Old illustration of a sea monster. In this case a squid, not Nesski

Nessie’s Russian cousin, “Nesski” seems to be misbehaving in a rather morbid way. It seems to have acquired the taste for fishermen!

Nesski has now been attributed with 19 deaths in the Chany lake over the years. According to Russian experts, that number may actually be higher, but no one has taken note of it yet.

On the books, these deaths have been reported as drowning. However, it is interesting to note that of the “drowning” victims only a few have actually been recovered. The bodies that have been recovered have been reported to be “half eaten”. Off the record, this has led to the speculation by many of the local community that “Nesski” has acquired a taste for human flesh.

Nesski claimed its latest victim, a 59 year old man, when the hapless fisherman tried to reel it in last week. Vladimir Golishev, the man’s close friend, explains what happened. “I was with my friend… some 300 yards from the shore. He hooked something huge on his bait, and he stood up in the boat to reel it in. But it pulled with such force that he overturned the boat. I was in shock – I had never seen anything like it in my life. I pulled off my clothes and swam for the shore, not daring hope I would make it.”

Golishev did in fact make it back to the shore, however his long time fishing partner, vanished beneath the waves, never to be seen or heard from again.

This sad incident is a painful reminder of what happened only three short years ago, when Vladimir lost his 32 year old grandson to the Beast. Mikhail, a Russian soldier, was dragged beneath the lakes’ placid waters, after something large capsized his boat. “The lake was calm, but suddenly the boat was rocking, and it capsized.” recalled Mikhail’s grandmother, Nina Doronin.

The couple has lived on the shores of Chany their entire lives. They firmly believe that Nesski is real, and is responsible for the death of their grandson, as well as the other missing fishermen. The most frustrating aspect of the whole thing, is that they have never personally seen the monster responsible for the crime.

Nesski is thought to be a pleiosaur, much like its counterpart in the Loch Ness. A pleiosaur is an aquatic dinosaur with a rather long neck, small head, large body, and an almost comicly short tail and fins. According to experts on the subject however, these beats went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The reports of Nesski sightings have been coming in a steady flow for decades, though actually locating such a beast really shouldn’t be too difficult, given its habitat. The lake is only 57 x 55 miles across, and only 23 feet deep at its deepest.. Which begs the question.. Why has no one proven the existence of the monster? But more importantly… Why can’t you find the missing fisherman in water so shallow?

The sea monster - Photo by Larry Kenner

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the serene Lakeside Park, most specifically the exciting developments in its pond. This isn’t the kind of location where you would expect to find a lot of excitement, as it is quite tranquil and many people go there to get away from the stress of the day.

However, there is something strange lurking beneath the waters of the pond… It is unknown what exactly it is at this time, but it has been dubbed the “Lakeside Nessie”.

This mystery creature doesn’t really fit the bill of being a full fledged sea monster, however it is rather large and doesn’t seem to be too fish-like.

A lone dog walker a few weeks ago, Hannah Ramsey, was walking along the pond, when she saw a very large fish-like creature on the banks.
“It was really weird,” Ramsey said. “It had a snake’s tail. It was really long and really big in the middle and it had fish scales.”
Ramsey continued by saying that she was within arms reach of the creature, but that it didn’t make any sudden moves.
“It stayed there for a couple of minutes, but it wouldn’t turn so I could see its face. It was acting like it was strangling a fish or something.”

However, Ramsey’s mother, Laura, has said that she believes that the creature on the banks was a giant carp. Lots of people feed things to the local wildlife, such as ducks, and the food sinks attracting the fish to the shoreline. She goes on to state that in the last she has seen two really large carp close in to the shore of the pond.

However, that doesn’t explain the snake-like tail, or the other odd features of the creature… Is it possible that Nessie has a cousin? Or maybe its just on a well deserved vacation? Whatever the answer is, the populace of Lakeside is eagerly awaiting the outcome.

My money is on a carp or other large scale fish because, lets not fool ourselfs, that is what it looks like.

78-year-old Florida resident Russ Sittlow has spotted something big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach at the coast of Pinellas County in western Florida.

The retired engineer first spotted the creature in April, and has now seen two of them – one bigger and one smaller. He estimates the largest to be at least 30 feet long.

“His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge,” he said of that first sighting.

Sittlow think it might be a sea serpent and has nicknamed it Normandy Nessie since he lives on Normandy Road.

