“A Baby Sea-Serpent.--From Van Diemen’s Land comes news of the capture of a queer fish
- Date of account
- Late nineteenth-century survey
- Source
- The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise
- Reference
- The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise · selected passage 133
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English edition of a European scholarly compilation
- Translation
- English edition of A. C. Oudemans's historical survey
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
“A Baby Sea-Serpent.--From Van Diemen’s Land comes news of the capture of a queer fish
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention only“A Baby Sea-Serpent.--From Van Diemen’s Land comes news of the capture of a queer fish. It is fourteen feet long, fifteen inches deep from the neck to the belly, tapering two inches to the tail, and eight inches in diameter in the thickest place. There are no scales, but the skin is like polished silver, with eighteen dark lines and rows of spots running from the head to the tail each side. There is a mane on the neck twenty inches long, and continues from the head to the tail; small head, no teeth, protrusive mouth, capable of being extended four inches like a sucker; eyes flat, about the size of a half crown, and like silver, with black pupils. There are two feelers under the chin, thirty-two inches long.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis is a historical compilation of unusual-animal reports and argument. Witness testimony, repetition between publications and the author's zoological assumptions all affect independence and reliability.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares morphology, behaviour and setting while keeping misidentification, folklore, exaggeration, error and known animals available as alternatives.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.