Stuff You Should Know - How Sea Monsters Work

Episode Date: December 30, 2014

Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited with creating the universe. Even today when the sea washes something odd ashore we see monsters - we understand there's much more than appears above the surface. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's

guest producer Noel, there's Nikola Tesla, it's Stuff You Should Know. There's Johnny and Scott. Are those your imaginary friends? No, that was Sigmund, The Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No. Once again, the brief cultural divide that spans between us. Was that from the 70s or early 80s?

Yeah, it was one of the Sid and Marty Kroff shows. Oh, HR Puff and stuff. Yeah, Sigmund, The Sea Monster, and Johnny and Scott were his buddies. Yeah. He was like a, you know, he was a dude in a suit, I reckon, but he looked like a big blob of kelp. I'm sure he was total nightmare fuel. With eyes.

That was cool. Sid and Marty Kroff, man. Oh yeah. Their sensibilities scare me. Yeah, I went to the place once in Atlanta, you know, they had down at the Omni, which is now Phillips Arena, they had Sid and Marty Kroff World or whatever, and I went down there once and looking back now it was like a drug-fueled indoor amusement park. You're like, why are there so many 20-year-olds here?

Yeah. I never really put this. Without kids. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I say this every single time that we talk about Sid and Marty Kroff, but you've seen the Mr. Show state of drug, you too, Sid's one there. Yeah.

God, I love that. That's one of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out for Mr. Show, but. That's definitely up there. Yeah. That's top five. Easy. Yeah.

And that's Sea Monsters. Sea Monsters. They're going to get you soon. Is that from a show? No. Okay. It's from this show. So, Chuck, are you familiar much with Sea Monsters when you were researching this, where

you like, everybody knows all this? Sort of half and half. Yeah. I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff, a lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of, and the extra research we did, too, yielded some new insights. But one of the things that stuck out to me, and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing, is that we've been seeing Sea Monsters for millennia.

We've been talking about Sea Monsters for millennia. Oh, yeah. And we still are. Like, have you heard of the Montauk monster? Yes. Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah. I remember when it came out.

Oh, okay. I just heard of it yesterday. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome. Yeah. In 2008, what was the beach?

It was around Montauk. Yeah, but it was a specific beach, Ditch Plains Beach. This girl and her three friends found this washed up Montauk monster. And I think what's funny is they still, there's a trend here in naming these things sensationally throughout history. And we still do it. Well, yeah. Because they could have called it like a decomposed raccoon, but they called it the Montauk

monster. Right. And the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon. Yeah. I mean, they pretty much think so, but it's not like you can't prove that. I mean, they have like a line of biologists from Montauk to Manhattan saying it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur, which makes it look awesome.

I've heard some other paleo zoologists say like it may be a sheep though. I think it was too small. Or other animals. Gotcha. But it's definitely not a sea monster. No. But this is 2008 we're talking about and some weird thing washes up on a beach and around the world, people here of the Montauk monster, except for me.

Yeah. Did you see the East River monster? I heard that one was a pig. Yeah. It's clearly a pig, but it's still kind of cool looking, but still they named it the East River monster. Right. And not a pig that was, you know, I don't know how the pig got there.

Right. The pig of East River or something like that. Yeah. It's probably like, you know, somewhere in Chinatown, a pig was no good. And they said, go throw that thing in the river. That's what they do. Yeah. Also, in 2006, there was one in Russia, I didn't see where, but on a beach, something

washed up and they said, sea monster. Yeah. And it turned out to be a beluga whale carcass, greatly decomposed, but it looked weird. It didn't look anything like a beluga whale. The point is, is still in the 21st century, whenever the sea spit something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly, obviously this is a monster and then biologists come along and say, it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing.

Or sometimes they say, this is new. Yeah. It's not a monster, but this is new. And this is the point, finally, that I'm trying to get to, is that the oceans, the seas cover 70% of Earth's surface. Yeah. Right. That's a lot of hiding places.

Sure. So, the oceans have known and still know intuitively that there is a lot of stuff down there that we don't know about, we don't know what it is, but over time, science has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't think of them as monsters. So our mindset has changed somewhat. Yeah. But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown organisms that we're still learning about.

Sure. So, 90 to 95% of the deepest seas are still completely like unresearch and undiscovered. Well, James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit of my soul with every movie he's made since Terminator 2. Oh, really? You like Terminator 2? I didn't see that one. Yeah.

