In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by Bernard Heuvelmans

The Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm is dead long live the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm. Look at any piece of text where sea monsters are discussed as if they’re real animals, and you’ll soon see reference to the idea that they might be modern-day basilosaurid whales or plesiosaurs, and how the 1938 discovery of living coelacanths provides verification for this view.

I’ve called this the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm (or PSP), and while it’s not taken seriously by many (any?) working biologists and is not obviously or necessarily endorsed by those cryptozoologists who’ve otherwise promoted it*, I’d argue that it remains highly visible as the primary explanation for what sea monsters are. Common in these works is the idea that the sea monsters and other creatures endorsed by cryptozoology are animals belonging to lineages otherwise known only as fossils. Thanks to Heuvelmans (and his colleague and sometime co-author Ivan Sanderson), a cryptozoological community became established during the latter decades of the 20th century, the efforts of its advocates being realised in a great many books and even the creation of a society (the International Society of Cryptozoology, or ISC).

They included French naturalist and proponent of giant cephalopods Pierre Denys de Montfort, Dutch biologist Antoon Cornelius Oudemans, and of course qualified mammalogist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1968 book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (first published in French in 1965 as Le Grand Serpent de Mer) remains the great primary source on the subject.Ĭoelacanths and the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm. On the contrary, the possibility that sea monsters might very much be real and able to be confirmed and studied using science was promoted by quite a few authors and investigators, several of whom were qualified scientists.

After the ‘Medieval’ section, the exhibition is deliberately constructed to give the impression of diverging into two, this symbolically being a reference to the idea that the bulk of writings on sea monsters became ever more divorced from the scientific ‘mainstream’ from the late 1800s onwards.Īfter all, the idea that sea monsters might be real and out there in the vastness of the oceans didn’t die when the Middle Ages came to an end.

In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by Bernard Heuvelmans