January 24, 2019 • 41 mins
When mysterious globs of meat wash up on the shores of human civilization, we have a tendency to see beasts in the blobs and have always tried to imagine the creature in the carnage. Welcome to the world of globsters, where mounds of putrid sea flesh birth cryptozoological dreams and science tends to have the last world. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore...
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back for Globsters Part two, The Revenge That's Right.
The last episode was a fun introduction to the world
(00:27):
of globsters, grotesque, love crafty and amorphous monstrosities that wash
upon our shores and perplex onlookers. Now, last time we
tended to focus on globsters that are of a sort
of maybe you could call like the standard class globster,
which is something that is sort of off white, gray
(00:49):
or pale pink and color. Huge blob like in shape,
maybe multi ton no apparent skeleton or bones, no apparent eyes,
no apparent head covered in will find hairs or stringy
fibrous substances, kind of a rubbery texture, your classic beach blob. Yeah,
And as we discussed and explored in that episode, it's
(01:09):
almost always a safe bet to go with the explanation
that it's a big old piece of rotting whale blubber.
In fact, if someone if you're out in the world,
you know, in the next over the next few months,
and someone says, hey, did you see this headline about
this strange creature that washed up you. You can just
go ahead and say, oh, yeah, that's probably whale blubber,
and you have a very good chance of being correct.
(01:30):
You can you can really feel like a Sherlock Holmes
in this scenario. Yeah, you'll be right most of the time.
But we should acknowledge that there is also another, well,
I don't know if it'd be one class, you could say,
a whole range of other classes of globsters, which are
you know, some form of mysterious dead organic matter that
(01:51):
washes up on a beach and defies initial classification and
people don't automatically know exactly what kind of animal it is.
That it might be a new species or some kind
of sea monster or sea serpent. And that's what we're
going to talk about today, the globsters that are not
just whale blubber or some type of whale tissue. Right.
(02:12):
One of the key examples that you come up with
our our globsters that are interpreted as being a plesiosaur. Yes,
this is one of the biggest classes of other globsters
out there. The plesiosaur form the kind of like long
neck reptile with weird little paddle fins, the lockness monster. Yeah,
(02:33):
but the thing is, you can you can just go
ahead and forget about the lockness monster for a second,
because the lockness monster does not exist, never existed, but
the plesiosaur did. And it's uh, you know, it's it is.
It is an amazing thing, like we should wake up
every day in amazement that giant marine reptiles once ruled
our seas. Yeah. Well, a point of clarification. Sometimes plesiosaurs,
(02:57):
they get lumped in with dinosaurs. Weren't dinosaurs more than
pterosaurs were dinosaurs. Plesiosaurs were seed dwelling reptiles, right, Yes, though,
I have to I have to admit I myself will
sometimes mistakenly refer to a tarrasaur as a dinosaur, and
my six year old son will correct me. They're not
actually dinosaurs, Dad, they're tarrasaurs. Good on him, he's flexing
(03:18):
those pedantic muscles early. Yes, I mean, that's just good
training for adulthood, nobody. The kind of person everybody loves
most is the person who corrects them about what kind
of animal something is. Yes, well, you know you have
to work on that too, that's that's the story of
of of raising a child, right. Um, the difficult part
is yet convincing them that there is a time and
(03:39):
a place to correct people on this and this sort
of thing. And in granted some adults never learned that lesson.
But anyway, to come back to Tanessy, it is important
to acknowledge Nessy because NeSSI is a great example of
how we have this well worn cryptid trope uh to
turn to when we find a strange creature that in
(04:01):
some way resembles a prehistoric marine lizard. And so it
is a great form to turn to because for starters,
nothing alive today really looks like a plesiosur in the
same way that nothing to the live today really looks
like say a sauropod or any number of prehistoric animal forms.
I mean nothing, I mean nothing outside of you know,
(04:24):
a chicken looks like a t rex, but you know,
certainly not at that scale. But but at the same time,
these forms are famous and and if certain animals decay
in just the right way, underlying you know, bones or
ligaments may create the illusion of a long neck and
a small head emerging from a bulky Torso So what
(04:47):
happens is. On several different occasions, basking sharks have been
misidentified as plesiosaurs. This due to their prominent snouts or noses,
which is the namesteak, the namesake of their genus uh
set O rhinus ketos, which is marine monster in Greek
plus rhinos meaning nose, and with it so with the
(05:07):
underlying basking mouth rotted away because these are big, you know,
filter feeders. Uh, it looks like the remnants look like
a small head on a long neck. One of the
most prominent examples of this that you still see everywhere.
You go to any cryptozoological website and they will have
this picture is this This this thing that was pulled
(05:30):
up by a Japanese fishing trawler, the zoo Maru in
ninety seven. Again, this picture still makes a round sometimes
as part of a creepy pasta. I've even I've seen
it used in that way, and it is an unsettling image.
It looks like there is this long necked, small headed
creature with like two or at least two probably like
(05:51):
four limbs trailing off of it. Some sort of underlying structure, uh,
you know, it could be a skeleton, so it's easy
to look at that and think, oh, my goodness, that
is that's that's nesty, that's that's e Plesius are right,
but it's not right. Uh. You know. One of the
books we're looking at for this was Abominable Science Origins
(06:12):
of the YETI, uh Nessy and More by Daniel Lockston
and Donald R. Prothero, and it provides an excellent illustration
of how this sort of thing would occur, exactly like
how the flesh would rot away to create this false
impression of e Plesiosaur. It's on page to fourteen in
a Kindle edition. Yeah, there's actually ah, there's a great guy.
(06:35):
It's a reversal of the shrink rapping thing you know
that we know we talked about when we did the
episode with Katie Golden of Creature Feature. You know this
idea that sometimes when paleo artists are trying to figure
out how to draw what a dinosaur looks like, they
essentially just like wrap the skin as tightly around the
bones as possible, and so we end up with a
(06:57):
dinosaur or any kind of extinct animal that looks like
a very like slim, very slim, slender interpretation of what
the bones were kind of like the bones have been
shrink wrapped by the skin, but in fact many animals
are They've got all kinds of tissues that are not
fossilized don't show up in the bones. So maybe we
should be imagining dinosaurs as as plumper, fat or more
(07:19):
more fluffy creatures. And uh, this is like the opposite
of that procedure where we pull up the bones and
then you're we're actually maybe it's the same thing. You're
imagining a shrink wrapped version of what these cartilaginous remains
are from the basking shark. And if you were to
do the shrink wrapped version of the cartilaginous remains, they
look what would look kind of like a plesiosaur exactly,
(07:41):
you know, when when alive. The head of a basking
shark is something like five feet across, but it's skeleton
is made of cartilage, and those huge jaws that it
have they quickly wrought away and it leaves behind what
looks like a small skull at the end of a
long spine. Another example of this this exact same situation
occurred in eighteen o eight with the strong say beast,
(08:04):
this is a this is a classic globster. Yeah, washed
ashore on the island of Stronsay in the Orkney Islands,
Scottish anatomist John Barclay thought that it was surely the
remains of a sea serpent, and it caused quite a
stir at the time, especially in the media. Though anonymoust
to Sir Everard Home, who was a belief based in
(08:24):
London at the at the time, he dismissed it. I'm
almost immediately saying that's a decaying basking shark. Uh. And
others backed him up on this, But so there were
other people who jumped to Barclay's defense, saying that this
was clearly the remains of a long necked beast with
three pairs of paws or wings, along with hair like
bristles down its back. Now, one place I have frequently
(08:47):
seen claims of people trying to validate the existence of
plesiosaur remains found coming out of the ocean is among
Young Earth creationists. Well, I guess they sometimes seem keen
on the idea that there are still dinosaurs out there,
or there are still animals that we now know to
be ancient extinct animals. Uh, you know they're because they've
(09:10):
compressed the timeline of Earth history to a tiny fraction
of what it really is. I think they're motivated to
think that things that we think have been extinct for
millions of years are actually still somewhere in a jungle
or somewhere in the deep ocean. If your agenda is
to take geological time and fit it within the time
frame of human language, then that's probably solid step to make.
