Sea Monster Monday: Swordfish
The Swordfish is part of the bill family of fish, the middle sized, as compared to the sailfish and marlin. If left to grown on its own, each can reach roughly 1500 pounds. From Caitlyn’s LetsBeSeaMonsters and Wiki:
The Scuttlefish
Love the Ocean. Wish you were here.
Category: sea monster monday
November 8, 2010
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October 25, 2010
Sea Monster Monday: Kraken of the Sea and of Our Trembling Fear
In 1965, a Soviet Whaler watched an adult squid and sperm whale battle one another, but neither was victorious. The whale was found strangled, and the severed head of the squid was found in the whale’s stomach.If this is true, it is remarkable, for very few prey can injure their hunters to the point of death.
As the second largest mollusk, and the second largest invertebrate on the planet, the Giant Squid (Genus Architeuthis) comes with the largest reputation ahead of even that of the later discovered and larger colossal squid.
October 11, 2010
Sea Monster Monday; The Creature from the Black Lagoon
The real selling point of a creature, of the Creature, is fear of the unknown. And like any good B movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon is actually a remake. The beginnings of this monster started with a dinner party. A story of some half-man, half-fish haunting the waters of South America. Take the story of King Kong, replace the gorilla with a pre-historic missing link, and you have yourself a Universal Picture.
Creature actually went through innumerable rewrites and holds influence from many different films and stories (e.g. It Came from Outer Space, Beauty and the Beast, etc). Undeniably, though, King Kong was the primary inspiration for Creature and its sequels. While there are over fifty years between its release and when I saw it for the first time, some good old fashioned movie magic made it not just a blockbuster, but a classic.
October 6, 2010
Maid in Japan
Though not often considered monsters, mermaids have quite a gruesome history.Their literary history is pretty colorful, but today, legends of mermaid sightings are dismissed as brief glimpses of manatees. As far-fetched as that sounds, I can imagine the witness of a flirtatious swish of fishy tail to be quite convincing to a scurvy sailor. Myth is a powerful mistress, and even to this day, we know less about the ocean than we do of outer space. Enter the Feejee Mermaid.
This particular creature was a seductive imagining that belonged to the mind of P. T. Barnum. In the summer of 1842, Barnum (an advertising genius) mailed letters from an English gentleman, “Dr. Griffin” to newspapers in New York, claiming the discovery of a mermaid specimen off the coast of Fiji. To promote the discovery, pamphlets with an image of a bare-breasted mermaid were distributed across the city. When the specimen was finally put on display in Barnum’s museum, the public was thoroughly horrified.
