How a local ‘sea monster’ spawned a century of myth, mystery and scientific discovery

In May 1925, a strange decaying corpse washed ashore on Moore’s Beach, now known as Natural Bridges State Beach, in Santa Cruz. Locals who swarmed out to investigate the specimen described elephantine legs, a fish-like tail and a long neck stretched across the sand.

It was quickly dubbed a sea monster.

Photographs published at the time reveal that much of the monster’s carcass had collapsed, leaving only the head mostly intact. Its eyes were small, its forehead bulbous;  its jaws formed a duck-like beak. Sensational accounts were plastered across newspapers from California to Texas.

The story of this “monster” reveals how genuine scientific mysteries feed fear of the unknown, spawning myths and misinformation. The rotting corpse has, over the last 100 years, stoked arguments between creationists and evolutionary biologists. But together with the remains of stranded marine animals more recently found on the beaches of California, the long-ago discovery has also helped scientists understand the biology of an elusive deep-sea whale.

Barton Warren Evermann, then director of the California Academy of Sciences, visited the specimen on the beach and identified it as a beaked whale — a little-studied group of whales with dolphin-like heads — and had the specimen sent to the academy. Scientists there later confirmed the creature was a Baird’s beaked whale, Berardius bairdii, publishing their findings in 1929 in the Journal of Mammalogy.

The Santa Cruz sea monster shows how decay can mislead even careful observers. Decomposing whales can form a tubular shape known as a “whale sock,” said Moe Flannery, ornithology and mammalogy collections manager at the California Academy of Sciences.

When a decaying whale carcass hits the beach, injury to the body, as well as gas released when microbes digest the tissues and gut contents, can cause the sock to transform into weird shapes. “All the bones fall out, and the skin just kind of flows around,” Flannery said.

This likely explains why witnesses spoke of the monster’s long neck. The Santa Cruz Evening News reported that a local resident and twice-president of the National History Society of British Columbia by the name of E.L. Wallace suggested it was a plesiosaur — a long-necked, predatory marine reptile from the age of the dinosaurs. According to the news article, Wallace speculated that the beast had been preserved for eons in glacial ice that recently melted.

But Wallace’s identity is a mystery. In a post on Instagram, the California Academy of Sciences noted that there are no records that he existed or was president of the British Columbia society. Still, his erroneous identification thrust the decaying remains into the heart of sea monster lore — Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness Monster has been claimed to be a plesiosaur that somehow escaped extinction — and into the war between creationism and evolution.

The monster washed up just a couple of months before the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a Tennessee teacher was accused of violating a state law that banned teaching about human evolution. For creationists, the existence of modern plesiosaurs would support claims that the Earth has only existed for a few thousand years, and that people and dinosaurs coexisted — the modern young-earth creationist website Genesis Park includes a post on the Santa Cruz sea monster.

The real science behind the monster is less outlandish — but still mysterious. Today, the creature’s preserved skull resides at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It isn’t on public display, but is available to scientists conducting research. “We’re like a library, but instead of books, we have specimens,” said Flannery, who showed the remains to Bay Area News Group in early November.

The collection includes bones from two Baird’s beaked whales that washed onto the San Francisco and Point Reyes coasts in 2003 and 2016. Although the more recent carcasses were more complete when they were found, only a few bones were collected. The species can grow to 35 feet long and weigh over 26,000 pounds, making storage of entire specimens difficult.

While these whales are massive, they are notoriously elusive: “What’s amazing to me is that you can have an animal that is 25 feet long, basically bigger than anything that lives on land, and we know basically zero about it,” said Ari Friedlaender, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Cruz.

Friedlaender has seen only a handful of Baird’s beaked whales in 15 years of studying marine life in California. Rather than go searching for the whales, Friedlaender collaborates with other researchers who monitor whale sounds through an underwater microphone sitting at the end of a 32-mile cable in Monterey Bay. When the team is notified that Baird’s beaked whales are in the area, all hands are on deck. “We’ll drop everything we’re doing and try and get out there,” he said.

Strandings like the one in 1925 provide a rare opportunity to study a whale’s age, diet, health and causes of death using bone and teeth samples. “There is a huge amount we can learn from them. There’s almost no ceiling on how valuable an individual like this is,” said Friedlaender.

What scientists do know is that the species is particularly social, typically traveling in groups of five to 20. They live and feed in deep water, diving a mile down to hunt for prey including squid, octopus and rockfish. Sometimes, they will remain underwater for over an hour.

“They’re very cryptic,” said Friedlaender. “They’re at the surface very infrequently.”

The Santa Cruz sea monster story shines a light on human psychology, highlighting how readily the unfamiliar is transformed into mythical tales. “When something this big washes up that you’ve never seen before and you have no perspective for what it is, ‘a monster’ seems very appropriate,” Friedlander said.

It also illustrates how people use monster stories to rationalize their fears and represent challenging problems facing society, according to Michael Chemers, director of the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

“One of the things that people fear most is the unknown, and the sea represents the deep unknown,” he said.