It was pretty good. Yeah. I think that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic? Did you know that there was an alternate ending for it where, like, they kept the diamond? Oh. Or no. The argument where something like the Titanic didn't sink.

It worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's what it was. Yeah. I think. Speaking of recent sea monsters, though, which is not a sea monster, but did you see the footage of the anglerfish recently? That's another great point.

Yeah. Some of these deep sea creatures look like creepy monsters. Right. I mean, the anglerfish is one of the scariest-looking things I've ever seen in my life. Creepy. And it's real, though. It's just, you know, science is not like, oh, what is this thing? They know what the anglerfish is.

Exactly. But they live so deep, I think, until recently it had never been filmed in its habitat. Until, like, this year, 2014. Until, like, three weeks ago. Yeah. Well, apparently it wasn't until 1975 that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Oh, really? Yeah.

Interesting. 2006, I think. Or 1976, we discovered the megamouth shark. Yeah. The sea just coughs up new life to us that, yeah, where we're slightly more superstitious, we would have called monsters. So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters, but it goes back, like, really, really far, and looking at the different kind of monsters we came up with really kind of

reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it goes back, I mean, pretty much since people were writing stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster, like the ocean is always just enthralled, folks, I think. Yeah. The Mesopotamians had the goddess Tiamat. It was a sea monster. Well, yeah, and she was their creator goddess, originally.

So if you go far enough back in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from. That's where the universe came from was Tiamat, right? No. And then eventually, as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, she became what's known as the chaos monster. Yeah. And she was slain by a male hero, and then the world was created from that. But originally, she was just a benevolent creator goddess.

Well, and we'll see as we go through here, not all of the sea monsters, it depends on the culture and the religion. Some of them were benevolent. I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. The Old Testament had its Leviathan, even in the Bible. Right. And this is a question of mine, dude, is don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamat are one and the same, and in the Old Testament, it's the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesopotamian

gods saying, don't even bring that here. Like you created the world, I slay you. I am God. Well, I mean, there's a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament and other religions, and some people take great offense to that, others don't. What? That it's not, no, this is the word of God, period, there is no crossover, that's just coincidence.

Right. Yeah. 20,000 leagues under the sea, I think Jules Verne, this quote is pretty cool. In 1870, he wrote that great, great book, and he said, either we do know all the varieties of beings which people are planet, or we do not. If we do not know them all, if nature has still secrets in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans and other kinds of even new species.

To which the character receiving that monologue said, duh. Yeah, but it just, it kind of plays to the point that if there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains or deep in the jungles or deep under the sea because people would have seen them. So it makes it exotic and sort of grabby as a means of religion or literature, you know, lore. Right. Jules Verne was writing in, well, this is 1870 when he wrote 20,000 leagues under the

sea. So this is a time when a lot of the old myths and legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. Yeah. So like, yeah, that monster that you saw, that thing does exist. But it's not actually a kraken. It's an orphish. It's, yeah, or it's a giant squid.

Yeah. It's, you know, what it does and how it reproduces and because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah. That's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're a fan of mythology, they are, there are tons and tons of cool stories about sea creatures and sea monsters, all kinds of monsters, namely one Cetus, named by the Romans, King Cepheus, had a wife named Cassiopeia.

And they ruled Ethiopia, apparently. Yeah. And she said, you know what? My daughter, Andromeda, is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs. And of course... She's like, yeah, I said it. Yeah. And Cetus was like, all right, well, I've got a dog like head and I'm part fish and I'm

going to come up and kill your daughter. Yeah. And besides, I'm like, kill, kill Cetus. Yeah. And Perseus, of course, is always saving the day. So he apparently was flying back, carrying Medusa's head that he'd just chopped off. Oh, yeah. And he was hanging around and just happened to pass by, was it Persephone who was about

to be eaten? Andromeda. Andromeda. And said, all right, I'll take care of Cetus on my way home. My sword's bloody already. Yeah. Harry Hamlin. Yeah.

Who it was. Yeah. I never saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No. I didn't either. I just remember, release the Kraken was a buzzword. Yeah.

