How Sea Creatures Became Mythology
Myths animate the human imagination, yet their roots often lie in genuine encounters with misunderstood wildlife. Across the world’s oceans and lakes, mariners and coastal dwellers have spun tales of mermaids, unicorns, krakens, and sea serpents, while terrestrial observers have whispered of enigmatic beasts inhabiting freshwater lochs. A closer look at these legends reveals that each mythical entity can be traced to real animals: the mermaid to sirenians (dugongs and manatees), the unicorn to narwhals, the kraken to giant squids, and sea serpents—even the famous “Nessie” of Loch Ness—to whales and other marine vertebrates. This exploration, grounded exclusively in scholarly research, unravels how sensory misinterpretation, low visibility, and a generous helping of storytelling birthed enduring legends.
Mermaids: Sirens of the Sea Cows
Ancient seafarers voyaging into tropical and subtropical waters often reported sightings of human-like figures breasting the waves. These “mermaids” were described as half-woman, half-fish, luring sailors with their beauty—yet no creature matching that description exists. Instead, slow-moving, large marine mammals known as dugongs and manatees (order Sirenia) are the best candidates for these early misidentifications.
Early European explorers repeatedly encountered dugongs and manatees grazing on seagrass near coasts. Sirenians resurfaced for air, exhibiting a rounded, fore-flippered body with a horizontally flattened tail—features far removed from a fish-tailed maiden, yet from a distance or under poor lighting they could carry a vaguely human silhouette. Indigenous names for these animals, such as the Malay word “dugong” itself meaning “lady of the sea,” hint at their mermaid associations.
5000-year-old cave paintings at Tambun Cave in Malaysia depict dugong-like outlines with humanoid attributes, suggesting an early link between dugongs and mermaid folklore. When Christopher Columbus sighted three such creatures off Hispaniola in 1493, he described them as “not as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face like a man,” inadvertently recording North America’s first written manatee encounter and further seeding European mermaid tales.
The very scientific name for the order, Sirenia, recalls the sirens of Greek mythology, winged temptresses whose voices lured sailors to their doom. Over centuries, the conflation of dugong/manatee sightings with seafaring superstition transformed fleshy, blubbery mammals into seductive sea nymphs. In reality the mermaid’s “tail” was the paddle-shaped sirenian tail, her “breasts” mammary glands on the chest, and her flowing hair the algae and seaweed caught on the animal’s back.
Despite mermaids’ lasting appeal—from Andersen’s The Little Mermaid to Disney’s film—modern marine biology confirms that these legends were built on misperceptions of endangered sirenians. Today, both dugongs and manatees are recognized as vulnerable, reminding us that the real sea’s inhabitants, not mythical hybrids, deserve our protective gaze.
Unicorns: The Horns of the Sea
From medieval tapestries to Renaissance unicorn hunts, the singular horned beast captivated European imaginations as a powerful symbol of purity and healing. Hunting lore claimed that only a virgin could capture the unicorn to harvest its horn, which pawned as a cure-all against poisons. Yet no one ever found a horse-like quadruped with a spiraled appendage—until narwhals entered the scene.
Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) are Arctic cetaceans whose most distinctive feature is a long, helical tusk projecting from the upper jaw. This tusk is an elongated canine tooth that can exceed nine feet in length and spiral tightly in its growth pattern. When isolated, detached, and sold as “unicorn horns,” narwhal tusks fetched astronomical prices in medieval and early modern Europe, offering a plausible “material basis” for the mythic horn’s purported virtues.
Narwhal tusks arrived in European markets as curiosities amid burgeoning Renaissance Wunderkammer collections. Scholars and collectors, lacking firsthand narwhal encounters, accepted them as evidence of the unicorn’s reality. Leather and ivory treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe and illustrate spiraled cornu, extolling their medicinal virtues against poison, epilepsy, and even plague—virtues modern medicine cannot substantiate but which myth transformed into perceived facts.
