Don’t get too excited. No one’s seriously talking about mermaids being real (well, Animal Planet is). But the two giant creatures that recently washed up on busy California beaches a few days apart may well be the source of all the old sea serpent stories. One was 18 feet long, the other 14 feet, long and narrow, like oceanic pythons. No one had seen anything quite like it, except in those old maps where monsters are cruising the shores of unknown seas.
An oarfish recently found dead in California.
They’re oarfish, and the seas they cruise are indeed fairly unknown: they’re generally found 3,000 feet deep, and sightings are incredibly rare. They can grow much longer, too, up to 50 feet, which would make a frightful impression indeed on a scurvy-addled sailor lucky enough to spot one at the surface.
Albrecht Dürer’s “The Sea Monster,” from 1498.
Many of the old sea monster stories derive from the Age of Discovery, when Europeans were bumping into all kinds of unfamiliar things, like manatees, which may well have been the inspiration for mermaids, as in Edward Coley Burne-Jones’s painting of “A Sea Nymph” above, on view in Gallery G359.
And then there’s Albrecht Dürer’s “The Sea Monster,” from the MIA collection, showing a woman trying not so very hard to escape the clutches of a creature as hybridized as the landscape behind them, which combines the castle of Nuremberg with alpine views encountered by the artist while traveling. Sometimes fantasy is just that.
More troubling is why the two sea serpents, the oarfish, died—and apparently so far from home. Japanese tradition holds that beached oarfish are harbingers of earthquakes. Others blame the Fukushima nuclear disaster or our general screwing up of the oceans and currents. In which case the monster is likely us.