That's right. It was a knack for a buzzy movie, Lines of Dialogue, because that very particular set of skills was also a big thing for six months. But he said like four different movies. No, it was just another one. Are you sure? Yeah, taken. Yeah, it was a pretty good movie, by the way.

Sure. Sure. Did not see this sequel, though. Taken to Electric Boogaloo. Yeah, I thought it was weird when he started breaking. He's doing the worm. Yeah. But like not even very well.

I thought they get like a body double who is like a professional dancer. Well, he did not have a particular set of skills when it came to being on the cardboard. Chuck, we'll talk a little more about mythology and what it reveals about humans and sea monsters right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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So Chuck, you were talking about Perseus laying Cetus. Homer's Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. And there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah. Skilla or Skilla and Charibdis, Charibdis, these two point out an important and ongoing feature of some of these stories, which are that maybe they might symbolize something else. Real.

Yes. Either a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing. I know the Kraken, also the most dangerous part about the Kraken supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right. So this is kind of a, this is one thesis on why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory.

Yeah. A, you know, a tale told of a warning. Right. So that quote or that description of Skilla is described as having 12 feet, six heads atop long, sinuous necks and mouths bristling with rows of shark-like teeth. Well, that's probably a reef. Right. Yeah.

Sure. And then Charibdis lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated the waters there. Probably a whirlpool. Right. Yeah. So it's a story saying maybe don't go there. Exactly.

In your boat. Exactly. Did you read that thing on nuclear semiotics? I did not. Dude. Let me tell you about this for a second. Okay. So where is this, this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to express, so like

if you have nuclear waste and you need to put it away for 10,000 years and to keep people away from it for 10,000 years, you have to figure out a way to warn people away from it. Sure. For 10,000 years. Well, how could you possibly do that? Put it by Godzilla sign. That's one idea.

Sure. One of the other ideas, and this whole thing is called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways to, probably the most agreed upon way is to create this thing called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site, but purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away. So to add some sort of superstitious danger or something to the site that will get passed down and passed down. Eventually, the people surrounding that area who live around it will know, like, you don't

want to go there, you'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along. And they're saying, like, that may be the best way to pass along information. And that's exactly what the idea, one interpretation of what sea monsters are is. Yeah, it's like a ghost story, too. You don't want your kids to go in that decrepit house with all the rusty nails, tell them a scary old lady lives in there.

Or to play near the water. You don't want a carpe to take you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid. Pretty much. And to not doing dangerous things. Right, exactly. Yeah. And it works.

And over time, it's gotten passed down. So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like you said, the Kraken, possibly being the giant squid, or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right? Yeah, there's always been stories of the Kraken terrorizing ships off of Iceland and Norway. And the Kraken is noted because it is huge, like 1.5, a mile to a mile and a half wide. And you know, the Kraken is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.

If you see a, if you're a sailor back then and you don't know about biology and things yet and you see a, an eyeball pop out the size of a human head, it might make you think that's a big Kraken sea monster. Exactly. So then if that gets embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide with legs as, as large as the sailing mast capable of pulling down on a ship, well, I mean, it gets the point across to people back on land, like, wow, that was a really big monster that you guys saw.

How big do these squids get? They get to like 40, 43 feet, 40, 40 feet long. There's something even bigger called the colossal squid. Yeah. It's bigger, it's its own species, I believe. And it lives just in the Antarctic. So it was probably not the basis of the Kraken. Right.

It's probably just a regular old giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look, look at those things. Right. Exactly. They're scary looking. They are very scary and they're very, very big. Plus also the idea of the Kraken may have first come about before sightings of giant

squids. Yeah, sure. They may have been taken from whalers who found like crazy scars on whales who may have found like bits of tentacles, like huge tentacles in the whale's stomachs, things like that. The beak. What did this come from? Yeah, the beak.

Yeah. Because they did find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it up and used it for bait, but they preserved the beak and that just fueled the legend even more and more. So that's another interpretation of sea monsters is that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual sea organisms that we're familiar with now. Yeah. So it's the same thing. We just changed the name.

Sure. Well, you're a sailor. You're drunk, maybe. Sure. You may be hallucinating because you've been out at sea for too long. Licking toads. You may be licking toads. You may be physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued, and you see a giant squid.

You might write in your journal that I've seen the Kraken. It makes perfect sense. Sure. And it spreads and takes shape over time. You got a little scurvy going on? The Kraken's not the only one that's probably based on something real. The sea serpents. So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many-headed sea serpent.

