A person who uncovered a giant jaw with finger-length teeth thousands of years ago did not know the word ‘dinosaur’. They simply had the remains of an animal far larger than most living predators they knew. There is no reliable…
Old sea maps often seemed to end where monsters began. Giant serpents coiled around ships, tentacled creatures dragged sailors beneath the surface, and strange carcasses thrown onto beaches appeared to prove that something terrifying lived beyond familiar waters. Modern oceanography…
Show a modern reader a photograph of a manatee and few will shout, ‘Mermaid!’ Its bulky gray body and wrinkled skin look nothing like the beautiful sea-woman of popular culture. But sailors centuries ago did not examine wildlife through high-resolution…
The modern mermaid seems easy to define: a woman above the waist, a fish tail below, long hair and an ability to live in water. If such creatures formed a real biological species, we would expect bodies, skeletons, DNA or…