Le « serpent de mer du Constitutionnel », « cet admirable et immortel canard ». Examen d’un running gag médiatique

This paper assesses the reality and sources of the Constitutionnel's sea serpent case, attributing to this newspaper the authorship of the invention of this journalist's joke (hoax), circulated as a running gag during the 19th century. The subject is not so much the dissemination of sea serpent stories as this problematic attribution, which became traditional in the history of the French press. At the end of our inquiry, after what might seem like a police investigation, it is established that the first mention of a sea serpent indeed really took place in this newspaper in 1817-18, when it was called the Journal du commerce, a paper that had no exclusivity in the dissemination of this hoax, which had its source in American papers. Before the digitization of newspapers, it was difficult if not impossible to find brief mentions or even articles on these elusive subjects. It was therefore easy to make fun of them without having to provide any proof or justification.

Early entanglement of Nova Scotian marine animals in pre-plastic fishing gear or maritime debris: indirect evidence from historic ‘sea serpent’ sightings

Marine environmental historians and ethnobiologists have resorted to imaginative means with which to back-cast the temporal frame of reference in order to assess recent anthropogenic changes. The present study, in support of previous work from around the world, indicates that anecdotal accounts from eyewitnesses of purported sightings of sea serpents provides indirect evidence that marine animals in Nova Scotia have been subjected to anthropocentric pressure for a much longer period than commonly presumed. This involves not only direct fishery exploitation, but also perhaps from being bycatch due to entanglement in deployed gear.Key words: Unidentified marine object, entanglement, fishing gear

DID NINETEENTH CENTURY MARINE VERTEBRATE FOSSIL DISCOVERIES INFLUENCE SEA SERPENT REPORTS?

ABSTRACT Here we test the hypothesis, first suggested by L. Sprague De Camp in 1968, that “After Mesozoic reptiles became well-known, reports of sea serpents, which until then had tended towards the serpentine, began to describe the monster as more and more resembling a Mesozoic marine reptile like a plesiosaur or a mosasaur.” This statement generates a number of testable specific hypotheses, namely: 1) there was a decline in reports where the body was described as serpent or eel-like; 2) there was an increase in reports with necks (a feature of plesiosaurs) or reports that mentioned plesiosaurs; and 3) there was an increase in mosasaur-like reports. Over the last 200 years, there is indeed evidence of a decline in serpentiform sea serpent reports and an increase in the proportion of reports with necks but there is no evidence for an increase in the proportion of mosasaur-like reports. However, witnesses only began to unequivocally compare sea serpents to prehistoric reptiles in the late nineteenth century, some fifty years after the suggestion was first made by naturalists.