Once again, rolling through social media is a silly story about whale penises mistakenly perceived as “sea monsters”.
Here’s a nice bit to set things straight. It’s a Twitter thread by Dr. Darren Naish from April of 2021.
I’ve unrolled it for easy reading.
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)…
… 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!
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.
Modern Cryptozoology 