Champ- Vermont

Lake Champlain is a long, narrow body of water situated primarily in Vermont, though sizeable portions of it extend into New York and the Canadian province of Quebec. The lake is named after Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer who mapped much of the area along the Saint Lawrence Seaway and founded the colony of New France.

Like many large bodies of water across the world, Lake Champlain is believed to be the home of a mysterious aquatic monster. Nicknamed Champ, or affectionately “Champy” by locals, the creature is said to be a dark gray or black serpentine beast with a long, swan-like neck and several humps on its back. Fairly typical for lake beasties, really.

According to some sources, legends of a monster living in the lake go back to the original Abenaki peoples who called it Tatoskok. The first known account by a European was in 1819 when a scow captain claimed to have seen a bizarre looking “black monster” that had a head like a “sea horse”, three teeth, onion-colored eyes, a white star on its forehead and a belt of red around its neck. True or not, this incident marked the start of a string of sightings throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Champ quickly became a popular legend around the Champlain Valley, to the point that in 1873 famous showman P.T. Barnum offered a substantial reward for the beast’s capture.

Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for Champ was a photo taken in 1977 by Sandra Mansi. According to Mansi, she was at the lake with her fiancée and two children when what appeared to be an animal with a long, swan-like neck suddenly emerged from the water only about 150 feet away. As Sandra and her fiancée scrambled to get the children out of the water, the object appeared to move as if peering around. Sandra snapped a single photo of the thing before it sank back below the waves once more.

The photo very clearly depicts what appears to be the humped back and snake-like head of some sort of creature. While many have claimed that the object in the photo is clearly a living animal, science writer Darren Naish, along with other skeptics, believes it is only a submerged log that briefly bobbed to the surface before sinking again. His Tetrapod Zoology blog has some pretty interesting model images to back up his claim.

Champ, like Nessie and many other lake monsters, is popularly thought to be a surviving plesiosaur. However as a cold-blooded reptile, a plesiosaur would likely not have been able to tolerate the frigid waters of the lake. There is also the fact that plesiosaurs had stiff necks held out straight in front of them, whereas Champ and its cousins often have flexible, swan-like necks. While it’s certainly possible that over millions of years plesiosaurs developed flexible necks and a warm-blooded metabolism, there is actually a more plausible candidate for the monster’s identity (assuming it is a real animal): a long-necked seal.

In his 1968 book “In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents”, cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans postulated that aquatic cryptids could be grouped into nine categories, one of which was a long-necked seal. But even before Heuvelmans, C.A. Oudemans wrote in his 1892 book The Great Sea Serpent” of his theory that sea and lake monsters were actually a kind of swan-necked pinniped (the group of animals to which seals belong along with sea lions and walruses). Even earlier than this, though, comes a description of a long-necked seal in James Parsons 1751 “A dissertation upon the Class of the Phocae Marinae” in which he apparently makes a scientific description based on what appears to be an actual specimen in his possession (a specimen which has, naturally, disappeared).

There is actual fossil evidence for long-necked seals. Acrophoca longirostris is a pinniped from the Miocene and Pliocene coast of Argentina and Chile that has a remarkably elongated neck. Although its length is nowhere near the plesiosaur-level length of reported lake monsters, it does provide a tentative clue to the existence of  long-necked seals.

It’s worth noting that one of the closest living relatives of Acrophoca is believed to be the leopard seal, Hydrurga leptonyx, an Antarctic predator that has an eerie, almost reptilian appearance. If a possible Acrophoca descendant bore a similar appearance to its southern cousin, one could see how it might be mistaken for a plesiosaur.

Some sightings of Champ may actually be explained by an unusual property of the lake itself. When wind blows for long periods across the surface of a long, narrow body of water such as Champlain, the force actually pushes the water and causes it to pile up to one side. When the wind stops, this water flows back and begins to slosh back and forth across the lake, creating an oscillating wave called a seiche. You can see a similar phenomenon by sloshing around in a bathtub full of water. This long, low wave may account for the frequent sightings of a wake or broad hump moving across the lake’s surface.

