Mary Anning and the sea dragon

Was one of paleontolgy's most sensational discoveries originally named after a lethal triphibian cryptid that had featured in that fortean classic The Gentlemen’s Magazine?

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT449

The head and neck of the "sea dragon" Ichthyosaur discovered by Mary and Joseph Anning from 2011. Part of the neck and torso of the specimen has since been lost. This species has since been renamed Temnodontosaurus platyodon It's now on display at the Natural History Museum (the British Museum, Natural History at the time.) Photo: Matt Salusbury

Among the great stories from the history of paleontology is that of how Mary Anning, then aged 12, together with her brother discovered the first identified prehistoric marine reptile. Mary's brother Joseph found the skull of what became known as Ichthyosaurus in the cliffs between their native Lyme Regis and Charmouth in 1811. From the time of Joseph's discovery of the the skull, the name "sea dragon" attached itself to the find – apparently because of its many sharp teeth and its big eye sockets.

After the Annings's discovery of the skull, Mary found the neck and partial torso of the same animal the following year. Although the Anning family had been on the poor relief, they managed to raise funds to pay labourers to dig out the fossil in November of that year. The Annings sold the skeleton of the "sea dragon" to lord of the manor Henry Hoste Henley for the princely sum of £23, enough to lift the family out of poverty. The fossil found its way to Bullock's Museum of Picadilly. It was later auctioned off to Charles Konig of the British Museum, where it caused a sensation.

The scientific establishment was forced to accept that animals had once walked the Earth or swum its seas bore scant resemblance to anything still alive in the 1820s. This allowed people to contemplate the immense span of time that had passed since the "sea dragon" lived – far longer than allowed for in a world created on October 22 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop Ussher of Armagh. The "sea dragon" undermined the prevailing orthodoxy which held that all animals were created as part of God's plan.

Various official names for the beast discovered by the Annings were suggested, including the grand-sounding Proteosaurus. But the official name Ichthyosaurus ("fish lizard"), Konig’s idea, finally stuck. One of the earliest life reconstructions of Ichthyosaurus was in Thomas Hawkins' Book of the Great Sea dragons – icthysauri and Plesiosauri, gadolim, taninim, of Moses. This appeared in 1840, so the "sea dragon" terminology was still in use some 30 years later.

The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1810, just before the Annings' discovery, featured an entry for "SEA-Dragon". This quotes an article in that fortean favourite The Gentlemen’s Magazine of 1749 describing an encounter "between Orford and Southwold" on the Suffolk coast with a "monster of a very singular nature." In the words of a witness who'd seen the creature’s corpse, its "head and tail… resemble those of an alligator; it has two large fins, which serve it both to swim and to fly… shaped like those which painters have given to dragons… Its body is covered with impenetrable scales; its legs have two joints, and its feet are hoofed like those of an ass: it has five rows of very white and sharp teeth in jaw and is in length about four feet."

The Britannica entry recorded how two fishermen captured the animal after a struggle in which one fisherman had two fingers bitten off, he died soon after. As the "sea dragon" was brought ashore, it escaped, flew 50 yards and lacerated another man's arm with its bite before it was battered to death with a boathook. The entry for "sea dragon" was still in the Encyclopeadia Britannica in its 1823 edition. Suffolk Ghosts and Legends quotes another Gentlemen’s Magazine article of 1750 that describes a living "Suffolk monster" exhibited in London. Possibly an attempt to cash in on the previous year's "sea dragon", this Suffolk monster looked suspiciously like a seal or sea lion.

Mary Anning is known to have been an autodidact who as an adult borrowed the latest natural history journals and laboriously copied out their articles. So could Mary have been inspired by the sea dragon Britannica entry in naming it? Lyme Regis was already a seaside resort where the well-to-do holidayed for the "sea bathing", while Encyclopedia Britannica was for some a much-used work of reference. So it's not hard to imagine a conversation involving a holidaymaker visiting Lyme Regis and remarking on the similarity between Mary Anning's new discovery and the spikey, bitey, many-toothed flying monster that mauled a fisherman off the Suffolk Coast half a century earlier, so extraordinary that they'd remembered it from Britannica.

In recent years, popular science media has revived the term “sea dragon” to describe Ichthyosaurs, the BBC's 2018 documentary Attenborough and the Sea Dragon being an example. (Yes, it’s another Ichthyosaur, whose huge skull was discovered on Britain's Jurassic coast.) Presumably, the current vogue for rebranding Ichthyosaurs as more accessible-sounding “sea dragons” is because Ichthyosaurus is near-impossible to either spell or pronounce.