It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said. Or no, I'm sorry. It was in the Old Testament. It may have been the Mesopotamian god. That's what I said. But Leviathan always is sort of a catch-all word now for any, like, large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah.

And apparently it's in Hebrew. It just means whale. Yeah. Which, again... This is probably a whale. Well, yeah. It could have also been a sea serpent. So sea serpents are their own things.

The Norse had a legend of the Jormungandr. Yeah. There's an urnlot in there and everything. And that was apparently one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah. That was the baby that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman named Angerboda, I guess, had the sex of the gods and created this creature. A sea serpent that wrapped around the globe.

Supposedly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just one example of a sea serpent, a huge sea-bound snake. And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for sightings of sea serpents. Yeah. Huge things of floating kelp seen in the distance. Sure.

Schools of porpoises. Yeah. They're all aligned together. There's one thing, though, that could have accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the orphish. Did you see this thing? Yeah. It is huge.

And if an orphish was swimming in the water, it could be undulating up and down and it looks like little spiny humps coming in and out of the water. So that makes sense, sure. They get up to, I think, 30 or 40 feet. Yeah, they can. I mean, there's plenty of photos of, you know, like 10 dudes on a beach holding one up. Because it takes 10 dudes. Yeah.

It's not like they all want their hand on the little fish. Exactly. You know? Yeah, there. And these aren't photoshopped either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures, too, but orphishes are huge and they look like big slimy kind of serpentine fish. Yep.

And then Chuck, Mer people were another kind of universal, I guess, sea monster myth. That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there were, there are legends around the world from cultures that are separated by space and time that had similar stories without possibly interacting. Yeah. So it makes you think that a lot of these people cited similar things and came up with similar myths and legends to explain what they were seeing. Probably.

The mermaid is, you know, if you've seen Splash, you think, well, what a neat thing to find a mermaid. But mermaids were not looked upon kindly because they would, and this article points out they would, at their best, they would just forget that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die. The worst, they would do so on purpose and take the men down under the water and lights up for you. Tom Hanks.

Yeah. Sorry, Tom Hanks. Sorry for the rest of your career. Darrell, yeah, his career was pretty lousy after Splash, wasn't it? Well, yeah. What? No. She, Darrell Hanna, though, in the movie, she was not a bad mermaid because she kissed

him and gave him breath. Right. Well, that's the Hollywoodification of the mermaid legend, or like Ariel from Little Mermaid. Oh, sure. And that dirty, dirty DVD cover. Oh, yeah. I guess it was VHS cover.

They probably corrected that before it went to DVD. Probably. Those Disney guys. Bored. Bored and, yeah, sure. Yeah, I guess bored and blank. So the whole Mer creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north that they consider themselves Nordic

rather than Scottish. Oh, really? Yeah. Orkney, I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland that's underwater now called Dogland that was around 10 or 12,000 years ago that's like this really fertile, neolithic artifact area. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

I don't know what it is, not Dogland. So they had their own things called Carpies, Chuck. And what's interesting about the Carpie is that the, the Kelpie, I was thinking Harpies. Yeah. Or Carpies. Exactly. But this is not Carp or Harpies. They're Kelpies.

Yeah. Which are actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes change into humans. So they're kind of Mer creatures. Sure. And every lake in Scotland has a Kelpie, supposedly associated with it, including Loch Ness. And it wasn't until the early 18th century that Nessie became like a sea creature that we think of her today when some dinosaur bones, plesiosaur bones, were found around Loch Ness saying, well, this is what the Loch Ness monster is.

Right. Before that, it was just a Kelpie. We could probably do a full show on Nessie just for the fun of it. Totally should. But it has been pretty much disproven unequivocally, of course, because there is no Loch Ness monster. But I just think things like that are neat. And when we did one on Bigfoot, it's more about just the legend and the lore around

it. Exactly. I'd love to do one on Loch Ness monster. Did you ever see the documentary that what's his name did, Werner Herzog? No, I didn't know he did one of those. It was, I think it was, he did a mockumentary, but not like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, just a faux documentary. Waiting for Nessie.