By the eighteenth century, naturalists such as Ole Worm and Edward Topsell began critically assessing “unicorn horns,” noting their resemblance to narwhal tusks. Worm confidently attributed many legendary horn specimens to cetaceans, and by the nineteenth century, unicorns had surrendered the material stage to narwhals, though the symbolical power of the unicorn horn outlived the creature itself in art and heraldry.
Thus, the mythical unicorn was less a forest dweller than the Arctic dweller’s dental oddity—its horn an echo of narwhal biology channeled through commerce, translation, and mythic credulity.
The Kraken: From Giant Squid to Giant Sea Monster
Scandinavian sagas speak of the kraken as a colossal sea demon—an island-sized creature capable of engulfing entire fleets. Reports from medieval Iceland and Norway describe enormous tentacled beings whose movements stirred whirlpools, dragging ships to the abyss. While the kraken’s legendary scale defies modern measurement, evidence suggests giant squids (Architeuthis spp.) fueled these tales.
Giant squid inhabit bathyal depths across the globe. They can exceed 40 feet in total length, including two long feeding tentacles, and possess proportionally large eyes adapted to the dark ocean. Their tentacles—armed with suckers—can tear at wooden hulls; their stealthy surfacing might appear as an undulating island emerging from the deep. Dead or wounded giants drifting to the surface could be glimpsed by coastal fishermen, who lacked the comparative anatomy to identify the rare sighting as a cephalopod.
In 2014’s “The Kraken: when myth encounters science,” Salvador and Tomotani analyze Norse sagas, concluding that the kraken legend solidified into a cephalopod form only by the early modern era, as seafaring explorers and naturalists reported giant squid carcasses and sucked-up squid in whale stomachs. Whale hunters often encountered massive suction scars on sperm whales—secondary evidence of epic squid battles deep below. These scars, along with occasional squid beaks in whale stomachs, supported the existence of giant cephalopods, which cryptic sightings anthropomorphized into kraken lore.
Scientific advances in the twentieth century, including deep-sea photography and submersible captures, have documented giant squid in situ, yet no kraken match has ever been observed. Nonetheless, the fusion of squid biology, seafaring peril, and oral tradition forged one of the sea’s most enduring monsters.
Sea Serpents: From Orcas to Monsters
Legends of sea serpents appear in maritime cultures worldwide. Tales describe long, narrow beasts undulating on the surface, ringed with humps, dragging nets and wreckage in their wake. Like mermaids and krakens, sea serpents found their origin in legitimate sightings of marine vertebrates—often misidentified under duress or distance.
Killer whales (Orcinus orca) and pilot whales, when hunting in pods, exhibit sinuous dorsal fin sequences that crest and submerge in rhythmic waves. To a coastal witness, a line of surfacing orcas or a pod of whales traveling abreast could easily present as a single, multi-humped creature stretching hundreds of feet. In “Extreme Climatic Upheaval, Emergency Resource Adaptation, and the Emergence of Folkloric Belief,” France argues that many nineteenth-century sea serpent reports from the Western Pacific coincide with seasons of seismic sea changes that disturbed whale migration, drawing whales closer inshore and leading to “many-humped” sightings.
Similarly, basking sharks and oarfish—megafaunal fishes exceeding 20 feet in length—have surfaced unexpectedly, their dorsal fins and ribbonlike bodies joined by intermittent curves. Early observers, untrained in marine zoology, lacked secure frames of reference, and storytelling quickly bridged the gap between uncertainty and explanation. Paper trails of UMO (unidentified marine object) reports from the 1800s record colossal eels, aquatic dragons, and serpents whose descriptions match the anatomy and movement of known species entangled in fishing gear or floating in coastal shallows.
The same impulse that misconstrued dugongs as mermaids bottled whales and sharks as sea serpents, weaving zoological reality into the tapestry of folklore.
Nessie: Scotland’s Freshwater Phantom
Loch Ness, Scotland’s deepest freshwater loch, has rippled with a special monster myth since a 1933 newspaper article by water bailiff Alex Campbell. Before that, medieval hagiographies recorded a “water beast” in the River Ness, but modern interest ignited when motorists Aldie and John Mackay reported seeing a whale-like shape rolling on the loch surface. Protean glimpses followed: long-necked silhouettes, humps breaking the water’s mirror, and enigmatic photographs.