SOURCES:

Encyclopedia Britannica Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature Volume XIX, 1823, which quotes extensively from The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1849. The 1823 Britannica entry for the sea-dragon is near identical to that in the 1810 edition, Suffolk Ghosts and Legends, Pamela Brooks, Halsgrove, Wellington, Somerset 2009, has a retelling of the story which quotes Britannica in its edition of 1810.

Attenborough and the Sea Dragon, BBC iPlayer, 2018, 2023,

There's more on the "sea dragon" and other Suffolk sea monsters and sea serpents in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

West Suffolk’s 1985 big cat flap

The county police forces of both Suffolk and Norfolk had multiple call-outs in April 1985 following a wave of big cat sightings in West Suffolk, according to newspaper articles from that time that I recently tracked down in the British Library. There was also a big cat alert at the time around the local RAF Honington air base.

This is significant as credible reports of big cat sightings in Suffolk in the 1980s are very rare. Read more...

Mermaids and manimals of Suffolk

The following extract from Mystery Animals of Suffolk appeared in Fortean Times, issue FT444.


“PRAY resolve me in your next Week’s Paper, whether there be any such Thing in Nature as Mermen and Mermaids, I being not yet satisfied in the verity thereof, notwithstanding the Reports of Seamen and others.” That was the plea from a letter writer to the Ipswich Journal, 27 May 1721. The vexed reader of the Ipswich Journal may well have believed in mermaids, possibly because his parents had told him from an early age to believe in mermaids (as they might convince their infants to believe in Father Christmas today). His parents would have a very practical reason for doing so, as we will see.

With the possible exception of the Orford “merman” found by fishermen off the coast at Orford Ness and described by medieval chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, Suffolk’s merfolk were all female – mermaids rather than mermen. And “Reports of Seamen” didn’t feature in Suffolk mermaid traditions. The Orford merman – possibly just a human gone feral – was the only merperson found off the coast, as all the Suffolk mermaids were freshwater mermaids, found in the county’s rivers, lakes, wells, pools and even its drainage ditches. Read more...

A sceptical report of wildmen seen in pre-Roman Britain in AD16?

A wildman on the porch of the church at Peasenhall, Suffolk. It dates from around 1490.

I found what's likely to be the earliest surviving reference to wildmen in England – or at least possibly in what's now England or possibly somewhere on the North Sea coast. The source is from way back in around 116AD, describing alleged events a century earlier.

The Annals, written by the Roman historian and senator Publius Conrelius Tacitus, describes the reigns of the early Roman emperors Tiberius and Nero. It covers the period from AD14 to AD68. The Annals was written around 116AD, so around a century after the events it describes, possibly using as a source the Acta Senatus, the records of the Roman senate, to which he would have had access to as a Roman senator.

In the Annals Book 2, 23-24 there is an account of a Roman fleet commanded by the general Germanicus Julius Caesar, nephew and adopted son of the Emperor Tiberius, in 16AD. This fleet was transporting legions returning from campaigns against German tribes and going back to their forts in the province of Germania Inferior (the southwestern part of what’s now the Netherlands up to the Rhine and parts of Germany and Belgium).

Long before the canals linking the interior to the North Sea were constructed, this required the fleet to sail up the River Ems (now on the Dutch-German border on the Fresian coast), sail into the North Sea and then make the dangerous journey along the treacherous Dutch coast before entering the River Schelde and returning to base. The fleet of Germanicus was blown off course, some troops were left marooned on islands in the Waddenzee around the Dutch coast or even blown all the way to Britannia (then still outside the Roman Empire), these troops were later returned to Roman territory, sent by boat by British "local chieftains."

Tacitus describes how shipwrecked Roman legionaries and sailors who had been blown off course to the "distant regions told the most amazing stories; enormous tornados, birds that nobody had ever heard of before, sea monsters, and enigmatic forms that were half man and half beast: they had seen or imagined them in their terror." Tacitus was apparently of the opinion that soldiers and sailors in the service of Roman had imagined such horrors as "half men, half beast" while suffering from what we would now call PSTD. At the time that Tacitus was writing, Britannia had been largely brought under Roman rule, and while it was known to be populated with "barbarians", Romans knew there were no wildmen to be found there. However, in the days of Germanus's expedition, the thought of setting foot in the wild, unknown land of Britannia, beyond the edge of the known world, induced terror.