Waiting for Nessie. Where it just looked like he was, I can't remember the name, but where he was searching for the Loch Ness monster and saw, you know, caught it on camera, but it made it, he made it seem real. I think it was Werner Herzog. Huh. It was good, of course, you know. Sounds a little dishonest for Werner Herzog.

Well, I don't think he was trying to pass it off. I think. I kind of see this. Yeah. I'll look that up. It may not be him, but someone did that. And it was kind of cool because if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my God, there it is.

Are you sure this wasn't like something on cable? No, it says it was Herzog. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it probably played on cable at some point. Gotcha. Noel talks a lot more than Jerry does. So Chuck, that brings us to our third interpretation for where sea monster legends came from.

People finding dinosaur bones. Yes. And we'll talk more about that right after this break. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. I have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts, attention, bachelor nation, he's back, the man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times.

It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this. We have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me.

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Oh, well, so I said that Nessie became this kind of sea monster. On the time of Pleasiosaur, I believe it's what it was, skeleton was found around Loch Ness. They said, well, this must be one of Nessie's relatives. Apparently, that wasn't the first time that a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent. You mentioned the Chinese having a legend of some sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three feet long. Oh, no, I'm sorry, about a foot long, the Guizhou dragons.

They were basically marine reptiles called Kichosaurus Huey, but they were lucky. If you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got your hands on and it would bring you good fortune. That's right. I know earlier we were talking about just the early explorers and you can't fault some of these dudes because they were, you know, this one article you said, they were literally in uncharted waters and it was before the rise of science and all they had heard were stories and folklore and any time you saw if you ever see a map, a sea map, oceanic

map from the 1500s, it's going to have some sea monsters drawn on it even as just decoration. So it was a time when before observational data came along, it was sort of like the internet today, you pretty much just rewrote earlier history books over and over until they finally got a little smarter and say, you know what, maybe we should really observe something and then write about it for real. This didn't really lead to anything more substantiated, you know? Well, for a while, sure, but it was, they called it a transitional era in this article, which I think kind of sums it up.

Yeah, these were early scientists, early naturalists who were trying to get a handle on what the heck they were looking at, but they still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature. Like a whale. Right. It's similarly a natural biological illustration of a mythical creature, like a sea bishop. So the sea bishop was this thing that was supposedly caught and taken to the king of Poland because it was this fish-like creature that had like a meter and robes, like a bishop.

And apparently it could also talk and refuse to eat and it would make the sign of the cross and everything. And later on, somebody said, it probably didn't talk and make the sign of the cross, but if you look at the squid a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's got the hat and some of its flappy skin looks kind of like the robes, you know? So maybe that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously to this, we're talking like the 16th century, there was a pretty much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land had an analogy in the sea.

Catfish, dogfish, seahorse. All that stuff. And in some cases, they were right. There are catfish, there are dogfish, because we call them that. Sea monkeys. Right. The seahorse too. But all that kind of, it was a rough time for science.

It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah, because, you know, like you said, things were mistaken. Like a whale and a walrus might be a monster when it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were all kinds of tales that, you know, when it's repeated over and over, you get the sense that it's just one of those like urban legends back then. Right. I guess it wasn't urban back then though. What would it be?

Just a seafaring legend. Yeah, exactly. Of whales being mistaken for islands and like a ship will land on the whale and build a, you know, enroute down, basically get off the ship and build a fire. And then the whale, I guess, who's just chilling out at the surface says, hey, there's a fire on my back and I'm going to take your boat underwater and swallow you whole. Sorry. I'm a whale.

So beware of the, you know, whatever they called that, whatever culture called that particular whale. Exactly. Now we just call it a whale. And again, there's probably. Can you land on their backs? It was an embellished story, but they, they, it was based on a sighting of a whale before they called it whales and back when everybody lied about everything they saw.

Another culture that found dinosaur bones and created their own legends were the Lakota and Dakota Sioux. Yeah, sure. They came up with something called the Oomka, Oomka, Heela. Oomka, Heela. Yeah. I think that's about right. Sure.

It's from dinosaur bones found in, around the Missouri River. Yeah. And that was a water creature. Yeah. Well, they were very evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another. Yeah. And so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with them. Thunderbeings.

Yeah, but I looked it up. It was basically thunderbirds. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. What they knew is that it wasn't a tatanka. That's a buffalo, right? Yeah.