Lake Champlain has a second, unseen oscillating seiche beneath the surface. As with many lakes, Champlain is stratified into an upper layer of warm water lying over a layer of deeper, colder water. The layers are separated by a distinct boundary called a thermocline. When the wind pushes on the lake’s surface, it piles up the top warm layer, subsequently causing the colder lower layer to be pushed to the opposite side. When the wind stops and the surface begins to oscillate back and forth, the cold water rushes back, setting up its own wave below the surface. Here’s where monster sightings come in. The underwater seiche can be from 30 to 300 feet high! Some researchers speculate that these huge oscillations could stir up sunken logs and other debris that pop up to the surface briefly before sinking back down again, creating the illusion of a monster bobbing to the surface.

Whatever the true nature of Champ- living plesiosaur, swan-necked seal or merely  waterlogged flotsam- the beast has become a much-beloved legend among the locals who live around the lake, and has even received several festivals held in its honor.

SOURCES

Darren Naish's discussion of the Mansi photo

Naish's discussion of the prehistoric seal Acrophoca longirostris

A brief archived descripton of the history of Champ from the Lake Champlain Region website

A complite PDF of James Parsons' 1751 A dissertation upon the Class of the Phocae Marinae

A thorough discussion of seiches in Lake Champlain

LiveScience article about Champ

Not everyone is happy about Champ's popularity...

In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by Bernard Heuvelmans

The Great Sea-Serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise by C.A. Oudemans

Smetty-- Wyoming

Just after the end of the Cretaceous, the area that would become Wyoming was a great basin filled with subtropical swamps and lakes. Over millions of years, the vegetation of the region built up into peat bogs which were periodically buried and compressed under sediment washed down from the nearby mountains, eventually solidifying into coal. As a result, this former swampland-- known today as the Powder River Basin-- is thick with the fossil fuel. 

Of course, all that coal just lying around under the earth would seem to be a huge fire hazard. And it very much is. Coal seam fires- whether natural or manmade-- are a frequent problem in this region.  Natural fires occur due to grass or tree fires, and once they get going they can burn for decades.  After all the coal is burned away, a hollow space is left which can collapse. Such a cave-in formed Lake DeSmet, near Buffalo Wyoming.

Like most sizable bodies of water, DeSmet hosts its own aquatic monster, Smetty. Descriptions of the creature vary. Some say it looks like a giant eel with a horse-like head. Others say it resembles an enormous alligator. Still other reports claim it's a classic Loch Ness-style plesiosaur. Knowing the prehistory of the lake, it's not hard to imagine Smetty being some relic population of Mesozoic monsters hiding or lying dormant in deep, water-filled caves under the prairie until they escaped into the collapsed coal seam that became Lake DeSmet.

Rather than depict Smetty as the usual snakey-necked plesiosaur, I wanted to go with a more unusual lake monster interpretation.  English journalist and wildlife specialist Frederick William Holiday speculated in his book The Great Orm of Loch Ness that Nessie, and by extension, other lake monsters, might actually be a giant invertebrate, possibly a worm or mollusk. He compares the shape of Nessie-- a long neck, boat-shaped body and paddled limbs-- to the strange fossil worm Tullimonstrum gregarium found in the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois. He explains that Nessie, or rather, Nessies, since there would obviously have to be a whole population of the creatures, being invertebrates would explain several anomalies about the monsters, such as why no bodies have ever been found (the creatures have no bones to wash ashore, and their gelatinous corpses rot quickly), why sonar scans of the loch sometimes pick up a creature and sometimes don’t (if the animal is lying on the bottom like a slug, it wouldn’t show up on the radar), why they aren’t seen more (being gilled invertebrates means they don’t have to come to the surface for air) and why many people who have seen the beasts up close often seem more horrified and revolted than one would expect from merely sighting a giant aquatic reptile. In Holiday's explanation, the “neck” of Nessie is actually the trunk of this invertebrate while the paddled limbs are related to the odd extensions on the side of Tullimonstrum*.

But then if Nessie is a giant Tullimonstrum, or at least a distant relative, what then is Tullimonstrum itself? Although a definitive taxonomic placement hasn’t been made, it does bear similarity to a mollusk.  Specifically Pterotrachea, a group of pelagic sea snails. 

