A
Anonymous
Guest
could these be reptiods that are lost or out skinny dipping? or the result of hillbilly inbreeding?
In some museums, they ahve preserved fetuses and stillborns of children that look jsut like 'monsters'. One had a fish tail, the other ahd only one eye. The former is due to our development due to our evolutionary past, the altter jsut a genetic defect.
Bannik said:That sounds pretty bizarre. Do you remember what stages of development these two...monsters... were in? And was the eye in the middle of the forehead like that of a cyclops?
Inverurie Jones said:That's just a myth. At no stage in it's development will a human foetus have a fishtail.
Inverurie Jones said:Damned if I know, but it ain't normal. I mean, are we talking tail flukes and things here?
Inverurie Jones said:That's just a myth. At no stage in it's development will a human foetus have a fishtail.
rigmarole said:Not a fish-tail, but a tail.
However, we DO have gills. They just develop into our ears, IIRC.
Bannik said:This is your original quote:"In some museums, they ahve preserved fetuses and stillborns of children that look jsut like 'monsters'. One had a FISH tail,..." (my emphasis)
We have GILLS that develope into ours EARS?:sceptic: This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
rigmarole said:Well, yeah, cuz it looked like a fish tail
Sorry, should have been more specific.
As for the gills, in mammals they devolop into the mouth, ears, and nose, I do believe.
They aren't true gills in that we breathe with them, but they devlop much like the gills that fish eventually have. In fact, all vertebrates have the same 4 basic structures that then idfferentiaite into their particular organs.
City Wants Bigger Bust for Mermaid
Mon Mar 29,10:33 AM ET
WARSAW (Reuters) - The mermaid patron of a Polish coastal town faces plastic surgery after councilors decided her breasts were too small and hips too wide, a city official said Monday.
The mermaid's looks became a hot topic during talks in the city hall on a promotion campaign for Ustka, a small port on the Baltic coast, in which the town's mermaid shield was supposed to play a key role.
"There was a discussion about the coat of arms and one female councilor said jokingly that the mermaid's breasts were too small and that she was a bit fat," city hall spokesman told Reuters.
The joke became a serious idea when local and national media got wind of the debate, giving sleepy Ustka plenty of coverage.
"We are now considering altering the mermaid slightly by making her breasts bigger and making her leaner," the spokesman said. "She will become more attractive and Ustka will gain publicity."
The soon-to-be revamped mermaid can be seen on the town's web page; http://www.ustka.pl/ustka.html?section=40.
Fishy find sparks alert
BY JONATHAN BARNES
October 22, 2004 06:46
SHIVERING with fear, Louise Bawley clutched the policeman's arm as they edged towards the mysterious figure in the water.
Her son and nephew watched from the car, waiting for the grisly discovery on the banks of the River Orwell.
They had spotted the "body" as they parked up to finish some takeaway food on their way home from a cinema trip to Ipswich on Wednesday night. Stranger still, it looked like a mermaid.
"We had driven under the Orwell Bridge and parked up in a layby," said Mrs Bawley, 42.
"It was dark but I could see this figure, lying half on the embankment and half in the water.
"I could see a head with hair and I said to the boys: 'I don't want to scare you, but that looks like a body.'
"We put the car headlights on and edged towards it, and we could see an arm and a tail. I called the police and told them: 'I think we've found a mermaid'. They told me to keep the boys in the car and they were on their way."
Police arrived at the scene, beside the B1456 at Wherstead, within minutes and Mrs Bawley, from Stutton, left her son Will, 14, and nephew Sam Hall, 12, in the safety of the car to join the investigation at about 8.30pm.
"I held on to the policeman's arm as we went towards it and he kicked the body over. It was a woman's figure in full glory, completely life-size, with a tail. Bits of it were coming off.
"I still wasn't sure what it was at first but we found it was this beautifully painted mermaid model, made out of papier mache. It could have been washed up but I don't know why it was there."
The mystery partially solved, Pc Ben Coombes lifted the figure out of the water and it is now back on dry land at Capel St Mary Police Station.
"I called back the police control room and told them: 'It was a mermaid – but not a real one," said Mrs Bawley, a pre-school worker.
"It sounds absolutely hysterical, I know, but at the time it was extremely scary and I had two very scared boys.
"My 14-year-old was trying to be extremely cool about it, but he wouldn't let me go out of the car when we saw it. If it was a hoax, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to do it."
A spokeswoman for Suffolk police said officers reported the figure had looked "very realistic". She added that if any had information about the mermaid or its owner, they should contact Pc Coombes on 01473 613500.
rigmarole said:Well, devoloping fetuses go through the stages of 'evolution'. PArticularly, they have gills for a while and such. If there's a genetic defect that causes a stoppage at some point of devlopment, the fetus will keep those traits. Of course, it will also probably be dead...