So in the early days of the Roman Empire, there were already stories of wildmen, "half man and half beast" living on what was seen as the edge of the world, with at least one author showing scepticism about such tales. This is at least 800 years before the first evidence for Western European Wildman traditions.

Crypto-conference

Matt Salusbury reports from the 2023 'Rencontres Europeennes de Cryptozoologie' in Dinant, Belgium This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 441.

A clutch of cryptozoologists in search of an unknown animal - it turned out to be a domesticated rhea in the grounds


There was excitement as a dozen cryptozoologists crowded at the window. Someone insisted they'd seen "an out-of-place animal… an ostrich or something" walking past. Some were sceptical; there were cryptozoology in-jokes about "the unreliability of the witness" and ironic cries of "Canular!" ("hoax" in French). Our out-of-place animal turned to be a rhea pottering around its small "hobby farm" in the hotel's extensive grounds.

We were in Day Two of 'Rencontres Europeennes de Cryptozoologie (European Cryptozoology Meeting) organised by Abepar in Dinant, Belgium, where the Ardennes mountains begin. I had attended the event 11 years previously and struggled to follow the talkls in French. At the event in Brussels in 2017 I gave a presentation on pygmy elephants in my own very poor French. They asked me back this year, but for a talk in English.

Shortly after my arrival there was a "round table" discussion presented by conference instigator Eric Joye. Bernard Heuvelmans, the "father of cryptozoolgy", was, of course, Belgian. I learnt during the round table that besides his zoology gig, Heuvelmans also had a brief career as a jazz singer in wartime and post-war Paris, where he reportedly met Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker.

Eric described the proto-cryptozoologists who predated Heuvelmans - Erik Pontopiddan, a Danish Lutheran bishop whose two-volume The Natural History of Norway (1752-1753) covered kraken and mermaids and was the first published work to describe the giant squid. Other pre-Heuvelmans cryptozoolists included Pierre Denys de Montfort who in the 1770s collected possibly dodgy accounts of giant octopuses off France's Atlantic coast. There was also Antonie Cornelius Oudemans, director of The Hague Zoo, whose English-language The Great Sea Serpent concluded that these could be a long-necked species of seal (FT348:38-39). French dictionaries, noted Eric, have defined cryptozoology as "scientific study" for some time; it's firmly categorised as "pseudoscience" by an army of sceptical editors on today's English-language Wikipedia.

Some 15,000 new species are discovered each year, of which only a handful are mammals. The Kobomani tapir was discovered in 2013, three species of monkey, including the lopunji, have been described to science within the 21st century, while Caprimulgus solala, the Ethiopian nightingale, has been scientifically described without a complete specimen having yet been found - we just have one of its wings.

I did my talk on big cats in Britain (Suffolk in particular, it's all in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.) I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand all the French-language questions afterwards. One young first-time punter, a local vet's assistant, said he'd been inspired by recent news reports of a big cat seen on the Belgian-German border. (Eric thinks it might have been this report from 2021, confirming lynxes have returned to Belgium after an absence of well over 250 years.) I mentioned in my talk that two fortean investigators in the UK - Neil Arnold in Kent and Darren Mann (the Paranormal Database) in Ipswich - regularly get big cat reports from Belgium or the Netherlands as there seems to be no one easily identifiable to report big cat sightings to in those countries.

The tigre de Tasmanie (Tasmanian tiger or thylacine) - and whether it still lives among us-was the subject of Adele David's talk. Thylacines had been hunted for about a century in the belief that they killed sheep, with bounties offered for their skins. The practice was finally banned in 1936 - too late: the last known thylacine died that year in Tasmania's Hobart Zoo. Reported sightings of thylacines in the wild started almost immediately. The species was declared extinct in 1982. But Adele told us there have been around 3,000 witness reports, including many on the Australian mainland. There have been possible thylacine tracks, videos and recordings of its calls. There is consistency in sightings with descriptions of something "like a dog with a broken back", a "steep" sloping tail, a "particular" gait and a distinctive, strong odour.

Veteran cryptozoologist Michel Raynal explained how "the Belgians failed to discover the okapi". The British pipped them to the post by a few months, when Philip Sclater formally described Equus(?) johnstoni (now Okapi johnstoni) for the Royal Zoological Society of London in 1901, based on a striped okapi-skin belt sent by Sir Harry Johnston from Uganda. From the 1870s various explorers, first Germans then French and Belgians, reported "strange antelopes", donkey-like animals, something "zebra-like" or an "antelope-ass-giraffe". These were known by various peoples as ku-mbutti, atti, makapi, ndumba, abuttu or okapi.

