing? I wondered why people still really want to and do believe in things like Loch Ness Monster. As far as why people choose to believe those stories, I think human civilization has a very long and storied history of believing things that the evidence just simply isn't there for. And that's okay, right? Because if we don't have that sense of wonder and sense of discovery, you know, what are we doing, right? Like there's, you talk about being a scientist, that literally is the driving force for most scientific breakthroughs and endeavors is that sense of wonder, that desire to discover new things, to make new understandings and share them with the world. So I can't fault people for wanting to believe something extraordinary because that's what makes the world interesting, right? Nancy, do you believe in anything like unexplained mythical creatures or ghosts or something like that? No, definitely not. Do you? I don't believe in the stuff we've been talking about. I don't not believe in ghosts. I mean, again, I said this before, but I wish people could see the shade that you're throwing at me with your eyes. Well, all right, folks, that's all from Third Pod from the Sun. Thanks so much, Shane, for bringing us this story. And of course, thanks to Rodrigo and Danielle for sharing their work with us. This podcast was produced and mixed by me. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please rate and review us. Check us out wherever you get your podcast or always at thirdpodfromthesun.com. And if you missed it, there's a part one to this series that you can check out. Thanks all and we'll see you next time.