(09:33):
But but the thing is, even people without that agenda
in mind, I mean, they still can fall into this
uh under this way of the plesiosaur interpretation. I mean
that there were a couple, at least a couple of
scientists in Japan who supported the plis are the pleas
sr interpretation of that that Zeromorrow case from seven uh,
(09:54):
which is kind of baffling, But but I guess who
wouldn't want to believe It comes back to the whole,
you know, situation of finding either a dead sasquatch or
a dead chimpanzee in your backyard. One of them is
far more likely, but one is amazing. Well, I you know,
I'm a plesiosaur molder like I would love to believe
that that would be wonderful if we discovered that some
(10:17):
kind of branch of plesiosaurs had survived into the modern
age at this point. You know, it seems kind of unlikely,
but you know, the ocean is big. Who knows. It's
just that these cases are not actually good evidence of that.
So I still maintain that there's far less excuse for
going with the plesiosaur explanation today or even in nineteen
(10:38):
seventy seven. But as Lockston and Prothero pointed out in
their book Abominable, Abominable Science, we should realize a few
things about about the early nineteenth century when considering these
earlier examples, like the strong state beast, they write, quote,
by nineteenth century standards, the ink was hardly dry on
newspaper reports of the sea serpent siding around Gloucester in
(11:01):
eighteen seventeen, when ichthyosaurs were shown to be reptiles in
eighteen twenty one. The first nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton was
described in eighteen twenty four in a presentation before the
Geological Society of London at the same meeting that announced
the first dinosaur genus name, Megalosaurus. Almost immediately naturalists made
(11:24):
the connection to sea serpents. So you've still got contemporary
reports of sea serpent sightings. People are just discovering remains
of these ancient you know, gigantic reptiles. And so, you know,
why not put two and two together. Maybe these these
remains were discovering are the sea serpents that people claim
to see out on the waters. Yeah, And you had
(11:45):
people like the likes of geologist Robert Bakewell stating that
he was inclined to believe that something like ichosaurs were
likely alive today. He stated this in the eighteen thirty
three textbook Introduction to Geology. Well, I mean, it's not
without precedent that an ancient marine species thought to have
been extinct for for millions of years or so is
(12:07):
actually discovered to still be alive today. That one of
the most commonly sided examples is the lobe finned fish
the seila can't. Yes, But because one has been found
to exist does not suggest that necessarily another world be found, right,
But all prehistoric marine life forms are on the table, right. Uh.
And to to put this time period in context, you know,
(12:29):
the the early nineteenth century. To put it in context
of a past episode of stuff to blow your mind,
the bathosphere would not descend for another century like so
that's where we were too in our understanding of the
ocean and what kind of animals live there. I think
these were the This might even been before. I forget
when this happened, but they we were talking about in
(12:49):
the Bathisphere episode, how people tried to figure out what
was deep in the ocean before we had, you know,
anything that could go down there. And there were the
days of the drag lines where you just drag a
bucket along under you know, behind a ship and see
if you could pull anything up in it. It seems
remarkably crude technology. Now, yeah, just a death bucket to
pull things up and see what kind of flesh you
(13:10):
managed to snare and if it exploded by the time
it got to the surface. Right, all right, well, I
guess we should take a quick break and when we
come back we will discuss some more non whale globsters
from the Globster Hall of Fame. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
we're back now. One thing I wondered about is how
(13:31):
long have people been reporting globsters, Like how far back
does the does the Sun article about the beach blob go?
That's true, because if it, certainly this would seem like
the kind of thing that would have occurred throughout human history.
Of course it would I mean nothing like nothing that
we know have changed suddenly in the seventeenth century to
make this stuff start happening. So, uh, let's take a
(13:53):
look at old Plenty of the Elder. This is kind
of a late appearance, for Plenty usually shows up earlier
in an episode. That's true. Yeah, well he's making of
fashionable appearances. Okay. So Plenty of the Elder in his
Natural History is in a section talking about nereads, which
are the sea nymphs or the ocean fairies or mermaids,
and he writes about how the governor of Gaul once
(14:16):
wrote a letter to Caesar Augustus reporting that a number
of dead nereads had washed up on shore in his
territory and that their quote mournful song moreover, when dying
has been heard a long way off by the coast dwellers. Uh.
Later he writes, during the rule of Tiberius, in an
island off the coast of the province of Leone, the
(14:37):
receding ocean tide left more than three hundred monsters at
the same time of marvelous variety and size, and an
equal number on the coast of the Saints and among
the rest elephants and rams, with only a white streak
to resemble horns, and also many neriads. And then later
he writes about a couple of other monsters cast cast shore.
(15:00):
One story quote, the skeleton of the monster twitch Andromeda,
and the story was exposed, was brought by Marcus Scaurus
from the town of Jaffa in Judea and shown at
Rome among the rest of the marvels during his his
uh edile ship. It was forty ft long, the height
of the ribs exceeding the elephants of India, and the
(15:21):
spine being one foot and six inches thick. Well, this
all sounds exactly like what we've been talking about, like
people finding strange bodies, strange flesh upon the shores and
turning to mythological explanations or it just I mean, really
it almost almost of the you know, uh, it's it's
(15:41):
almost unfair to say mythology in these cases because in
some of these cases we're talking about just sort of
unexpected understanding of the more mysterious corners of the world. Well, yeah,
I mean this was a time for which mythology I
think was in some ways kind of blended with history.
Might not always be clear to these people which of
these myths were true and to what extent or were
(16:03):
they based on actual historical events. So if you've got
a story of your your classic heroes like Perseus or whatever,
and there's a sea monster in them, I don't know,
maybe that story happened, and maybe the c monster is
real and this. Oh and you know what, I found
some really big bones or a big, old, confusing pile
of flesh on the beach. I bet it was that
sea monster, right, And then of course we have to
(16:25):
we have to recognize that if these things are occurring
throughout history, we have possibly the reverse situation occurring where
you have just a story about a sea monster and
then you find these weird remains and you're like, well,
this must be the form, and then that informs the myth. Yeah. Now,
we just we've discussed creatures like this on the show
in the past, especially Triton's and neriads, mermaids and whatnot. Uh,
(16:50):
And you know, I believe we discussed the link between
mermaid myths and the sightings of real life marine mammals
and even occasionally sightings of cephalopods. But I wonder too
if actual human remains ever factored into these observations as well.
Oh so, like like kind of bloated dead human corpses
washing up on the beach and people and say, ah,
(17:12):
these are the dead sea nymphs. Yeah, I mean we've
we have looked. At example, I looked around for specific
discussion of this, and I couldn't find anything. And maybe
it's out there though, and I just didn't happen upon it.
But you know, in discussing the Kappa in Japanese folklore,
we talked about how they are aspects of that myth.
They're based upon misinterpretations of of of bloated bodies, the
(17:37):
bodies of drowning victims. So it doesn't seem that remote
a possibility that one could misinterpret the human remains found
on a shore, you know, the remains of some fishing vessel,
or even a vessel in a time of war, provided
that the the decay was substantial enough or unique enough. Yeah.
(18:02):
I feel like we're developing an interesting parallel to like
Adrian Mayer's geomethology, where the idea that maybe ancient people's
discovered dinosaur fossils or other kinds of fossilized bone remains
and developed the ideas of mythical beasts from them. Here,
I guess we're talking more like bio mythology, like recently
dead creatures and corpses found or blobs found could give
(18:24):
you ideas of the types of mythical monsters and creatures
that inhabit the hidden part of the world, you know,
and looking around it more like recent examples of supposed
cryptozoological creatures. I did find at least one example where
it's this weird bipedal looking creature. It appears hairless and
has this kind of quasi human appearance to it, and
(18:47):
the likely explanation is that it was a sloth. Whoa yeah,
So so you know, you could have a situation where
somehow this animal is wound up in the water, it's dead,
it's lost its hair, and it is no longer quite
recognizable as what it was and now occupies this kind
of strange in between space. Well, it makes me think
(19:09):
about the New Jersey Beach monster. I think you've probably
seen pictures of this, which is what do they ultimately
decided it likely was like a raccoon. Yes, they did
run across this one Yeah, it's just this hairless, gross
looking little demon mammal without you know, it's smooth all
over dead on a beach in New Jersey, and people
now think, oh, it's probably just a raccoon. But regardless
(19:32):
of what you know, they may have made of human
remains on the beach, they were inevitably encountering chunks of blubber.
They were encountering things like basking sharks, perhaps the remnants
of marine mammals such as manatees or doo gongs. So
there's plenty of stuff there to to lend itself to
monstrous interpretations. Yes, I'm so sorry. I've got to clarify.
(19:56):
I said New Jersey it was the Montauk Monster. I
was wrong. It was the New York beach mont talk.
Oh yes, yes, sorry about that. New Jersey sea monster
is an entirely different scenario. By the way, myriads and
Triton's uh play an important part in Transgenesis, the sci
fi podcast that is publishing January thirty one, two thousand nineteen.
