Russia's Nessie: The Monster That Wasn't

It does get very dark up in the arctic circle at this time of year.


That is perhaps the most charitable explanation of the monster that wasn't, the mighty carcass that washed up earlier this week on the Russian arctic shore, convincing a group of meteorologists that they had found a dinosaur or some lost cousin of the Loch Ness Monster.


It was a sperm whale.


There were no feathers, fur, or limbs. In fact it was nothing like a dinosaur. Itar-Tass, which had first run the report, glumly admitted Thursday that the monster was indeed a beached whale.


One might have thought this a common sight for any local taking a stroll along the coast of Cape Nemetsky, some 1,500 kilometers north of Moscow. Or at least that they would be cool-headed enough to hold back from rushing to the nearest pay phone and shouting "Plesiosaurus!" or "Pteranodon Sternbergi!"


Clearly not. Itar-Tass reported Tuesday that a group of meteorologists working on the Cape had spotted the carcass and immediately reported it to the Marine Biology Institute in Murmansk. They had described the animal as dinosaur-like, about 12 meters long and 1.5 meters wide, and -- this is the tricky part -- covered from decomposed head to tip of tail or toe with feathers or wool.


This was surely the point when the worthy scientists of the Murmansk institute should have hung up, or at least sent a recommendation to Moscow to hold back on the vodka shipments to the Far North. To be fair, they did pronounce themselves skeptical. But they also sent a team of specialists to investigate.


"What if it had turned out to be a real dinosaur?" biology expert Mikhail Yakovenko told Itar-Tass when asked if he regretted embarking on such an unlikely chase. "I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't come here."


Before the Murmansk team had boarded their plane, Itar-Tass had dubbed the rotting corpse the "Russian Nessie," a reference to the fabled Loch Ness monster of Scotland."


But by Thursday, the game was up. The Murmansk team took one look and pronounced the cadaver a whale.


Admittedly, it was a whale in a very bad state. The tail had deteriorated so badly that at a pinch it might be taken for a dinosaur's head. And the body had become so twisted as to look like ... well, not much like a whale, anyhow. And the feathers? The ravages of time, the sea and the weather had blistered and scraped the skin so much that it stood up like a crest. Sort of.


And what about that dinosaur-like limb, the arm or leg that the meteorologists had talked about? That, Itar-Tass explained with disarming candor, was the whale's meter-long penis.