Local chiefs showed their status by wearing belts made from the animal's striped hide. Lieutenant Leon Vincart, in the service of "the authorities of the Belgian Congo", in 1899 sent one such belt to Maredsous Abbey, not far from Dinant, where his brother was a monk and where Father Gregoire Fournier had a zooiogy collection which exists to this day. Michel tracked down the okapi-skin belt, still in the collection and logged just a few months before Sclater's description.

Dr Charles Paxton presented work "in its very early stages" that asked: "How can we explain cryprozoological experiences?" There are, he said, no rules for explaining encounters with creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster, for which there are now over 100 different hypotheses on offer, mostly involving misidentifications.

Charles's studies are now taking him from marine biology and statistics into the realms of philosophy and "thought experiments". Concentrating on historic sea serpent sightings with multiple witnesses, he described what happens if we have two hypotheses of "equal explanatory power'': we choose the simplest one. He went into offsetting complexity and explanatory power in explaining sea serpent sightings, "abductive arguments" as used by Sherlock Holmes and "the problem of causation". He admitted that he was "trying to find a tame philosopher to help me get through the philosophical literature" on this.

Looking to the future, Eric has plans for a cryptozoology "festival" next time, aimed at a broader, non-specialist audience. Details will be on the Abepar website www.cryptozoologia.eu.

Thanks to Eric (on the left), Pierre-Yves ("Pierro") on audio-visual and all at Abepar, and in particular to the equipe de traduction - the translation team, on the right: Cassandra, Corentin and Anna - all students from The University of Mons, who rendered my talk into French as I gave it.

Hotel Castel Pont a Lesse in the foothills of the Ardennes. Originally a chateau, it was bought by a steelworkers' union to become "The Castle of the Trade Unions", a venue for their congresses and cadre training. It was the scene of an abortive Declaration of Independence for Wallonia (the French-speaking region of Belgium) in 1950.

The town of Dinant's unique selling point is being the birthplace of Adolphe Saxe, whose birthday it was the day I left. The open-all-hours supermarket and the laundrette in Dinant celebrate the saxophone.

Rows of giant saxophones on the Charles de Gaulle Bridge. (The future President of France was wounded defending the bridge as a lieutenant in the opening days of World War One, when the town also witnessed a massacre of civilians by the advancing Germans.)

A statue commemorating De Gaulle's stand on the bridge at Dinant as a young lieutenant in 1914, although he seems to have lost a hand!

Dr Charles Paxton

The author with Abepar's Tintin in Tibet-inspired conference banner.

Michel Raynal on "how the Beglians missed out on discovering the okapi".

Mystery Animals of Suffolk and bigcatsofsuffolk.com

I am pleased to announce the publication of my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk - including an account of over 150 mystery big cat sightings, published by Slack-jawed Amazement Productions and printed in Suffolk by Leiston Press.


It's available from its distributors Bittern Books and yes, it's on Amazon UK too. If you're in East Anglia, you can buy it at Dunwich Museum, Aldeburgh Bookshop, The Halesworth Bookshop, The Chocolate Box, Bungay and the Arts and Craft Centre, Old Hunstanton.


So far I have been interviewed about Mystery Animals of Suffolk by BBC Radio Suffolk twice (most recently here) and on Gen-X Suffolk Radio, also by East Anglian Daily Times and Suffolk News website.


It's all on my website bigcatsofsuffolk.com, which has updates on Mystery Animals of Suffolk and events around it. It also has a "report a big cat sighting" form - I'm getting about one report a week now. The website also has footage of what looks like a black leopard in Wortham from 2010 and a video showing a very strange animal just over the Norfolk border on the edge of Thetford Forest.

Big cats around Bournemouth

This book review first appeared in Fortean Times magazine.


The British Big Cat Phenomenon – Differing Theories, Eye Witness Reports, and the Predators Diet, Jonathan McGowan, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 190 pages

The British Big Cat Phenomenon -Searching for Evidence and Territorial Marks, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022 191 pages

The British Big Cat phenomenon – Sightings, field signs and bones, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 183 pages

The British Big Cat Phenomenon - Environmental impact, politics, cover ups, and revelations, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 153 pages
Black and white photos, no index or bibliography

Jonathan McGowan's achievement in gathering so much evidence for big cats in Britain over a lifetime is extraordinary.