(20:20):
I hope everyone that listens to the show will check
it out. You can find out more about it at
Transgenesis dot show. That's right, check it out. Now, Robert,
are you ready to talk about a sea monster or
wonderful beast? Do I get to choose between the two?
Are they one and the same? They are one and
the same, But you will get to choose which one
you think it is? All right, let's do it, okay, now,
(20:40):
I so I came across evidence of a seventeenth century
lobster washed ashore in Ireland, and this is a glorious
thing it was. I'm going to make the case that
this was pretty clearly a giant squid of the genus
arctotis uh. It was written up in a pamphlet published
in London in sixty four, and the pamphlet is usually
(21:03):
known by its opening line, which is a true and
perfect account of the miraculous sea monster or wonderful fish.
The pamphlet continues, lately taken in Ireland, bigger than an ox,
yet without legs, bones, fins or scales, with two heads,
and ten horns of ten or eleven foot long, on
eight of which horns there grew knobs about the bigness
(21:26):
of a cloak, button in shape like crowns or coronets,
to the number of a hundred on each horn, which
we're all too open and had rows of teeth within them.
That does sound a lot like a giant squid. I
think we're getting there. So. The pamphlet tells the story
about a man named James Steward who was riding by
the seaside in the west of Ireland, and quote, as
(21:47):
the tide was coming in, perceived at a distance something
of a strange bigness to make towards the shore. At
first he apprehended it might be some horse that might
have been caught away with the violence of the tide,
and having recovered himself, was now swimming to land. But
approaching nearer on a closer view, he was infinitely surprised
(22:07):
and amazed, not so much at the bigness, which yet
he found to exceed that of a horse, which he
first took it for in the body, as at the
uncouth shape, and a number of strange horns of great length,
which rendered it not a little terrible to behold, insomuch
that he durst not go near it, lest it should
destroy both him and his horse. So we got the
(22:29):
dramatic set up. Steward goes off and gets help from
a couple who live nearby, and they use ropes to
drag it up on the beach. This they could do,
though the account says that when they tried to touch
the horns quote, they found there on shells like coronets
with teeth within them, which got hold of their hands
and fingers, so that they were glad to let them go.
(22:52):
So they come back the next day with a bigger company,
and by then the beast was dead. And after that
they gave a further description, saying that the body was
smooth and without scales or bones, and that it had
two heads and two eyes, quote, of an oval form
and of extraordinary bigness. Now, I think this has pretty
much got to be a giant squid, especially when talking
(23:14):
when they talk about the size of the eyes, because
the eyes of a giant squid are extremely remarkable or organs.
They've got a maximum diameter of around twenty five centimeters
or ten inches. I've also seen slightly larger estimates of
around thirty centimeters or about twelve inches, And the eyes
of the giant squid and their southern Southern Ocean cousins,
(23:36):
the colossal squid, are by far the biggest eyes in nature.
Like they're often compared to the size of dinner plates. Uh.
The one I like is that they're bigger in diameter
than a standard basketball. They don't have irises or eyelids.
Their eyes are not filled with jelly like fluid like ours,
but rather they're just filled with water. And so I've
read that after the squid dies, their eyes just kind
(23:58):
of like collapse like a deflat bag. Um. They're made
for extreme light sensitivity in the pitch dark of the
ocean more than five hundred meters down. And I was
reading an interesting piece in Scientific American from twelve by
Katherine Harmon about research on the purpose of those huge eyes,
because why why do they need eyes that big? Like
(24:20):
the next biggest eyes in nature are the eyes of
the sword fish, and they're literally like a third of
the size of the squid's eye. These eyes are like
three pent of the next biggest eyes in nature. Uh,
the entire eye of a swordfish would fit inside the
giant squid's pupil. On top of this, there's the fact
(24:40):
that beyond a certain size, scientists have generally found really
diminishing returns in eye bigness, where in most cases it
just does not pay off at all for an animal
to have an eye any larger than an orange, It
consumes a lot of energy, it's very vulnerable, and it
doesn't see much better than anything bigger than an orange.
I mean, you think of some of the of the
animals that have that are known for having the most
(25:02):
impressive eyesight, and that the eyes aren't that big. Eyes
aren't that big. You're you're generally dealing with different varieties
of bird. Yeah, that's exactly correct. So what are the
squid using these triple huge eyes for? Well? Study found
that while a squid's huge eye is not generally better
at seeing, it's not just it's not like better at
(25:24):
seeing everything. It is better at seeing one extremely specific
kind of visual information, which is subtle changes in contrast
caused by large objects at a distance. Oh, I bet,
I know what that large object is. That's right. So
imagine what, in fact a squid might be most likely
to be on the lookout for, Robert, you know the answer,
(25:47):
the sperm whale. That's right. So imagine the body of
a sperm whale diving through the Black Ocean five meters
down and as it travels. What the scientists were pointing
out is that you know, as as a sperm whale
dives through the water, it will probably disturb and trigger
the bioluminous the luminescence of tiny organisms here and there
as it rushes through the water column. And most of
(26:10):
the time it does not pay to have foot wide eyes.
But the one exception is if you're going to be
looking around for huge objects in the pelagic darkness, then
gigantic eyes are where it's at and five down. The
researchers figure that a squid can spot an approaching sperm
whale at a hundred and twenty meters, giving it a
chance to escape. Of course, the whales don't really need
(26:32):
sight to hunt in the dark because they use sound
based decolocation. This is amazing and but it does make
perfect sense, you know, because the sperm whale is the uh,
the giant squid eater par excellence. Yeah. Yeah, we love
to think of the giant squid as like the ultimate crazy,
scary ocean monster. But it's a prey animal. Yeah, I mean,
of course it preys on other things, but like but
(26:54):
a sperm whale. When sperm whales are found, sometimes they
will have guts full of beaks, you know, because the
squid it's mostly got soft body parts that are easy
to digest, except for this one hard body part, the beak,
which which you know, you open up a sperm whale
stomach and you you may may just be beak city
in there. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
(27:16):
but we'll be right back. Thank thank and we're back.
So back to the sea monster or wonderful fish. Uh So,
Another thing the pamphlet says is on the cloak button
shaped crowns upon its horns. The pamphlet points out, quote
the resemblance of a pearl, which was to open and
shut as a little mouth, and had within it a
(27:38):
row of teeth, so that it should seem beside the
mouth of a little head, which we shall describe by
and by this monster received nourishment for its body at
eight hundred several places for that to number, or thereabouts,
did the crowns on all eight horns amount. So they're
saying they think that this this creature eats with its suckers.
(28:00):
If this is a squid, that seems to be incorrect.
But but they thought, oh, these look like tiny mouths.
These are the mouth through which it eats, and they
are kind of like tiny mouths they're kind of like
a little leech mouths all over the arms. A giant
squid has eight arms and two feeding tentacles longer than
the other arms, making the tin limbs tin limbs in total,
consistent with the report of the tin horns. And of
(28:23):
course these cloak button shaped crowns sound pretty much exactly
like the toothed suckers lining the arms and the tentacle
the feeding tentacle clubs of a giant squid. I've got
an image here of what they look like, Robert. They're nice,
real quick. I should also throw in that the tentacle
armed distinction, that's another one that's easy to to refer
(28:45):
to the tentacles of a squid when you really are
referring to to the arms. Right, But you get into,
especially when you get into like weird fiction and all,
the word arm is not nearly as evocative as the tentacle.
You don't want to have a mini armed alien crawling
out of a dimensional gateway, No, you want a many
(29:05):
tentacled monster. Well it makes me wonder, you know, when
like you hear about these ancient monsters that are described
to say an apocalyptic religious visions as like an angel
with tin arms or something. If we go with the
cephalopod analogy here, maybe those are things more like what
people would call tentacles, not necessarily human arms with elbows
(29:25):
and hands. I like this this reading of pretty much
any certainly any biblical account. Just put in tentacles for
arms or heads, and you have. You have quite a
cool monster in your hands. But to be biologically rigorous,
you are correct about that distinction. There the squid has
eight arms which are covered in suckers all over, and
then it's got the two tentacles which are longer, and
(29:47):
I have clubs for grabbing prey and bringing it to
the mouth. Those are the feeding tentacles. But let's come
back to this, uh, this globster here, because there was
mentioned to get biblical again, there was mention of horns, right, yeah,
so it's got these tin horns, and then it says
in the middle of the head, between all these horns, uh,
we're we're assuming the horns are the arms and the tentacles.