“This is a snake I guarantee you, or a serpent like thing that looks like a snake,” he explained, adding that it might be an anaconda or a python or “a mutation there of.” He believes the creature to be dangerous and doesn’t recommend anyone swimming in the canal until the thing has been positively identified.

In order to capture the creature on film, Sittlow set up a surveillance camera and has now recorded “Normandy Nessie” three times. (see the video here) The video shows a dark form that appears to be 30 feet long swimming close to the surface. There is also a sequence where the creature is splashing in the water.

Sittlow’s neighbour Maria VanAiken and her husband have also encountered the elongated animal in the canal.

“I looked up and I saw this like huge-looking creature,” VanAiken said, adding that it wasn’t a manatee or dolphin.

She spotted the creature from her back porch which overlooks the canal. “This huge thing just came out of the water,” she said.

State wildlife officials that have seen the video do not give much for the sea serpent theory; they believe the animal is a manatee.

The fossilised skull of a gigantic predator has been found off the English Channel coast of southern England.

The skull is 2.4 meters long and scientists believe it once belonged to a 16 meter long pliosaur which probably weighed an impressive 12 tons.

The pliosaurs were a type of ocean dwelling reptiles that dominated the seas roughly 150 million years ago.

The man behind the discovery is fossil hunter Kevin Sheehan from Dorset who gradually uncovered the remains of the fragmented skull over a number of years.

“In 40 years of collecting, I have often been green with envy at some of the finds other people have made“, said Sheehan. “But now when someone shows me a find, I can say ‘That’s not a fossil, this pliosaur, that’s a fossil’.”

The fossilised skull is 90% complete and clearly shows the jaws of a powerful predator.

“These creatures were monsters”, says Dr David Martill, a palaeontologist from the University of Portsmouth. “They had massive big muscles on their necks, and you would have imagined that they would bite into the animal and get a good grip, and then with these massive neck muscles they probably would have thrashed the animals around and torn chunks off. It would have been a bit of a blood bath.”

Martill suspects that the skull may belong to a species of pliosaur that haven’t been unearthed until now.

“This is one of the largest, if not the largest, pliosaur skull found anywhere in the world and contains features that have not been seen before“, he explains. “It could be a species new to science.”

The skull has been purchased by the Dorset County Council and will be displayed in the county museum.

Internet problems keep interfering with the publishing of new posts. Working to fix it.

Florida seems to have gotten its very own alleged sea monster. It lives in the waters off Singer Island in the Lake Worth Lagoon, not far from the Riviera Beach Florida Power & Light plant.

An episode of the TV-show MonsterQuest was dedicated to the Floridian sea monster in April, after a video shot by Palm Beach Gardens resident Gene Sowerwine reached the TV-team. In the video, you can see a trident-shaped tail slapping the water and, in another image, an elongated snout breaking the surface.

As per usual, MonsterQuest didn’t succeed in identifying the animal. According to Florida Atlantic University professor Ed Petuch, the Singer Island sea monster could be a wayward arctic seal, e.g. a Hooded or Bearded seal. In 2006, two Hooded seals were found in this southerly part of the USA; one in Martin Country and the other 2 miles north of The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. The year after that, a Bearded seal was caught in Fort Lauderdale.

If the Singer Island creature is an arctic seal, this is actually more frightening than any sea monster since it might be a sign of how far over fishing and/or global warming has forced these cold water species.

“Nature is never constant, by law,” Petuch said. “The ice is melting, the surface waters are becoming more fresh water, and it’s driving them out of their normal ranges.”

Martine DeWit, associate research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, is leaning towards a less startling but equally sad explanation.

“We know manatees can look like that when they get hit by a propeller,” DeWit said.

The remains of a 15 meter[1] long sea living predator has been found in Svalbard, an archipelago located about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The animal, a species of pliosaur dubbed Predator X by the group of scientists who discovered it, lived in the ocean 147 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

Predator X hunting (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

The skull of Predator X is twice as big as the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and researchers believe the jaws of this hunter could exert a pressure of 15 tonnes[2]. The weight of the live animal is estimated to be around 45 tonnes[3].

“It is the largest sea dwelling animal ever found and as far as we know it is an entirely new species”, says palaeontologist Espen Madsen Knutsen[4] from the Olso University in Norway to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Knutsen is a part of the research team who dug out the skull and backbone of the creature during a two week long research expedition to Svalbard in June 2008. The remains were first discovered by Professor Jörn Hurum[5] from the Natural History Museum at Oslo University in 2007. Hurum noticed a piece of bone sticking up from the permafrost, but since it was the last day of the 2007 expedition the group was forced to leave the bone behind without any further investigation after having jotted down its GPS position.