And yes, IIRC it was in the center of the head.
Gloria said:<<<Have just returned from my hols (Florida,where I saw manatees), no way could they be mistaken, even by the most p*ssed up sailor.>>>
Sure thing. Who normally witnessed mermaids (sea serpents, etc.)? People TRAINED to observe things at sea - experienced seamen or fishermen. It was not a one-man delusion - usually the whole crew witnessed things like that. Experienced seamen could easily notice the difference between a seal or manatee and a woman with hair and boobs , even with a fishtail. Can anyone seriously think that people in the Middle Ages were more "stupid" or "backward" than we today? (Personally I think they were more normal at those times than most of us now, at least when it came to moral principles, integrity and faith in our Creator.) Why cannot we simply acknowledge: yes, there are unknown forms of life existing parallel to our own world, instead of stubbornly searching for ridiculous explanations?
Science is a discipline characterized as much by mystery and wonder as by experimentation and reproducible results. In The Barmaid's Brain and Other Strange Tales from Science (W. H. Freeman, .95), Jay Ingram purports to expose some of that mystery. The mythical Norse merman, for example, a beast of the sea regarded as a sign that a storm was imminent, may have been nothing more than a distant walrus seen through the "distorting lens of the atmosphere." The barmaid's exceptional ability to recall orders is offered as proof of the human brain's incredible adaptability. The eccentric behavior of young women accused of being witches in 17th-century Salem may have resulted from eating rye bread contaminated with ergot. Ingram's rational explanations for a handful of natural phenomena only add to their wonder, and the book is often amusing.
carlosox said:I have a friend who has seen a mermaid washed up on shore after a heavy storm on one of the islands of Indonesia. The creature was gently carried by the locals and put back into the sea as it was crying and trying unsuccessfully to make it back to the sea by itself. My friend ( who was very young then ), described it as being of a greenish color.
Claim: Photographs show a mermaid-like creature discovered in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2005]
Origins: Proving once again the maxim that there's nothing new under the sun (or "everything old is new again") comes the set of photographs displayed above, purportedly depicting a bizarre ocean-dwelling "mermaid" creature unearthed by powerful tidal forces, the latest entry in a series of older photographs being passed off as images associated with the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
We last saw these very same photographs back in 2003, when they were circulated on the Internet as a "Mermaid found in the Philippines" who had been "caught by fishermen in Visayas Region." Not only were they hoaxes — then and now — but hoaxes of a type that is hundreds if not thousands of years old.
Creatures identified as "merfolk" (half-human, half-fish creatures who live in the sea, both male "mermen" and female "mermaids") have been a staple of folklore and mythology for many centuries. Although the popular modern image of merfolk is almost exclusively limited to depictions of human-sized, attractive females with human upper torsos and fish-like tails (as exemplified by Ariel, the heroine of Disney's popular 1989 animated film adaptation of "The Little Mermaid," an 1836 children's story by Hans Christian Andersen), that image has not always been the standard.
Depictions of mermaids as gruesome, dimunitive creatures, and the use of parts of other animals (primarily monkeys and fish) to create exemplars of such creatures, are both very, very old, as demonstrated by a supposed mummified mermaid which was exhibited in Japan several centuries ago and is thought to be up to 1,400 years old.
More recently (but still a considerable time ago) phony mermaid-like creatures crafted from various body parts and bones of fish and other animals, usually joined to dessicated monkey heads or skulls, were a common feature of 19th-century dime museums, carnivals, traveling circuses and their sideshows. Although many such fabricated mermaids date from that era, the most famous example was the "Feejee Mermaid" (also known as the "Fiji Mermaid" or "FeJee "Mermaid"), a grotesque creature allegedly "taken [by Japanese fishermen] among the Fejee Islands, and preserved in China" before being purchased by one Dr. J. Griffin, acting an agent of the Lyceum of Natural History in London, in 1842:
The mysterious Dr. Griffin was in fact a fictitious character played by Levi Lyman, an associate of the famous American showman and huckster P. T. Barnum, who exhibited the "found" creature throughout the U.S. and in his New York-based American Museum for a couple of decades before it was lost when the museum was destroyed by a fire in 1865. The "mermaid" was actually pieced together using papier-mâché, fish parts, the body of an infant orangutan, and a monkey head.
Although times have changed considerably since the days of Barnum, human nature has not. We continue to be fascinated by the same tales and the same forgeries, crafted in the same time-honored fashion.
Last updated: 11 February 2005