(30:09):
The pamphlet says between all these horns there was a
smaller head quote in shape much like the head of
a hawk, looking upward, and had a strange mouth and
two tongues in it, and here too, no doubt it
did take much of its nourishment. And in this they
are correct because this sounds like the beak and mouth
of a giant squid exactly right. They mentioned the resemblance
(30:32):
to a hawk. Giant squid actually do have hooked bird
like beaks. As we're talking about a minute ago, the
sperm whale stomach might be full of beaks, and inside
this beak in a giant squid is a chewing mechanism,
a grinding tooth covered tongue called the radula. And here
here's a crazy thing I did not remember learning about
(30:53):
in the past. I may have, But so the mouth
parts here have to process food down into tiny piece
is before it swallowed. And there's a very good reason
for this because the squid, and I've read about this
this in the context of the colossal squid, I believe
it's also true with the giant squid. Uh. The squid
has a taurus or doughnut shaped brain, and the esophagus
(31:16):
through which it swallows food passes directly through the middle
of that doughnut shaped brain, so it goes through the
donut hole. So if it tries to swallow a piece
of food that is too large it could literally press
against its brain. Now, imagine if when you ate there
was a choking risk, but the choking risk was not
(31:36):
of suffocation, but a risk of mashing on your cerebral cortex.
I'm imagining an alien race of cephalopod beings who, in
order to have hallucinogenic experiences, they swallow polyhedral dice. So
that you know, different different sizes will press on their
(31:57):
brains their donut brains in different ways produce different visions.
It's called the god choking. Anyway, I know what you're thinking.
Whenever a sea monster washes up dead on a beach,
the next thing they should do is figure out what
did it taste like? Right? So, for experiment that people
boiled some of the flesh. But the longer it boiled quote,
the harder it became. It gave a very good scent
(32:20):
as it boiled and seemed fat, But in boiling the
fat hardened, and no creature, though several at diverse times
were tried, would eat a bit of it, or so
much as taste of it. They don't say what creatures
they tried, though, I mean, did they offer it to
a cow? To a dog. What I mean a dog,
I'm sure it would be up for anything. Did they
offer it to a shark? I mean, there's no clues
(32:42):
to go on here, but anyway that I mean, this
just reminds me of Robert. Have you ever tried to
cook calamari? I don't think I've ever tried to cook
it myself. I've only ever had it in restaurants. Well,
I don't know if what is true of smaller squid
is also true of larger squid, but food sized squid,
which is what calamari is because I'm is overcooked and rubbery.
Extremely easily boiling it can make it tough as rubber.
(33:05):
You actually be very careful to cook it very quickly. Uh,
and you know, get it out of the heat before
it gets overcooked and gets super chewy. So this would
be this would be why you tend to encounter it
in kind of like a flash fried uh fashion. And
I bet you've had you may have like ordered calamari
at a not so great restaurant and it was really
tough and chewy. Yeah, I probably said, but it also
(33:26):
probably explains why it is hard to find calamari that
is not fried and of course not sushi. On the
other side, like there used to be a Vietnamese place
in Atlanta. This was ages ago that that I like
to go into because they had like a calamari salad
and the calamari was it was baked or something, you know,
(33:46):
so some of that I forget how it was actually prepared.
It's been so long, but it was like one of
the few places where it's like, oh, it's cooke calamari,
it's not fried. Well, I mean, I think another way
you can get tender calamari. I'm not positive about this,
but I think the other way is to like of
the low and slow method, you know, low temperature, long
long period of time. But I haven't tried it myself,
(34:07):
but anyway, I've got to mention. There is also an
addendum to the pamphlet at the end, which does it's
been I would say I'm impressed with this seventeenth century pamphlet.
It sounds, based on my reading, like it's a very
like kind of thorough empirical description that they do a
pretty good job of giving you an idea of what
this thing was. Uh, it's not too sensational. But then
(34:28):
it gets to the addendum at the end quote. We
might now divert the reader a little and tell him
that some Zealots, hearing of a strange creature with several heads,
tin horns, and more than triple crowns, took it for
the apocalyptical beast and fancied the Pope was landed in person.
And it just like us humans, we can't even have
a nice pamphlet about a dead blob of sea monster
(34:49):
flesh without bringing religion and politics into it, getting all
your Protestant grievances out against the pope. Well, that reminds
me of the example from from like this month's headlines
that we referred in the first one, where some strange
blob was found and they compared it to the current
yost president. Oh yeah, I just want pure enjoyment of
(35:12):
sea monsters that having to think about politics. Yeah, yeah,
it seems that would you. There should be plenty to
talk about without bringing politics and religion into it, because
here behold is a mystery of the deep cast upon
the shore for our perusal. Now, I guess one thing
we should say is that this is a globster by
(35:32):
by virtue of its time in history, because this wouldn't
be classed as a globster today. I think if this
thing washed ashore, people would immediately now be able to
recognize that it was almost undoubtedly a large species of squid, right,
Not much like the recent Australian case we mentioned in
the last episode where people saw it and they're like, hey,
it's a giant squid. Let's get the camera, let's put
(35:54):
this stuck around Instagram. Well, yeah, I mean those things
are rare enough on there. Even though we know what
they are and they're just animals, they are in a
way like the modern equivalent of a sea monster. You've
seen something rare and amazing, it's exotic. Yeah. Not for
sperm whales though maybe not right they're like, yeah, I had,
I had six of them yesterday. Yeah. Actually, you know,
(36:15):
this one thing I'm not clear on or I don't
remember from past research is just how often a sperm
whale is eating a giant squid. I don't know either.
One thing I did come across in this research is
um that a colossal squid has an extreme colossal squid
is the Southern Ocean like Antarctic equivalent of a giant squid.
They're around the same length, though a colossal squid has
(36:37):
a fat or more robust body, and the colossal squid
apparently has a very very slow metabolism. I guess it
lives in deep cold water, and despite its gigantic size,
it really doesn't have to eat very much at all
because it just doesn't move or do very much. But
either way, I mean, I guess these things delicious sperm whales.
I I wonder, like, do sperm whales get upset stomachs
(37:01):
when they have too many squid and they get do
they get like beak belly? One well, one would think so.
But then again, if these are these are indeed a
primary part of their diet, they've they've had time to
get used to it. One wonders, maybe someday, if we
create the machine that allows us to talk to whales,
we will that will be the first thing we ask them, right,
Or maybe it's just simply the fact that it's sure,
(37:21):
you're gonna pay for it, you're gonna get beak belly,
but it just tastes so good. It's indeed, like when
a when a human goes to a restaurant and eats
an entire appetizer of fried calamary all By themselves. It's
a terrible choice. They're gonna pay for it later, but
it sure was delicious while they were eating it. Squid
the awesome blossom of the sea. All right. So there
(37:44):
you have it. Globsters A two parter here on stuff
to blow your mind. Again. We didn't cover all the
globsters that have occurred and been reported by humans wandering
the beaches of the world. We haven't discussed anywhere near
all the amazing creatures that live in the in the
ocean and sometimes wind up washed on the shore. But
(38:06):
we get to cover a lot of ground. I think
there are some examples we didn't get to that are
neither confirmed to be parts of whales, nor are they
like basking sharks or squid like we talked about today,
but some other kind of blobby mass that we don't
quite know what it is, and uh, who knows. Maybe
will come back to that in the future if people
really want to hear more blobs. They love blobs, you know,
(38:29):
we we can always we can always return to blob
Blob Island. Will do Globster three D. That will be
the third one, because it'll be in three D. You
can't have a monster movie that's number three without having
some three D glasses. That's good. I like it. Whether
whether it's whether it's whale body parts, whether it's a squid,
whether it's a basking sharp or shark, or whether it's
(38:50):
the Pope. It's all gonna look good in three D.
You're gonna be glad you came and you paid the
extra dollar for the glasses. All right. Well, if you
want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, you know where to find them. You can
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(39:10):
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(39:32):
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(39:53):
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(40:16):
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(40:42):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Tropical char
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back for Globsters Part two, The Revenge That's Right.
