In his publication Sea Fables Explained (1883), he wrote, “… the descriptions by ancient writers of so-called ‘fabulous creatures’ are rather distorted portraits than invented falsehoods, and there is ...

The open ocean has always made room for imagination. For centuries, sailors swore they saw monsters bigger than ships, smarter than people, and hungry enough to pull a crew straight off the deck. No ...

In novels like “Moby Dick” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” monsters exist to aggravate and impinge on human life. Science, folklore, and fiction have villainized deep sea creatures for centuries, ...

Megalodon usually gets all the attention when it comes to sea monsters, but ancient oceans were full of predators just as strange and scary. Fossils tell us that long before modern sharks ruled the ...

In May 1925, a strange decaying corpse washed ashore on Moore’s Beach, now known as Natural Bridges State Beach, in Santa Cruz. Locals who swarmed out to investigate the specimen described elephantine ...

Machine generated contents note: Classical Antecedents -- The Earliest Medieval Maps with Sea Monsters: Beatus Mappaemundi -- "Let the Waters Bring Forth Abundantly": Sea Monsters in the Creation -- ...

The historian Procopius described how a creature called Porphyrios terrified sixth-century sailors for 50 years. But what was it? A sixth-century Byzantine mosaic depicts an amphibious monster—though ...