Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Sea Monsters Work

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited them with creating the universe. Learn more about humanity's attachment to seeing monsters in the deep in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. 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. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find 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. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. It's December 30th, 2014, and podcast time. This is Chuck and we're talking about how sea monsters work. This is a great episode from back in the day. I remember, boy, this is hard to believe almost six years ago. Time is really flying, everybody. I'm getting old.

This is a fun podcast episode, though. How sea monsters work right here, right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. 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 a total nightmare fuel. With eyes. That was cool. Sid and Marty Kroff, man. 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. 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-a-toosets one. Yeah. God, I love that. That's one of the

best. I mean, it's hard to pick out from 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? Yeah. Okay. It's from this show. So, Chuck, are you familiar much with sea monsters when you're researching this, where you're 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. Okay. I just heard of it yesterday. 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 there 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. Yeah. And we still do it because it 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 monster, 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 hear 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 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. 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. And I think humans 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, we've, 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. Right. Yeah. But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown organisms that we're still

learning about. Sure. What's the 90 to 95% of the deepest seas are still uncompletely 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 or no? Oh, a monument 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, 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, it's 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. Yeah. 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

mega-mouth shark. Yeah. The sea just coughs up new life to us that, yeah, where we 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, she, 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 as, 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. Yeah. The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So 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 in 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. Yeah. 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. Oh, sure. Period. Right. 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 right 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 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? Right. Lore. Right. Plus, 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. So like, yeah, that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, but it's not actually a kraken. It's an orphish. Yeah, or it's a giant

squid. And here's 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, 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. 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, Poseidon went, 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, flying 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, 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. Liam Neeson has a knack for buzzy movie lines of dialogue, because that very particular set of skills was also a big thing for six months. That he said in like four different movies. No,

it was just in the 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, but like not even very well. I would have thought they'd get like a body double who was like a professional dancer. Well, he did not have a particular set of skills when it came to being on the cardboard. 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. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you. It got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view

on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, you were talking about Perseus laying Cetus. Yeah. Homer's Odyssey was also another great book of legends and mythology. Yeah. And there were some sea monsters in it. Yeah, Scylla and 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 one thesis on why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory. Yeah, a tale told of a warning. Right. So, that quote or that description of Scylla is described as having 12 feet, six heads atop long sinuous necks and mouths bristling with rows of shark-like teeth. 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 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? There is this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to express... So, 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 for 10,000 years. Well, how could you possibly do that? Put up a Godzilla sign. That's one idea. Sure. There's a lot of 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. So, 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 know, you don't want your kids to go in that decrepit house with all the rusty nails. Right. Tell them a scary old lady lives in there. Or to play near the water. You don't want a carpie 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 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 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 43 feet, 40 feet long. There's something even bigger called the colossal squid. Yeah. That's so much 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. It's probably just a regular old giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. 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 squid. 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. And been like, 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. Right. 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. Got a little scurvy going on. The Kraken's not the only one that's probably based on something real. Like 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. Yeah, but Leviathan always is sort of a catch-all word now for any, like, large,

unknown, huge creature. Yeah. And apparently, 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 umlaut in there and everything. Yeah. 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. All along the line together. There's one thing, though, that could have accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the oarfish. Did you see this thing? Yeah. It is huge. And if an oarfish 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. Right. 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. Right. Because it takes 10 dudes. Yeah. It's not like

they all want their hand on the little fish. Exactly. You know? Yeah, there. Yeah. And these aren't photoshopped either. There's all kinds of stupid fake pictures, too. But oarfishes 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. Yeah. Is there were, there are legends around the world from cultures that are separated by space and time that had similar stories. Yeah. 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, wow, 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 until you die. And at the worst, they would do so on purpose and take the men down under the water and lights out 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 would, she was not a bad mermaid because she kissed him and gave him breath. Right. Well, that's the Hollywoodification of the mermaid legend. Ron Howard. 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. Orcney, 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. Doggerland. That's what it is, not Dogland. So they had their own things called Carpe's Chuck. And what's interesting

about the Carpe is that the Kelpie, I was thinking Harpe's. Yeah. Or Carpe's. Exactly. But this is not Carpe or Harpe's. They're Kelpes, which are actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes change into humans. So they're kind of mer creatures. Sure. But 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. I think we should.

Totally should. It has been pretty much disproven unequivocally, of course. Sure. Because there is no Loch Ness monster. Yeah. 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, Verna 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? Yeah, 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 Verna Herzog. It was good, of course. Sounds a little dishonest for Verna 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. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams,

canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Dino, Josh. Yeah, let's hear it. Oh, well, so I said that Nessie became this kind of sea monster around 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. Or no, I'm sorry, about a foot long, the Guizhou dragons. Yeah. They were basically marine reptiles called Kichosaurus Huey. But they were lucky. Like 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. And 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.

Yeah. And it was before the rise of science. And all they had heard were stories and folklore. And anytime 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, we pretty much, 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. And 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. And then it's similarly a natural biological illustration of a mythical creature. Right. Like a sea bishop. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And apparently it could also talk and refuse to eat. Yeah. And it would make the sign of the cross and everything. And later on, somebody said, probably didn't talk and make the sign of the cross.

But if you look at a squid a certain way. Sure. It looks a lot like, yeah. It's got the hat and some of its flappy skin looks kind of like the robes. So maybe that's where the sea bishop came from. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And in some cases, they were right. Like there are catfish, there are dogfish because we call them that. Yeah. Sea monkeys. Right. The seahorse too. Yeah. But all that kind of, it was a rough time for science. It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah. Because 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 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. Yeah. Of whales being mistaken for islands and like a ship will land on the whale and build a, you know, and root 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, it was probably on their backs. It was an embellished story, but it was based on the 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 Unctahila. Yeah, I think that's about right. Sure. From dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah. And that was a water creature. Well, they were very evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another. And so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with them. Thunderbeings.

Yeah, but I looked it up. It was basically thunderbirds. Oh, 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 Cyclops came from. From Native Americans? No, from finding like old 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 the stuff was

legend to keep, you know, boaters from going in maybe a particularly dangerous part of the sea. Right. Or to keep the children away from the water. Yeah. 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 are just riding around on the top of the ocean. Yeah. 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 look 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. Right. 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. Or the butterfly. That's right. Yeah. Do you like that one? Yeah. I finally saw that movie,

by the way. Hardcore, man. It's 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 good times. Maybe. I don't know. Really? Yeah. Opa. Well, I'm sure those are just three letters together. It 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 this, ladies. I'm writing in specifically about your wailing 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 ships 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 notice the blast had killed the fish. They floated to the top, so the crew brought them in to the boat as well, waste not want not. As they were going about their business, they 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, 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, thanks for listening and for spreading the word and for being sisters.

Way to go, being sisters. Yeah. Thanks for writing in Wendy. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Wendy. 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. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. 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. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, 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. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.