The last episode was a fun introduction to the world
(00:27):
of globsters, grotesque, love crafty and amorphous monstrosities that wash
upon our shores and perplex onlookers. Now, last time we
tended to focus on globsters that are of a sort
of maybe you could call like the standard class globster,
which is something that is sort of off white, gray
(00:49):
or pale pink and color. Huge blob like in shape,
maybe multi ton no apparent skeleton or bones, no apparent eyes,
no apparent head covered in will find hairs or stringy
fibrous substances, kind of a rubbery texture, your classic beach blob. Yeah,
And as we discussed and explored in that episode, it's
(01:09):
almost always a safe bet to go with the explanation
that it's a big old piece of rotting whale blubber.
In fact, if someone if you're out in the world,
you know, in the next over the next few months,
and someone says, hey, did you see this headline about
this strange creature that washed up you. You can just
go ahead and say, oh, yeah, that's probably whale blubber,
and you have a very good chance of being correct.
(01:30):
You can you can really feel like a Sherlock Holmes
in this scenario. Yeah, you'll be right most of the time.
But we should acknowledge that there is also another, well,
I don't know if it'd be one class, you could say,
a whole range of other classes of globsters, which are
you know, some form of mysterious dead organic matter that
(01:51):
washes up on a beach and defies initial classification and
people don't automatically know exactly what kind of animal it is.
That it might be a new species or some kind
of sea monster or sea serpent. And that's what we're
going to talk about today, the globsters that are not
just whale blubber or some type of whale tissue. Right.
(02:12):
One of the key examples that you come up with
our our globsters that are interpreted as being a plesiosaur. Yes,
this is one of the biggest classes of other globsters
out there. The plesiosaur form the kind of like long
neck reptile with weird little paddle fins, the lockness monster. Yeah,
(02:33):
but the thing is, you can you can just go
ahead and forget about the lockness monster for a second,
because the lockness monster does not exist, never existed, but
the plesiosaur did. And it's uh, you know, it's it is.
It is an amazing thing, like we should wake up
every day in amazement that giant marine reptiles once ruled
our seas. Yeah. Well, a point of clarification. Sometimes plesiosaurs,
(02:57):
they get lumped in with dinosaurs. Weren't dinosaurs more than
pterosaurs were dinosaurs. Plesiosaurs were seed dwelling reptiles, right, Yes, though,
I have to I have to admit I myself will
sometimes mistakenly refer to a tarrasaur as a dinosaur, and
my six year old son will correct me. They're not
actually dinosaurs, Dad, they're tarrasaurs. Good on him, he's flexing
(03:18):
those pedantic muscles early. Yes, I mean, that's just good
training for adulthood, nobody. The kind of person everybody loves
most is the person who corrects them about what kind
of animal something is. Yes, well, you know you have
to work on that too, that's that's the story of
of of raising a child, right. Um, the difficult part
is yet convincing them that there is a time and
(03:39):
a place to correct people on this and this sort
of thing. And in granted some adults never learned that lesson.
But anyway, to come back to Tanessy, it is important
to acknowledge Nessy because NeSSI is a great example of
how we have this well worn cryptid trope uh to
turn to when we find a strange creature that in
(04:01):
some way resembles a prehistoric marine lizard. And so it
is a great form to turn to because for starters,
nothing alive today really looks like a plesiosur in the
same way that nothing to the live today really looks
like say a sauropod or any number of prehistoric animal forms.
I mean nothing, I mean nothing outside of you know,
(04:24):
a chicken looks like a t rex, but you know,
certainly not at that scale. But but at the same time,
these forms are famous and and if certain animals decay
in just the right way, underlying you know, bones or
ligaments may create the illusion of a long neck and
a small head emerging from a bulky Torso So what
(04:47):
happens is. On several different occasions, basking sharks have been
misidentified as plesiosaurs. This due to their prominent snouts or noses,
which is the namesteak, the namesake of their genus uh
set O rhinus ketos, which is marine monster in Greek
plus rhinos meaning nose, and with it so with the
(05:07):
underlying basking mouth rotted away because these are big, you know,
filter feeders. Uh, it looks like the remnants look like
a small head on a long neck. One of the
most prominent examples of this that you still see everywhere.
You go to any cryptozoological website and they will have
this picture is this This this thing that was pulled
(05:30):
up by a Japanese fishing trawler, the zoo Maru in
ninety seven. Again, this picture still makes a round sometimes
as part of a creepy pasta. I've even I've seen
it used in that way, and it is an unsettling image.
It looks like there is this long necked, small headed
creature with like two or at least two probably like
(05:51):
four limbs trailing off of it. Some sort of underlying structure, uh,
you know, it could be a skeleton, so it's easy
to look at that and think, oh, my goodness, that
is that's that's nesty, that's that's e Plesius are right,
but it's not right. Uh. You know. One of the
books we're looking at for this was Abominable Science Origins
(06:12):
of the YETI, uh Nessy and More by Daniel Lockston
and Donald R. Prothero, and it provides an excellent illustration
of how this sort of thing would occur, exactly like
how the flesh would rot away to create this false
impression of e Plesiosaur. It's on page to fourteen in
a Kindle edition. Yeah, there's actually ah, there's a great guy.
(06:35):
It's a reversal of the shrink rapping thing you know
that we know we talked about when we did the
episode with Katie Golden of Creature Feature. You know this
idea that sometimes when paleo artists are trying to figure
out how to draw what a dinosaur looks like, they
essentially just like wrap the skin as tightly around the
bones as possible, and so we end up with a
(06:57):
dinosaur or any kind of extinct animal that looks like
a very like slim, very slim, slender interpretation of what
the bones were kind of like the bones have been
shrink wrapped by the skin, but in fact many animals
are They've got all kinds of tissues that are not
fossilized don't show up in the bones. So maybe we
should be imagining dinosaurs as as plumper, fat or more
(07:19):
more fluffy creatures. And uh, this is like the opposite
of that procedure where we pull up the bones and
then you're we're actually maybe it's the same thing. You're
imagining a shrink wrapped version of what these cartilaginous remains
are from the basking shark. And if you were to
do the shrink wrapped version of the cartilaginous remains, they
look what would look kind of like a plesiosaur exactly,
(07:41):
you know, when when alive. The head of a basking
shark is something like five feet across, but it's skeleton
is made of cartilage, and those huge jaws that it
have they quickly wrought away and it leaves behind what
looks like a small skull at the end of a
long spine. Another example of this this exact same situation
occurred in eighteen o eight with the strong say beast,
(08:04):
this is a this is a classic globster. Yeah, washed
ashore on the island of Stronsay in the Orkney Islands,
Scottish anatomist John Barclay thought that it was surely the
remains of a sea serpent, and it caused quite a
stir at the time, especially in the media. Though anonymoust
to Sir Everard Home, who was a belief based in
(08:24):
London at the at the time, he dismissed it. I'm
almost immediately saying that's a decaying basking shark. Uh. And
others backed him up on this, But so there were
other people who jumped to Barclay's defense, saying that this
was clearly the remains of a long necked beast with
three pairs of paws or wings, along with hair like
bristles down its back. Now, one place I have frequently
(08:47):
seen claims of people trying to validate the existence of
plesiosaur remains found coming out of the ocean is among
Young Earth creationists. Well, I guess they sometimes seem keen
on the idea that there are still dinosaurs out there,
or there are still animals that we now know to
be ancient extinct animals. Uh, you know they're because they've
(09:10):
compressed the timeline of Earth history to a tiny fraction
of what it really is. I think they're motivated to
think that things that we think have been extinct for
millions of years are actually still somewhere in a jungle
or somewhere in the deep ocean. If your agenda is
to take geological time and fit it within the time
frame of human language, then that's probably solid step to make.
(09:33):
But but the thing is, even people without that agenda
in mind, I mean, they still can fall into this
uh under this way of the plesiosaur interpretation. I mean
that there were a couple, at least a couple of
scientists in Japan who supported the plis are the pleas
sr interpretation of that that Zeromorrow case from seven uh,
(09:54):
which is kind of baffling, But but I guess who
wouldn't want to believe It comes back to the whole,
you know, situation of finding either a dead sasquatch or
a dead chimpanzee in your backyard. One of them is
far more likely, but one is amazing. Well, I you know,
I'm a plesiosaur molder like I would love to believe
that that would be wonderful if we discovered that some
(10:17):
kind of branch of plesiosaurs had survived into the modern
age at this point. You know, it seems kind of unlikely,
but you know, the ocean is big. Who knows. It's
just that these cases are not actually good evidence of that.
