All those sea monster stories coming out of the ocean… they were actually whale penises.

From time immemorial, world sailors claimed that mysterious creatures emerged from the depths of the farthest corners of the oceans, and then plunged back into the dark waters. From fantastic monster landscapesto krakens, sea snakes and mermaids.

Sightings of the Kraken, a gigantic and deadly beast that craves human flesh, date back to 1180 when King Sverre of Norway wrote about a sea monster. Before long, the sailors claimed: the monsters were the size of an islandThey attacked ships with their huge arms, and as the legend developed, they could sink entire ships, creating a gigantic whirlpool that dragged all ships to the bottom of the ocean.

Hans Egede, a Lutheran missionary, wrote on 6 July 1734 that his ship was off the coast of Greenland. That day, those on board “saw a terrifying creature unlike anything they had seen before.” Egede reported that the beast was taller than his entire ship.

“He had a long, pointed snout and flew like a whale. He had large, wide fins, and the skin of his body seemed to have a very wrinkled and bumpy shell. He dived into the water and threw himself back again, and then rose to the tail of the water”.

Copper processing of Aegean’s great sea monster | Naturalist’s Library Sir William Jardine (publisher) Wm. Lizards (master recorder).

In stories, creatures identified as snakes and it’s drawn like this. Egede’s narration is remarkable because he was an educated man and had described several whale encounters before, and as a man who had seen a few things in his life, he was not easily impressed. What did Egede and her friends actually see?

Researchers say it’s a whale penis.

Three biologists took up the task of answering this question. The lead author was Charles Paxton, who was familiar with the unusual work. Suffice it to say that he received the Nobel Prize a few years ago for a study of how ostriches in love try to impress people in England. The Paxton Whale Study was conducted in 2005, and researchers examined all reasonable actions that might fit the explanation.

“A more serious objection to a cetacean is the identification and scratching of the animal’s back as a snake. Whales are found and can survive without fins, although snake- or eel-shaped bodies are not usually associated with propulsion.” faster than necessary to get the whole body out of the water,” he and several other authors wrote in the Archives of Natural History.

So it looks like the beast can’t be a whale. But it could have been part of a whale.

“There is an alternative explanation for the snake-like tail. Most of the great whale whales. they have long penises like snakes. If the animal had actually fallen on its back, then the surface of the abdomen would be highest, and if the whale woke up, the retracted penis would usually be visible,” the authors explained.

Isn’t it funny how sailors constantly mistake whale dicks for mysterious sea snakes? pic.twitter.com/hBzleFlMps

— Collie Ennis 🕷 (@collieennis) April 4, 2021

This seems convincing enough, but still leaves the issue of size open to debate. Whale penises are really huge, but could they be bigger than the whole ship? Researchers suspect the answer is “no,” but there may be an explanation: multiple whales.

“The penises of the North Atlantic right whale and the (Pacific) gray whale they can be at least 1.8 and 1.7 meters long It can go through a queue in turn and by a naive witness. Seeing the tail away from the hull of a ship suggests the presence of more than one male whale.”

In 1875, sailors aboard the merchant ship Pauline saw a sea snake, which they described as a “whitish column.” This particular snake was spotted in the middle of a herd of sperm whales at the time. “They went crazy with excitement”. A separate event that can be more precisely explained by a major blunder from an old whale.

Ultimately, we may never know what all these sailors saw, and probably not all sea snake sightings are whale penises, but it seems to happen quite often, and it’s not uncommon for sea snakes to “appear” around whales.

While whale-penis observations probably cannot account for every sea snake seen throughout history, it is plausible that some of these “sea snakes” were attached to the bottom of a whale.

But not the Loch Ness Monster.

Learn more here: https://t.co/Y0rb26xKlF

— snopes.com (@snopes) April 28, 2021

Now we must all be thinking the same thing. Was the Loch Ness Monster also a whale penis? Various explanations have been offered to explain a series of claims of sightings of a sea snake in Loch Ness, a large, deep body of freshwater in the Scottish Highlands. Some They assumed that “Nessie” was actually just a giant eel or possibly an oddly shaped body. Others decided it was a prehistoric plesiosaur that somehow survived extinction.

In April 2021, another theory became popular on the internet: The Loch Ness Monster was actually just a whale’s penis. Unfortunately there is a big gap in this theory, because Loch Ness is a lake and there are no whales in it. We’ll never know for sure.