Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey everyone,

I have been doing some reading up on this incident. Apparently, a japanese fishing ship, named the Zuiyo Maru, was trolling for mackerel, when it pulled up the carcass of this "sea creature". It was already badly decayed and smelled terribly. There was a former zoologist/student on board who had the smarts to snap a few pics of it before the crew dumped it back overboard, because they did not want their fresh fish catch to be contaminated. There have been several debates over this find, some people are saying plesiosaur/similar tetrapod, whereas others are suggesting that it is a decaying basking shark... I am not an icthyologist or anything, but in the pics you can clearly see a vertebrae and ribcage... I thought that sharks did not possess any bones, and were made of cartilidge, which is fast to decompose. I guess I kind of just want it to be a plesiosaur, to disprove that all dinosaurs are extinct.. Heck, we were all disproved back in the thirties or fifies, when they found a coelecanth, a plated prehistoric fish, which was thought to have been extinct for 60 million years, living off the coast of madagascar. I just find it fascinating that we do not have the slightest clue as to what does live in the spance of ocean that has yet to be discovered. So what are your feelings about this; plesiosaur or dead basking shark. The pic of the head clearly shows a mouth, one which is much smaller than what a basking shark(plankton eater) would possess. Sorry for the irrelevance to varanids, but I just had to share this with my buddies here on the monitor forum. Oh, by the way, this was Discovered in 1977, not a fresh, recent incident, long before dna testing/sampling. Thanks for looking,

bob mendyk

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another pic

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it's the Lock ness Monster!
Alex oliver

Some years ago this was trawled in southern waters - and alot of people thought it was a sea serpent carcass - the collogen and other markers were tested and shown to be a basking shark carcass....but there are BIG critters in the sea, i.e. giant octopus and a sea serpent animals seen around the world known as the "Lau" from a combat incident with Sudanese tribe in 1909 - and similar in appearance to the multi-humped Nessie of Loch Ness, Scotland. Sea Serpent lore is another of my hobbies, which leads to Dragon lore and giant bird lore = cryptozoology. Regrettably there are few good cryptozoology newsletters/journals out there anymore. Most of the stuff is on the web and television....check out any book by Bernhard Heuvelmans, especially "In the Wake of the Sea Serpent" (1966).

Thankx Bob,
markb

hey mark, thanks for your input. Yeah, I know that it proved to be a basking shark because of the elastodin(a protein) which was found in the initial samples of the fin. Elastodin is a protein that is found in all sharks, thus the plesiosaur possibility was ruled out. I still do not doubt there being large, never before seen creatures living out there, maybe we'll find an answer to nessy someday, or even champ- New York/vermont's very own sea(lake) moster who supposedly lives in lake champlain. Cryptozoology is very fascinating; yet some can be downright ridiculous... I find the mongolian death worm to be rather fascinating, it is probably just some form of sand boa (eryx sp.) that attains a lenght of four feet or so... There's so many things out there.... did you hear about that new caetecian they discovered?? I believe that it is one of the smallest of the baleen whales... so, you never know what science will uncover in the future. Thanks again for the link,

bob

... even if it were a plesiosaur, dinosaurs would still be extinct. Although plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs were contemporaries of the dinosaurs, they weren't actually dinosaurs sorry, had to do that

Speaking of sea serpent myths, I think almost every lake in North America has its own fabled monster. When I was a kid in Canada, my father told myself and my siblings about Winnipogo, the Lake Winnipeg monster. I'm pretty sure Lake Manitoba had one, too.

Hairy apemen are also popular. Aside from the yeti of the Himalaya and North America's sasquatch, Australia has its own version, too, the yowie.

I think there already ARE Eryx sp. in Mongolia that reach about that size. E. tartaricus is a pretty large species and I think its range extends up there. Eryx johni in Mongolia wouldn't stretch the imagination either. I have heard a tale that the Mongolian death worm has horns, and a horned Eryx would completely rock the party, almost as much as the elusive Persian tatzelwurm.
(Vipers shouldn't be the only ones to have fun with horns)
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Peter: It's OK, I'll handle it. I read a book about something like this.
Brian: Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't NOTHING?

see the neck, oh and the feathers.

depends on how you look at the picture could be the head of a whale maybe? or if you look hard enough you see what appears to be a head neck and body.

The last picture of the back looks like it has boney plates down the back so maybe it is a dragon. haha

who knows but if it was something new and rare why the heck would they of thrown it over board??

This is like JAWS revisited.

They're like the Whale shark.. biggest thing they eat are plankton or small fish strained out by their gills.. They're the second largest fish in the ocean...
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Lucien

1.0 Columbian Redtail Boa (BCI)
2.1 Leopard geckos (2 Blizzard and 1 het Blizzard)
0.1 Savannah Monitor
13 rats
12 Gerbils
2 Dogs
3 cats
1 Albino Corey (fish)

Hi,
There are 2 incidents where basking shark killed divers, and 1 for the whale shark, which got that diver in the crotch! All 3 bled to death and shock...who wouldn't!!

I believe the hammerhead and Tiger Shark has the top mortality numbers for shark attacks in the last what 100 years of reporting....

cheers,
mbayless

i believe basking sharks are the ones with the expanding mouths...when feeding they onen their mouths up and basically look like giant finned tubes...shudder
i dont care how harmless it is if im in the water and see that thing swimming with its mouth all gaped open like on the discovery channel they better have a clean diving suit waiting for me in the boat for i do believe id have crapped myself!

I had a book from the mid/late 70s or early 80s about sharks and whales. It was a great book and furthered my childhood fascination with both animals. The book had really neat color drawings/scenes of sharks and whales and a brief, age appropriate, paragraph on them. In this book, it stated that sailors in the old days used to see basking sharks swimming together snout to tail in long lines. It was suggested that this sight might have spawned the sea monster stories because they would look like a giant creature with multiple fins and such.

Now, I have no idea if basking sharks actually swim like that or if this claim was completely false. I do know that I have remembered that paragraph and the drawing for most of my life. I may even still have that book somewhere (I hope so because it was one of my favorites).
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^x^ Bloodbat ^x^

where do basking sharks bask at? what temperature would they need? 130? 150?

and what wattage bulb would that take. like one of those 250 watt red ones?

oh, and do they need UVB?
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robyn@proexotics.com

Pro Exotics Reptiles

*LOL* I guess they were named that because they spend a lot of time at the surface... at least thats what I've read anyway...

But I'd like to see someone try to keep it under the red lights and figure out UVB needs.. Maybe we can breed them smaller and they can be the next goldfish *L*
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Lucien

1.0 Columbian Redtail Boa (BCI)
2.1 Leopard geckos (2 Blizzard and 1 het Blizzard)
0.1 Savannah Monitor
13 rats
12 Gerbils
2 Dogs
3 cats
1 Albino Corey (fish)