Parts of the head and backbone was dug out during the abovementioned June 2008 expedition and together with an earlier find of a smaller specimen of the same species located just a few kilometres away, scientists have now managed to map together a good picture of what the live animal once looked like.

“We haven’t unearthed a high number of parts yet, but the parts that we do have are important ones and this has made it possible for us to create an image of what Predator X once looked like”, says Knutsen.

The digg site (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

In the excavated area, palaeontologist have found roughly 20,000 bone fragments – the remains of at least 40 different sea dwelling Jurassic animals. Once you’ve started digging in this region, it is fairly easy to spot the bones since their pale colour contrasts sharply against the black earth of the Svalbard tundra. The main difficulty is instead the short dig period and the fact that much time is spent restoring the excavated area after each dig.

“Each time we leave a dig site we have to restore the area. There can be no traces of our activities. This forces us to use half of our time digging up the same spot all over again when we return”, Kutsen explains.

Svalbard lies far north of the Arctic Circle and the average summer temperature is no more than 5°C (41°F), while the average winter temperature is a freezing −12 °C (10 °F). In Longyearbyen, the largest Svalbard settlement, the polar night lasts from October 26 to February 15. From November 12 to the end of January there is civil polar night, a continuous period without any twilight bright enough to permit outdoor activities without artificial light.

The team plans to return to Svalbard this summer to carry out more digging. They hope to find another specimen in order to make the skeleton more complete, and they also wish to unearth the remains of other animals that inhabited Svalbard at the same time as Predator X.

If you wish to learn more, you can look forward to the documentary shot by Atlantic Productions during the Svalbard excavations. The name of the documentary will be Predator X and the animal is actually named after the film, not the other way around. The film will be screened on History in the USA in May, Britain, Norway and across Europe later this year and distributed by BBC Worldwide.

Pliosaur crushing down on Plesiosaur with 33,000lb bite force (Ill.: Atlantic Productions)

All the scientific results will be published in a full scientific paper later this year.

You can find more Predator X information (in English) at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo: http://www.nhm.uio.no/pliosaurus/english/

The Kouris Dam, which impounds the River Kouris in the Limassol Distric on Cyprus, is now rumoured to house its very own lake monster. Tales about the dam being home to a “strange creature” began to surface three years ago, but these rumours centred mainly on the alleged dumping of a crocodile in the 3.6 km³ large dam. Today, local residents are instead talking about a serpent-like creature; a sort of Cypriot Nessie.

After receiving numerous reports about the creature, the Cypriot Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Affairs has launched a search for the extraordinary dam dweller but has failed to come up with any proof of its existence.

Even without any hard evidence, the Kouris Serpent may prove just as alluring for holiday-makers as its Scottish equivalent. According to local community leader Savvas Sava, housing may have to be constructed around the dam to cater for the needs of tourists wishing to catch a glimpse of the elongated beast. Tourism already occupies a dominant position in the economy of Cyprus, with 1 in every 3.4 jobs being found in the tourism sector.

The Kouris dam is the largest dam in a network of over 100 dams on Cyrpus. Situated at an altitude of 250 meters, the dam regulates the water flow of the rivers Kouris, Kryos and Limnatis. Water is also diverted into the dam through a connecting tunnel from the river Diarizos. The water storage volume is 115 million cubic metres and the overall catch area exceeds 300km². It is a fairly young dam, with construction being completed in September 1988.

For many years, residents living along the Great Kali River at the border between India and Nepal have claimed that a mysterious underwater creature is catching and devouring humans who dare to venture into the river. The rumours have now been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade, who says the perpetrator might be a Goonch catfish (Bagarius yarrelli).

Local residents says that the creature probably changed its diet to include freshly caught human flesh after getting used to eating the remains of partly burned corpses. In Hinduism, corpses are traditionally cremated in pyres as a as part of the funeral rite and the remains are often placed in a river.

“The locals have told me of a theory that this monster has grown extra large on a diet of partially burnt corpses,” says Wade. “It has perhaps got this taste for flesh by feasting on remains of funeral pyres. There will be a few freak individuals that grow bigger than the other ones and if you throw in extra food, they will grow even bigger.”