The British Big Cat Phenomenon comprises four slim volumes. It's unclear what order they're in, but I'm guessing Differing Theories comes first, followed by Searching, then Sightings and then Environmental as the final in the series. Differing opens as an evocative natural history memoir, describing McGowan's first sightings of big cats as a teenager in the 1980s. After an abusive childhood with periods in foster care, the young McGowan sought solace in watching wildlife, badgers in particular. It was through nocturnal badger watching that McGowan had his first big cat encounter - with a Dorset puma apparently stalking badgers.

McGowan's experience as a "field naturalist" frequently leads him to big cat sightings - the warning calls of birds alert him to a big cat in the area. He has received multiple reports of a British "running cat" observed while it's on sustained, long-distance chases after deer. This is different behaviour from leopards and pumas – ambush predators that can only manage short sprints.

Searching for Evidence dives straight into the evidence accumulated from McGowan's decades of experience in his "study area" around Bournemouth and Poole. Evidence includes scats (big cat poo) and scent sprayed on bushes and posts. There partial deer skeletons that have fallen out of trees after storms. There's much detail on scent markings and "scrapes" - claw marks in the ground made by big cats scent-marking, on big cat footprints and on how to distinguish them from dog tracks, as well as scratch marks on trees made by climbing leopards.

There are even urban big cats - their scats show up on Poole's parks, golf courses and streets. They travel along Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole green corridors and leave scratches on garden gates and they feast on rats, foxes and domestic cats.

People report hearing the low guttural growls and coughs of Dorset leopards. Puma screams are more cat-like or human-like. Police have been called out when a puma scream was mistaken for a human's.

On camera traps and why they produce so few big cat images, McGowan describes the phenomena of bait suddenly disappearing from them. "Something very strange is going on." I'd have appreciated sources for McGowan's assertion in Sightings, the next(?) volume, that cats can avoid the infra-red of camera traps by sensing electromagnetism through their whiskers.

Where is the big cat road kill? In some thinly-populated parts of the USA, a third of all young pumas are killed on remote roads. But given the UK's road traffic density British big cats would, McGowan believes, already be acclimatised to constantly passing cars and better at be dodging them. Big cats would probably survive most collisions anyway – just as many domestic cats somehow manage to crawl home after a road collision.

McGowan and others have seen big cat roadkill on busy dual carriageways where it's too dangerous to slow down to investigate. Returning a few hours later there’s nothing left, the remains squashed so flat as to be unrecognisable. He found the Blackwater Junction Black Cat – "totally pancaked out", its skin had melted to the tarmac and its bones were all crushed.

Sightings includes 69 photos of big cat field signs and kill signs. Included are many photos of big cat paw prints with McGowan's boot for size comparison, together with images of big cat feeding places littered with bones and grisly images of kills including dead swans and a half-eaten fox.

Stomach-churning detail describes how big cats kill their prey. Leopards clamp their jaws round the muzzle of a deer in a full-face hold to suffocate them, pumas often bite deers' noses off. Kills by dogs and foxes are much messier than those of a big cat.

Why are there so few photos of the big cats themselves? "This is a valid point," admits McGowan. There are a few in Sightings - a blurry photo of a "blonde puma" and a clearer trail cam image of a big cat sharpening its claws on a tree.

Environmental includes a guide to British big cat scats, with 22 monochrome photos of long thin twisted spiralled scats of leopards, lynx, puma and jungle cats. Some big cat scats McGowan's found contain bones and deer hooves.

There is no bibliography, index or referencing. Nor is McGowan's mostly compelling thesis helped by ranty digressions on how results of DNA tests are "covered up by the authorities". He asserts that the population is "brainwashed" into big cat scepticism, and so on. He's let down by his editors too, with basic typos too numerous to mention.

McGowan concludes Environmental by convincingly asserting that "the evidence for large cats living in Britain is overwhelming." Issues with the format and structure notwithstanding, the content of the four volumes of The British Big Cat Phenomenon make it essential reading for any serious British big cat investigator.

VERDICT: 4 stars ****


© Matt Salusbury 2023


Big cats in Dorset - expedition with Jonathan McGowan (June 2013)

Jonathan McGowan's large cat update (October 2012)


Britain's secret wildlife - lizards and big cats with Jonathan McGowan


Big cats of Suffolk website