Pterotrachea coronata, from the Tree of Life Web Project. Below is the living animal in action!

If you’re confused at what you’re looking at, the dunce-cap like  structure at the front is a trunk of sorts with a hard “beak” called a buccal mass.  The flappy thing on top is the snail’s foot modified into a fin. The animal is, thus, swimming on its back with the trunk flopping back over its up-turned stomach.  Although Tullimonstrum’s resemblance to Pterotrachea is probably just convergent evolution, the former creature does possess a hardened, pincer-like buccal mass at the end of its trunk, along with a pair of prominent eyes like a predatory mollusk. At the very least, it’s quite possible that Tullimonstrum was another species of marine snail that developed a similar body plan.

Anyway, this mini-lecture was mostly just a roundabout way of saying that I based my Smetty design on Pterotrachea. Like Holiday’s invertebrate Nessie, the DeSmet monsters have long, flexible trunks which frightened onlookers often mistake for plesiosaur-like necks. This trunk actually does parallel the plesioaur’s elongated neck since it creates a smaller profile, allowing the animal to get in close to prey without causing disturbances in the water from its larger body.

As to how these creatures even got into Lake DeSmet in the first place, I still like the idea of them living in aquatic caves beneath the prairie and migrating into the gap created after the pre-lake coal seam burned away and filled with water.

By the way, go here for an awesome blog post about Pterotrachea by Joseph Jameson-Gould of Real Monstrosities 

*The paleontology/biology nerd in me is compelled to point out that while Holiday compares Nessie’s flippers to the projections on the side of Tullimonstrum, said projections are, in fact, eyes on the fossil animal, not locomotory appendages.

SOURCES 

The Great Orm of Loch Ness by Frederick William Holiday

http://www.ultimatewyoming.com/sectionpages/sec3/extras/desmetmonster.html

http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/article_6c9c4598-de32-5d4d-a3c4-749e750a7fd1.html

Sinkhole Sam-- Kansas

Although Kansas is primarily known for its agricultural lands and prairies, a corridor of lakes and wetlands once ran through the state-- all across the Midwest, actually-- providing an important stop-over point for migrating birds.

Over the years land development drained these wetlands to the point that today the corridor is just a few small scattered ponds, potholes and playas.  The largest remnant body of water is Lake Inman, in the center of the state. Though the lake is tiny-- only about a quarter mile surface area-- it is said to house its very own monster, Sinkhole Sam.

 Sam is described as a 15 foot long, serpentine creature as round and wide as a car tire. The beast was first sighted by two unknown fisherman who reportedly took shots at it (as people tend to do when sighting a creature potentially new to science, apparently), but failed to kill it. Word of the lake creature spread, bringing in lots of tourist traffic to the small town of Inman. Like other aquatic monsters, of course, Sam failed to make any major appearances, so interest soon dried up.

According to sources, Sinkhole Sam is/was a creature called a "foopengerkle", though exactly what  that is is never explained. As to how Sam got into such a small land-locked lake, some speculate that it was a prehistoric creature that inhabited a cavern at the bottom of the lake and only came to the surface as the wetlands were drained.

For my interpretation of Sinkhole Sam, I imagined it as a gigantic caecilian-- a snake or worm-like amphibian (order Gymnophiona). Caecilians are mostly found in warmer parts of South and Central America, Africa and South Asia. Although most are burrowers, those in the order Typhlonectidae are aquatic. If Sam is one of these animals, or more likely a colony of them, it could survive the winter months in deep hibernation buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake as frogs and salamanders do.

Most caecilians eat small, subterranean prey such as earthworms, springtails and other invertebrates.  But a large aquatic species like the 15 foot long foopengerkle would likely subsist on the huge colonies of birds that stop off at this important watering hole during their migration.  When the lake was part of an extensive wetland system, the foopengerkles may have been abundant-- perhaps playing an important role in the food chain similar to otters or alligators.  As the waters have been drained away, the population must have plummeted until  now when only a tiny remnant colony remains in Lake Inman. If they have not already gone extinct.

Sources:

http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2010/06/the-legend-of-sink-hole-sam/

http://www.thekansan.com/article/20100612/NEWS/306129943

Prairie: A Natural History by Candace Savage