Last year, and 18-year-old Nepali was dragged into the river by a creature described as “an elongated pig”, but this was not the first attack. 10 years ago, a 17-year-old Nepali was pulled below the surface while bathing, and three months later the same thing happened to another young boy.

Jeremy Wade is a biologist and TV presenter who investigated the Kali River-rumours for a TV documentary. You can find out more about him and his work here. (http://www.jeremywade.co.uk/about_jeremy_wade.html)

Another lake monster sighting. This time in West Hartford, Connecticut. The pictures that are supposedly depicting a lake monster were taken in a water reservoir last Friday. The photos were taken by Barbara Blanchfield who claims that she witnessed the sea monster in her pictures surface and then submerge again while out photographing. The Metropolitan District Commission was shown the pictures and it is now working with their wildlife and patrol department to determine what (if any) is in the water.

People who have seen the pictures say that it don’t look like any known animal from the area. My personal opinion after having looked at the pictures is that it looks like a part of an old wooden, stockade like construction of the type that often used to be constructed around channels and ponds to prevent land erosion at the water edge. That also seems like a plausible explanation based on the fact that the sighting took place in a water reservoir which hardly seems like the most likely place to find an undiscovered Sea monster. But I might be wrong and no one would be happier than me if I was proven wrong and the pictures actually depict a new species.

Take a look at the video below and let me know what you think. Am I right or do we have a new (or perhaps a known) species on our hands.

So what do you think about the movie:

Not long ago we also reported on this video of a sea monster filmed with U/W cameras in Sweden.

A swedish documentary film crew claims to have caught images of a famous swedish sea monster on film. The beast is called “storsjöodjuret” which translates into “the monster of the big lake”. Storsjön is the name of the lake in which it supposedly lives. The monster have been sighted for a very long time and is very bellowed by the people who lives by the lake. It has been used to promote the area and have become a symbol for the area in much the same way Nessie is a symbol for Loch Ness.

The team have capture the picture with submerged cameras placed on a small island and you can follow the cameras online here. The film apparently show a large creature generating body heat and since there are no similar large sea creatures in Sweden except for the wells catfish which normally isn’t found this far north they believe the film shows the lake monster.

The team currently have six cameras but are going to place 24 more cameras next year and a NBC is going to make about the lake monster and their work this fall.

If you asked me the video is far from conclusive and very blurry but it is still better than many other videos like this so I decided to post it here and allow you to make up your own mind about what it depicts

The clip is from Swedish television

Transcript if dialog:
TITLE: Sweden’s Legendary Great Lake Monster (Storsjödjuret) has been caught on Film

ANNOUNCER: .6 constantly monitoring submerged cameras have captured poor images of the Storsjöodjuret, and an American TV company is on its way to depict the hunt for it.

VOICE OVER: This is supposedly the first moving images ever caught of the Great Lake Monster (Storsjödjuret) taken by an underwater camera . The red is representing heat. At least the group trying to disciver the lake monster want to believe that the swedish Loch Ness is captured on film. A special monitoring station have been built in Svenstavik.

SUSANNE KINDSTRÖM (on the team) It is clear that what have been caught on film is alive and contain cells as the equipment shows red (heat) So, is it a sea snake or a part of the lake monster on might wonder. As we’ve just discovered.

INTERVIEWER: It can’t be a piece of wood, or something else..?

SUSANNE KINDSTRÖM: That’s NO piece of wood, that I can see! Not with that movement pattern

VOICE OVER: This is supposed to be the back fin of the lake monster, the camera supposedly indicates heat on this video as well [Shown on video is a BLUE rectangle] Since the project Storsjöodjuret began this spring [2008], the interest for it has been huge – most of all from abroad. The american TV-company NBC is said to be making a film about the lake mosnter this fall. Next summer, they (the lake monster team) are going to increase from 6 to 30 cameras. It is on this small island the cameras are placed today.

INTERVIEWER: But.. do you believe you will ever get Storsjöodjuret on film?

KURT JONSSON (project Storsjöodjuret): I believe so. And I am also convinced that the technology will also be able to….(help) . in 15 or 20 years, you will be able to search any lake. From space or with unmanned vehicles. Technology goes forward..

INTERVIEWER: So this won’t end with it being (just) a piece of wood?

KURT JONSSON: No, I don’t think so. Something will turn up, yes.