WHAT’S BEING CLAIMED:
- The molecular ecologist that first likened the Loch Ness Monster to a whale’s penis said that Nessie could not have been a whale’s penis.
- He compared a blue whale’s penis to the Loch Ness Monster in a tweet, but the pictures were shared out of context.
- The ecologist continues to stand by his original statement: whale penises could have been mistaken for mythical sea creatures.
People started believing that the Loch Ness Monster could have been a whale’s penis, but the researcher that likened the sea monster to a whale’s sex organ said that his original statement had been taken out of context.
This started on April 8. Michael Sweet, a molecular ecologist at the University of Derby, England, posted pictures of a blue whale’s (Balaenoptera musculus) penis alongside a picture of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster.
His post highlighted the resemblance between the Loch Ness Monster and the whale’s penis. The ecologist speculated that in the past, sailors mistook a whale penis for a mythical sea creature.
“Back in [the] day, travellers/explorers would draw what they saw,” Sweet wrote on Twitter. “This is where many sea monster stories come from (i.e. tentacled and alienesque appendages emerging from the water, giving belief to something more sinister lurking beneath). However, [in] many cases it was just whale dicks.”
His post on social media accumulated more than 93,000 likes and was featured in tabloids. The images, however, had been shared out of context and as a result, people missed his original intention behind the tweet.
“I used the image of Nessie just as an example of what people used to describe sea monsters looking like,” Sweet told Live Science in an email. “There are no whales whatsoever in Loch Ness, so Nessie was a poor choice to use in this instance.”
He said that the cryptid, defined as an animal that has been claimed to exist but never proven, probably never existed. The ecologist also said the picture (which was taken in 1934) is probably a fake.
“The tweet still stands as factual,” Sweet explained. “Many whales’ penises (from various species) were surely mistaken by tired and half-starved sailors around the world.”
This is not the first time something like this has come up. There is a paper published in the journal Archives of Natural History in 2005 that speculated that Dano-Norwegian explorer Hans Egede made a similar mistake in 1734. The “most dreadful monster” he described is most probably an erect penis of a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) or a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), the paper suggested.
“Whales often mate in groups, so while one male is busy with the female the other male just pops his dick out of the water while swimming around waiting his turn,” Sweet said in the comment section of the original tweet, explaining that this is a normal behavior for larger cetaceans. “Everyone’s gotta have a bit of fun, right?”
Source: Live Science
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