The most famous image, the 1934 “surgeon’s photograph” by R. K. Wilson, seemed to show a small head and arched neck peering from the water. Though later revealed as a prank involving a toy submarine, the photograph cemented “Nessie” in public lore. Sonar explorations, underwater photography, and even environmental DNA sampling have failed to identify any large unknown reptile in Loch Ness. Instead, scientists point to misidentified eels, otters, waves, and logging debris as sources for Nessie sightings.
In “Nessie: The Loch Ness Monster,” Loxton and Prothero dissect early twentieth-century newspaper reports, showing how sensational journalism and public fascination amplified every ambiguous sighting into corroborative testimony. They underscore that Loch Ness’s murky waters, steep banks, and sudden squalls create optical illusions—wave patterns, floating logs, and fish schools rising in unison mimic a sinuous neck and back.
Nessie survives as an icon not of undiscovered biology but of human desire for mystery in an age of exploration. Loch Ness is better known today for its cryptid than its hydroelectric schemes, illustrating how a real lake can become a legendary habitat.
Mythic Sightings and Human Imagination
Across continents and centuries, our ancestors projected the unknown onto the canvas of the natural world, converting fleeting glimpses into whispered lore. The polar siren (manatee) became the aquatic maiden, the tusk of the narwhal the unicorn’s horn, the elusive giant squid the kraken of mariner terror, and pods of whales and drifting debris the serpentine leviathan. Even freshwater Loch Ness surrendered its secrets to our collective imagination, birthing Nessie.
Each legend shares a pattern: unexpected sighting under poor visibility, limited taxonomic knowledge, and the human craving for narrative cohesion. Into this space stepped folklore and sensational reporting, binding biology to myth. Modern science now decodes these tales, reminding us that wonder need not rely on invention when the living earth holds marvels still beyond casual gaze.
Reclaiming Reality From Myth
By mapping mermaids to sirenians, unicorns to narwhals, krakens to giant squids, and sea serpents to whales and other marine vertebrates, we demystify the myths without diminishing their narrative power. The stories endure, not because they outlasted their zoological origins, but because they speak to timeless human yearnings—for beauty, for mystery, and for connection with the wild.
In studying these myths through scholarly lenses, we honor both the animals that inspired them and the storytellers who wove them. Armed with modern biology and critical historiography, we disentangle legend from life, revealing a world where reality, once understood, is richer still.
Sources
Smithsonian Ocean. “From Mermaids to Manatees: The Myth and the Reality.” ocean.si.edu, 2014.
Dal Martello, Rita. “Mermaids, Dugongs, and the ‘Hand of Evolution’.” UCL Museums & Public Engagement Blog, 1 Mar. 2017.
Wills, Matthew. “The Undying Unicorn.” JSTOR Daily, 2019.
Pluskowski, Aleksander. “Narwhals or Unicorns? Exotic Animals as Material Culture in Medieval Europe.” European Journal of Archaeology, vol. 7, no. 3, 2004.
Malcolm, Aylin. “The Unicorn.” Pulter Project, Northwestern University.
Truitt, James. “Monoceros: What Conrad Gessner’s Discussion of the Unicorn Tells Us about Natural History in Renaissance Europe.” Smithsonian Libraries Unbound, 2017.
Orozco, Trizzy. “The Truth About the Kraken: What Scientists Say About Giant Squid Legends.” Discover Wild Science, 25 June 2025.
Salvador, Rodrigo B., and Barbara M. Tomotani. “The Kraken: when myth encounters science.” História, Ciências, Saúde—Manguinhos, vol. 21, no. 3, 2014.
France, Robert L. “From Cryptozoology to Conservation Biology: An Earlier Baseline for Entanglement of Marine Fauna in the Western Pacific Revealed from Historic ‘Sea Serpent’ Sightings.” Advances in Historical Studies, vol. 9, 2020.
“Loch Ness monster.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9 July 2025.
Loxton, Daniel, and Donald R. Prothero. “Nessie: The Loch Ness Monster.” In Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids. Columbia University Press, 2013.
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