So I still maintain that there's far less excuse for
going with the plesiosaur explanation today or even in nineteen
(10:38):
seventy seven. But as Lockston and Prothero pointed out in
their book Abominable, Abominable Science, we should realize a few
things about about the early nineteenth century when considering these
earlier examples, like the strong state beast, they write, quote,
by nineteenth century standards, the ink was hardly dry on
newspaper reports of the sea serpent siding around Gloucester in
(11:01):
eighteen seventeen, when ichthyosaurs were shown to be reptiles in
eighteen twenty one. The first nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton was
described in eighteen twenty four in a presentation before the
Geological Society of London at the same meeting that announced
the first dinosaur genus name, Megalosaurus. Almost immediately naturalists made
(11:24):
the connection to sea serpents. So you've still got contemporary
reports of sea serpent sightings. People are just discovering remains
of these ancient you know, gigantic reptiles. And so, you know,
why not put two and two together. Maybe these these
remains were discovering are the sea serpents that people claim
to see out on the waters. Yeah, And you had
(11:45):
people like the likes of geologist Robert Bakewell stating that
he was inclined to believe that something like ichosaurs were
likely alive today. He stated this in the eighteen thirty
three textbook Introduction to Geology. Well, I mean, it's not
without precedent that an ancient marine species thought to have
been extinct for for millions of years or so is
(12:07):
actually discovered to still be alive today. That one of
the most commonly sided examples is the lobe finned fish
the seila can't. Yes, But because one has been found
to exist does not suggest that necessarily another world be found, right,
But all prehistoric marine life forms are on the table, right. Uh.
And to to put this time period in context, you know,
(12:29):
the the early nineteenth century. To put it in context
of a past episode of stuff to blow your mind,
the bathosphere would not descend for another century like so
that's where we were too in our understanding of the
ocean and what kind of animals live there. I think
these were the This might even been before. I forget
when this happened, but they we were talking about in
(12:49):
the Bathisphere episode, how people tried to figure out what
was deep in the ocean before we had, you know,
anything that could go down there. And there were the
days of the drag lines where you just drag a
bucket along under you know, behind a ship and see
if you could pull anything up in it. It seems
remarkably crude technology. Now, yeah, just a death bucket to
pull things up and see what kind of flesh you
(13:10):
managed to snare and if it exploded by the time
it got to the surface. Right, all right, well, I
guess we should take a quick break and when we
come back we will discuss some more non whale globsters
from the Globster Hall of Fame. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
we're back now. One thing I wondered about is how
(13:31):
long have people been reporting globsters, Like how far back
does the does the Sun article about the beach blob go?
That's true, because if it, certainly this would seem like
the kind of thing that would have occurred throughout human history.
Of course it would I mean nothing like nothing that
we know have changed suddenly in the seventeenth century to
make this stuff start happening. So, uh, let's take a
(13:53):
look at old Plenty of the Elder. This is kind
of a late appearance, for Plenty usually shows up earlier
in an episode. That's true. Yeah, well he's making of
fashionable appearances. Okay. So Plenty of the Elder in his
Natural History is in a section talking about nereads, which
are the sea nymphs or the ocean fairies or mermaids,
and he writes about how the governor of Gaul once
(14:16):
wrote a letter to Caesar Augustus reporting that a number
of dead nereads had washed up on shore in his
territory and that their quote mournful song moreover, when dying
has been heard a long way off by the coast dwellers. Uh.
Later he writes, during the rule of Tiberius, in an
island off the coast of the province of Leone, the
(14:37):
receding ocean tide left more than three hundred monsters at
the same time of marvelous variety and size, and an
equal number on the coast of the Saints and among
the rest elephants and rams, with only a white streak
to resemble horns, and also many neriads. And then later
he writes about a couple of other monsters cast cast shore.
(15:00):
One story quote, the skeleton of the monster twitch Andromeda,
and the story was exposed, was brought by Marcus Scaurus
from the town of Jaffa in Judea and shown at
Rome among the rest of the marvels during his his
uh edile ship. It was forty ft long, the height
of the ribs exceeding the elephants of India, and the
(15:21):
spine being one foot and six inches thick. Well, this
all sounds exactly like what we've been talking about, like
people finding strange bodies, strange flesh upon the shores and
turning to mythological explanations or it just I mean, really
it almost almost of the you know, uh, it's it's
(15:41):
almost unfair to say mythology in these cases because in
some of these cases we're talking about just sort of
unexpected understanding of the more mysterious corners of the world. Well, yeah,
I mean this was a time for which mythology I
think was in some ways kind of blended with history.
Might not always be clear to these people which of
these myths were true and to what extent or were
(16:03):
they based on actual historical events. So if you've got
a story of your your classic heroes like Perseus or whatever,
and there's a sea monster in them, I don't know,
maybe that story happened, and maybe the c monster is
real and this. Oh and you know what, I found
some really big bones or a big, old, confusing pile
of flesh on the beach. I bet it was that
sea monster, right, And then of course we have to
(16:25):
we have to recognize that if these things are occurring
throughout history, we have possibly the reverse situation occurring where
you have just a story about a sea monster and
then you find these weird remains and you're like, well,
this must be the form, and then that informs the myth. Yeah. Now,
we just we've discussed creatures like this on the show
in the past, especially Triton's and neriads, mermaids and whatnot. Uh,
(16:50):
And you know, I believe we discussed the link between
mermaid myths and the sightings of real life marine mammals
and even occasionally sightings of cephalopods. But I wonder too
if actual human remains ever factored into these observations as well.
Oh so, like like kind of bloated dead human corpses
washing up on the beach and people and say, ah,
(17:12):
these are the dead sea nymphs. Yeah, I mean we've
we have looked. At example, I looked around for specific
discussion of this, and I couldn't find anything. And maybe
it's out there though, and I just didn't happen upon it.
But you know, in discussing the Kappa in Japanese folklore,
we talked about how they are aspects of that myth.
They're based upon misinterpretations of of of bloated bodies, the
(17:37):
bodies of drowning victims. So it doesn't seem that remote
a possibility that one could misinterpret the human remains found
on a shore, you know, the remains of some fishing vessel,
or even a vessel in a time of war, provided
that the the decay was substantial enough or unique enough. Yeah.
(18:02):
I feel like we're developing an interesting parallel to like
Adrian Mayer's geomethology, where the idea that maybe ancient people's
discovered dinosaur fossils or other kinds of fossilized bone remains
and developed the ideas of mythical beasts from them. Here,
I guess we're talking more like bio mythology, like recently
dead creatures and corpses found or blobs found could give
(18:24):
you ideas of the types of mythical monsters and creatures
that inhabit the hidden part of the world, you know,
and looking around it more like recent examples of supposed
cryptozoological creatures. I did find at least one example where
it's this weird bipedal looking creature. It appears hairless and
has this kind of quasi human appearance to it, and
(18:47):
the likely explanation is that it was a sloth. Whoa yeah,
So so you know, you could have a situation where
somehow this animal is wound up in the water, it's dead,
it's lost its hair, and it is no longer quite
recognizable as what it was and now occupies this kind
of strange in between space. Well, it makes me think
(19:09):
about the New Jersey Beach monster. I think you've probably
seen pictures of this, which is what do they ultimately
decided it likely was like a raccoon. Yes, they did
run across this one Yeah, it's just this hairless, gross
looking little demon mammal without you know, it's smooth all
over dead on a beach in New Jersey, and people
now think, oh, it's probably just a raccoon. But regardless
(19:32):
of what you know, they may have made of human
remains on the beach, they were inevitably encountering chunks of blubber.
They were encountering things like basking sharks, perhaps the remnants
of marine mammals such as manatees or doo gongs. So
there's plenty of stuff there to to lend itself to
monstrous interpretations. Yes, I'm so sorry. I've got to clarify.
(19:56):
I said New Jersey it was the Montauk Monster. I
was wrong. It was the New York beach mont talk.
Oh yes, yes, sorry about that. New Jersey sea monster
is an entirely different scenario. By the way, myriads and
Triton's uh play an important part in Transgenesis, the sci
fi podcast that is publishing January thirty one, two thousand nineteen.
(20:20):
I hope everyone that listens to the show will check
it out. You can find out more about it at
Transgenesis dot show. That's right, check it out. Now, Robert,
are you ready to talk about a sea monster or
wonderful beast? Do I get to choose between the two?
Are they one and the same? They are one and
the same, But you will get to choose which one
you think it is? All right, let's do it, okay, now,
(20:40):
I so I came across evidence of a seventeenth century
lobster washed ashore in Ireland, and this is a glorious
thing it was. I'm going to make the case that
this was pretty clearly a giant squid of the genus
arctotis uh. It was written up in a pamphlet published
in London in sixty four, and the pamphlet is usually
(21:03):
known by its opening line, which is a true and
perfect account of the miraculous sea monster or wonderful fish.