Yeah. They were pretty sure. You know, that's apparently where the legends of the psych, the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans? No, from finding like old, like elephant bones, elephant skulls, the huge cavity in the middle. Oh, gotcha. They're like, well, clearly there was a race of giants that just had one eye. No, they were elephants.

You know, we often joke like they were dumb back then. Of course they weren't. They were just trying to figure it out. It's like to make stuff up. Sure. They didn't have TV or anything back then. And like we said, a lot of this stuff was, yeah, was, um, they were like, oh, I'm sorry. A legend to keep, you know, boaters from going in a, maybe a particularly dangerous part of

the sea or to keep the children away from the water and like the ghost story and the nuclear, what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotics. Nuclear semiotics. Man, everybody. Go look that stuff up. Actually, Roman Mars has a 99% invisible about that one. Oh, cool.

Yeah. Nice. Nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat and effective, I imagine. We'll find out in 10,000 years. I guess so. What else you got anything else? I don't have anything else on sea serpents.

Just take a look at the anglerfish video and tell me if you came upon that. And see, we also didn't point out that this was before deep, not even deep sea exploration like this is before underwater exploration. Right. People were just riding around on the top of the ocean. So we're fascinated with it and we've gone to the depths that we can attain at this point. It's just pretty deep. I wish I would have looked that up.

I don't know how deep we can go. How deep James Cameron can go? Oh, he goes deep, buddy. But think about back then, man, when they couldn't, like, you know how scary that would be when these strange creatures are like, you see a giant squid. Yeah. And you're just partially seeing it. If you can't see it underwater, you have no idea what you're looking at.

Yeah. This is before the diving bell even, like, there was... Or the butterfly. That's right. Yeah. Do you like that one? Yeah. I finally saw that movie, by the way.

Hardcore, man. It was good, though. Yeah, really good. If you want to know more about the diving bell and the butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and, since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Opa, which is German for grandpa. I thought it was Greek for, like, good times.

Maybe. I don't know. Really? Yeah. Opa. Those are just three letters together. Might be something in Greek. But like my brother-in-law, Karsten, is German, and his grandfather was...

Opa. I'm sorry, his father. Yeah, his grandfather was Opa, but his dad was native German, so my nieces called him Opa. That's us ladies. I'm writing in specifically about your whaling podcast. Oh, how appropriate. With a family story that Lucy relates, my great-grandfather Opa left Germany when he was 14, pre-war,

to work as a sailor, came to the U.S. and was a member of the U.S. Coast Guard. One day he was part of a team that was clearing a harbor of some old, sunken chips to do so. They used the sophisticated method of throwing dynamite into the water to blast the wood apart and then gathered the debris. His team rode out in a 14-foot rowboat to gather up the wood shards, and noticed the blast had killed the fish. They floated to the tops of the crew, brought them in to the boat as well, waste not want not.

Sure. It was a business that came across a 16-foot, hammerhead shark that had floated up. Clearly, it would be a great source of food, so despite their small boat, they pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. No, I do. Well, as it turns out, the blast was strong enough to kill small fish, but only stunned larger animals.

The sharks slowly started to regain consciousness in the rowboat, and being confused and out of water was not pleased. It got to the point that it was thrashing about in the boat, threatened to destroy the boat, and likely injure or kill the crew members. So, in the midst of this chaos, they were able to flag down a sailor on a larger vessel and proceeded to shoot the thing to death while it was still in the boat. All of the crew members were safe, and they still got to feast on hammerhead shark, but now had a much more exciting story.

And you mentioned in the whaling podcast, Old Timey Whaling, crew members were deployed in small boats to get the whale, and were often injured and killed. I thought you might find this interesting, and I was hoping that you could give a shout out to my sister, Rachel, who turned me on to your podcast in 2009. She lives in France, and we don't get to see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is Wendy Baer.

She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and Rachel, uh, uh-huh-huh-huh, thanks for listening and for spreading the word and for being, uh, sisters. Way to go being sisters. Yeah. Thanks for writing in Wendy. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Wendy.

Um, and Chuck, this is our last episode of 2014. Oh, man. The longest year. So we want to say happy new year, everybody. Yes. And I want to say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife, Yumi. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.

That's the rights-free version. No, that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh, that's a good one. So it's not rights-free. Yeah. So happy birthday, Yumi. Happy new year to all of you great people out there in podcast land. We'll see you next year.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed.

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