The pamphlet continues, lately taken in Ireland, bigger than an ox,
yet without legs, bones, fins or scales, with two heads,
and ten horns of ten or eleven foot long, on
eight of which horns there grew knobs about the bigness
(21:26):
of a cloak, button in shape like crowns or coronets,
to the number of a hundred on each horn, which
we're all too open and had rows of teeth within them.
That does sound a lot like a giant squid. I
think we're getting there. So. The pamphlet tells the story
about a man named James Steward who was riding by
the seaside in the west of Ireland, and quote, as
(21:47):
the tide was coming in, perceived at a distance something
of a strange bigness to make towards the shore. At
first he apprehended it might be some horse that might
have been caught away with the violence of the tide,
and having recovered himself, was now swimming to land. But
approaching nearer on a closer view, he was infinitely surprised
(22:07):
and amazed, not so much at the bigness, which yet
he found to exceed that of a horse, which he
first took it for in the body, as at the
uncouth shape, and a number of strange horns of great length,
which rendered it not a little terrible to behold, insomuch
that he durst not go near it, lest it should
destroy both him and his horse. So we got the
(22:29):
dramatic set up. Steward goes off and gets help from
a couple who live nearby, and they use ropes to
drag it up on the beach. This they could do,
though the account says that when they tried to touch
the horns quote, they found there on shells like coronets
with teeth within them, which got hold of their hands
and fingers, so that they were glad to let them go.
(22:52):
So they come back the next day with a bigger company,
and by then the beast was dead. And after that
they gave a further description, saying that the body was
smooth and without scales or bones, and that it had
two heads and two eyes, quote, of an oval form
and of extraordinary bigness. Now, I think this has pretty
much got to be a giant squid, especially when talking
(23:14):
when they talk about the size of the eyes, because
the eyes of a giant squid are extremely remarkable or organs.
They've got a maximum diameter of around twenty five centimeters
or ten inches. I've also seen slightly larger estimates of
around thirty centimeters or about twelve inches, And the eyes
of the giant squid and their southern Southern Ocean cousins,
(23:36):
the colossal squid, are by far the biggest eyes in nature.
Like they're often compared to the size of dinner plates. Uh.
The one I like is that they're bigger in diameter
than a standard basketball. They don't have irises or eyelids.
Their eyes are not filled with jelly like fluid like ours,
but rather they're just filled with water. And so I've
read that after the squid dies, their eyes just kind
(23:58):
of like collapse like a deflat bag. Um. They're made
for extreme light sensitivity in the pitch dark of the
ocean more than five hundred meters down. And I was
reading an interesting piece in Scientific American from twelve by
Katherine Harmon about research on the purpose of those huge eyes,
because why why do they need eyes that big? Like
(24:20):
the next biggest eyes in nature are the eyes of
the sword fish, and they're literally like a third of
the size of the squid's eye. These eyes are like
three pent of the next biggest eyes in nature. Uh,
the entire eye of a swordfish would fit inside the
giant squid's pupil. On top of this, there's the fact
(24:40):
that beyond a certain size, scientists have generally found really
diminishing returns in eye bigness, where in most cases it
just does not pay off at all for an animal
to have an eye any larger than an orange, It
consumes a lot of energy, it's very vulnerable, and it
doesn't see much better than anything bigger than an orange.
I mean, you think of some of the of the
animals that have that are known for having the most
(25:02):
impressive eyesight, and that the eyes aren't that big. Eyes
aren't that big. You're you're generally dealing with different varieties
of bird. Yeah, that's exactly correct. So what are the
squid using these triple huge eyes for? Well? Study found
that while a squid's huge eye is not generally better
at seeing, it's not just it's not like better at
(25:24):
seeing everything. It is better at seeing one extremely specific
kind of visual information, which is subtle changes in contrast
caused by large objects at a distance. Oh, I bet,
I know what that large object is. That's right. So
imagine what, in fact a squid might be most likely
to be on the lookout for, Robert, you know the answer,
(25:47):
the sperm whale. That's right. So imagine the body of
a sperm whale diving through the Black Ocean five meters
down and as it travels. What the scientists were pointing
out is that you know, as as a sperm whale
dives through the water, it will probably disturb and trigger
the bioluminous the luminescence of tiny organisms here and there
as it rushes through the water column. And most of
(26:10):
the time it does not pay to have foot wide eyes.
But the one exception is if you're going to be
looking around for huge objects in the pelagic darkness, then
gigantic eyes are where it's at and five down. The
researchers figure that a squid can spot an approaching sperm
whale at a hundred and twenty meters, giving it a
chance to escape. Of course, the whales don't really need
(26:32):
sight to hunt in the dark because they use sound
based decolocation. This is amazing and but it does make
perfect sense, you know, because the sperm whale is the uh,
the giant squid eater par excellence. Yeah. Yeah, we love
to think of the giant squid as like the ultimate crazy,
scary ocean monster. But it's a prey animal. Yeah, I mean,
of course it preys on other things, but like but
(26:54):
a sperm whale. When sperm whales are found, sometimes they
will have guts full of beaks, you know, because the
squid it's mostly got soft body parts that are easy
to digest, except for this one hard body part, the beak,
which which you know, you open up a sperm whale
stomach and you you may may just be beak city
in there. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
(27:16):
but we'll be right back. Thank thank and we're back.
So back to the sea monster or wonderful fish. Uh So,
Another thing the pamphlet says is on the cloak button
shaped crowns upon its horns. The pamphlet points out, quote
the resemblance of a pearl, which was to open and
shut as a little mouth, and had within it a
(27:38):
row of teeth, so that it should seem beside the
mouth of a little head, which we shall describe by
and by this monster received nourishment for its body at
eight hundred several places for that to number, or thereabouts,
did the crowns on all eight horns amount. So they're
saying they think that this this creature eats with its suckers.
(28:00):
If this is a squid, that seems to be incorrect.
But but they thought, oh, these look like tiny mouths.
These are the mouth through which it eats, and they
are kind of like tiny mouths they're kind of like
a little leech mouths all over the arms. A giant
squid has eight arms and two feeding tentacles longer than
the other arms, making the tin limbs tin limbs in total,
consistent with the report of the tin horns. And of
(28:23):
course these cloak button shaped crowns sound pretty much exactly
like the toothed suckers lining the arms and the tentacle
the feeding tentacle clubs of a giant squid. I've got
an image here of what they look like, Robert. They're nice,
real quick. I should also throw in that the tentacle
armed distinction, that's another one that's easy to to refer
(28:45):
to the tentacles of a squid when you really are
referring to to the arms. Right, But you get into,
especially when you get into like weird fiction and all,
the word arm is not nearly as evocative as the tentacle.
You don't want to have a mini armed alien crawling
out of a dimensional gateway, No, you want a many
(29:05):
tentacled monster. Well it makes me wonder, you know, when
like you hear about these ancient monsters that are described
to say an apocalyptic religious visions as like an angel
with tin arms or something. If we go with the
cephalopod analogy here, maybe those are things more like what
people would call tentacles, not necessarily human arms with elbows
(29:25):
and hands. I like this this reading of pretty much
any certainly any biblical account. Just put in tentacles for
arms or heads, and you have. You have quite a
cool monster in your hands. But to be biologically rigorous,
you are correct about that distinction. There the squid has
eight arms which are covered in suckers all over, and
then it's got the two tentacles which are longer, and
(29:47):
I have clubs for grabbing prey and bringing it to
the mouth. Those are the feeding tentacles. But let's come
back to this, uh, this globster here, because there was
mentioned to get biblical again, there was mention of horns, right, yeah,
so it's got these tin horns, and then it says
in the middle of the head, between all these horns, uh,
we're we're assuming the horns are the arms and the tentacles.
(30:09):
The pamphlet says between all these horns there was a
smaller head quote in shape much like the head of
a hawk, looking upward, and had a strange mouth and
two tongues in it, and here too, no doubt it
did take much of its nourishment. And in this they
are correct because this sounds like the beak and mouth
of a giant squid exactly right. They mentioned the resemblance
(30:32):
to a hawk. Giant squid actually do have hooked bird
like beaks. As we're talking about a minute ago, the
sperm whale stomach might be full of beaks, and inside
this beak in a giant squid is a chewing mechanism,
a grinding tooth covered tongue called the radula. And here
here's a crazy thing I did not remember learning about
(30:53):
in the past. I may have, But so the mouth
parts here have to process food down into tiny piece
is before it swallowed. And there's a very good reason
for this because the squid, and I've read about this
this in the context of the colossal squid, I believe
it's also true with the giant squid. Uh. The squid
has a taurus or doughnut shaped brain, and the esophagus
(31:16):
through which it swallows food passes directly through the middle
of that doughnut shaped brain, so it goes through the
donut hole. So if it tries to swallow a piece
of food that is too large it could literally press
against its brain. Now, imagine if when you ate there
was a choking risk, but the choking risk was not
(31:36):
of suffocation, but a risk of mashing on your cerebral cortex.
I'm imagining an alien race of cephalopod beings who, in
order to have hallucinogenic experiences, they swallow polyhedral dice. So
that you know, different different sizes will press on their
(31:57):
brains their donut brains in different ways produce different visions.
It's called the god choking. Anyway, I know what you're thinking.
Whenever a sea monster washes up dead on a beach,
the next thing they should do is figure out what
did it taste like? Right? So, for experiment that people
boiled some of the flesh. But the longer it boiled quote,
the harder it became. It gave a very good scent
(32:20):
as it boiled and seemed fat, But in boiling the
fat hardened, and no creature, though several at diverse times
were tried, would eat a bit of it, or so
much as taste of it. They don't say what creatures
they tried, though, I mean, did they offer it to
a cow? To a dog. What I mean a dog,
I'm sure it would be up for anything. Did they
offer it to a shark? I mean, there's no clues
(32:42):
to go on here, but anyway that I mean, this
just reminds me of Robert. Have you ever tried to
cook calamari? I don't think I've ever tried to cook
it myself. I've only ever had it in restaurants. Well,
I don't know if what is true of smaller squid
is also true of larger squid, but food sized squid,
which is what calamari is because I'm is overcooked and rubbery.
Extremely easily boiling it can make it tough as rubber.
(33:05):
You actually be very careful to cook it very quickly. Uh,
and you know, get it out of the heat before
it gets overcooked and gets super chewy. So this would
be this would be why you tend to encounter it
in kind of like a flash fried uh fashion. And
I bet you've had you may have like ordered calamari
at a not so great restaurant and it was really
tough and chewy. Yeah, I probably said, but it also
(33:26):
probably explains why it is hard to find calamari that
is not fried and of course not sushi. On the
other side, like there used to be a Vietnamese place
in Atlanta. This was ages ago that that I like
to go into because they had like a calamari salad
and the calamari was it was baked or something, you know,
(33:46):
so some of that I forget how it was actually prepared.
It's been so long, but it was like one of
the few places where it's like, oh, it's cooke calamari,
it's not fried. Well, I mean, I think another way
you can get tender calamari. I'm not positive about this,
but I think the other way is to like of
the low and slow method, you know, low temperature, long
long period of time. But I haven't tried it myself,
(34:07):
but anyway, I've got to mention. There is also an
addendum to the pamphlet at the end, which does it's
been I would say I'm impressed with this seventeenth century pamphlet.
It sounds, based on my reading, like it's a very
like kind of thorough empirical description that they do a
pretty good job of giving you an idea of what
this thing was. Uh, it's not too sensational. But then
(34:28):
it gets to the addendum at the end quote. We
might now divert the reader a little and tell him
that some Zealots, hearing of a strange creature with several heads,
tin horns, and more than triple crowns, took it for
the apocalyptical beast and fancied the Pope was landed in person.
And it just like us humans, we can't even have
a nice pamphlet about a dead blob of sea monster
(34:49):
flesh without bringing religion and politics into it, getting all
your Protestant grievances out against the pope. Well, that reminds
me of the example from from like this month's headlines
that we referred in the first one, where some strange
blob was found and they compared it to the current
yost president. Oh yeah, I just want pure enjoyment of
(35:12):
sea monsters that having to think about politics. Yeah, yeah,
it seems that would you. There should be plenty to
talk about without bringing politics and religion into it, because
here behold is a mystery of the deep cast upon
the shore for our perusal. Now, I guess one thing
we should say is that this is a globster by
(35:32):
by virtue of its time in history, because this wouldn't
be classed as a globster today. I think if this
thing washed ashore, people would immediately now be able to
recognize that it was almost undoubtedly a large species of squid, right,
Not much like the recent Australian case we mentioned in
the last episode where people saw it and they're like, hey,
it's a giant squid. Let's get the camera, let's put
(35:54):
this stuck around Instagram. Well, yeah, I mean those things
are rare enough on there. Even though we know what
they are and they're just animals, they are in a
way like the modern equivalent of a sea monster. You've
seen something rare and amazing, it's exotic. Yeah. Not for
sperm whales though maybe not right they're like, yeah, I had,
I had six of them yesterday. Yeah. Actually, you know,
(36:15):
this one thing I'm not clear on or I don't
remember from past research is just how often a sperm
whale is eating a giant squid. I don't know either.
One thing I did come across in this research is
um that a colossal squid has an extreme colossal squid
is the Southern Ocean like Antarctic equivalent of a giant squid.
They're around the same length, though a colossal squid has
(36:37):
a fat or more robust body, and the colossal squid
apparently has a very very slow metabolism. I guess it
lives in deep cold water, and despite its gigantic size,
it really doesn't have to eat very much at all
because it just doesn't move or do very much. But
either way, I mean, I guess these things delicious sperm whales.
I I wonder, like, do sperm whales get upset stomachs
(37:01):
when they have too many squid and they get do
they get like beak belly? One well, one would think so.
But then again, if these are these are indeed a
primary part of their diet, they've they've had time to
get used to it. One wonders, maybe someday, if we
create the machine that allows us to talk to whales,
we will that will be the first thing we ask them, right,
Or maybe it's just simply the fact that it's sure,
(37:21):
you're gonna pay for it, you're gonna get beak belly,
but it just tastes so good. It's indeed, like when
a when a human goes to a restaurant and eats
an entire appetizer of fried calamary all By themselves. It's
a terrible choice. They're gonna pay for it later, but
it sure was delicious while they were eating it. Squid
the awesome blossom of the sea. All right. So there
(37:44):
you have it. Globsters A two parter here on stuff
to blow your mind. Again. We didn't cover all the
globsters that have occurred and been reported by humans wandering
the beaches of the world. We haven't discussed anywhere near
all the amazing creatures that live in the in the
ocean and sometimes wind up washed on the shore. But
(38:06):
we get to cover a lot of ground. I think
there are some examples we didn't get to that are
neither confirmed to be parts of whales, nor are they
like basking sharks or squid like we talked about today,
but some other kind of blobby mass that we don't
quite know what it is, and uh, who knows. Maybe
will come back to that in the future if people
really want to hear more blobs. They love blobs, you know,
(38:29):
we we can always we can always return to blob
Blob Island. Will do Globster three D. That will be
the third one, because it'll be in three D. You
can't have a monster movie that's number three without having
some three D glasses. That's good. I like it. Whether
whether it's whether it's whale body parts, whether it's a squid,
whether it's a basking sharp or shark, or whether it's
(38:50):
the Pope. It's all gonna look good in three D.
You're gonna be glad you came and you paid the
extra dollar for the glasses. All right. Well, if you
want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, you know where to find them. You can
find them wherever it is you get the podcast, wherever
you get any of your podcast. You can also check
us out at our home page our mothership stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com that has links out to
(39:10):
our various social media accounts. For instance, you can go
check out our our group on Facebook. It's called Stuff
to Blow Your Mind Discussion Module. It's a fun place
to interact with other listeners as well as with us. Uh. Likewise,
if you want to support the show, click on that
link at the top of the page for the merchandise store.
You can get some cool shirts, some cool stickers. It's
(39:32):
a cool way to support the show. And if you
want to support the show without spending a dime. You
can just rate and review us wherever you have the
power to do so, and don't forget about Invention, which
is already out. We have multiple episodes. Look up Invention
wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe that comes out
every Monday, and then looking just a week ahead, be
(39:53):
sure to subscribe to and check out Transgenesis, a science
fiction a fix in scripted fiction podcast that I have
coming out that involves all sorts of deep water horrors
and also a cameo from Joe McCormick. Big thanks as
always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison.
(40:16):
If you would like to get in touch with us
directly with feedback about this episode or any other, to
suggest topic for the future, or just to say hi,
let us know how you found out about the show
where you listen from all that kind of stuff, you
can always email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(40:42):
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