THE EAST MERSEA "MONSTER"
189
The East Mersea "Monster"
By J. T. Clark
At the end of February 1964 a series of large bones were
uncovered on the beach at Mersea. Then suddenly on 8th March
these became a focus of national interest as the radio, followed
closely by television and the Press, announced that a skeleton of
a prehistoric monster, an ichthyosaurus, had been found. By this
time the bones had been moved to a back garden in East Mersea
and assembled fairly convincingly. The dimensions in the report
dwindled progressively during the next day; the thirty-foot
skeleton shrank to twelve and the quarter-ton skull became less
than a hundredweight. Then, twenty-four hours later, came the
news that the remains were those of a whale. The object of fame
became the object of ridicule under such headlines as "What a
Boner!'". The real object of the ridicule should perhaps have
been the Press itself; theirs were the exaggerations and they failed
to check their data before publishing it.
The remains consist of an almost complete skull, twenty-two
vertebrae, three broken ribs and three chevron bones. The
epiphyses of the vertebrae were loose and with handling a number
became detached, to join the twenty-three isolated epiphyses
originally found. The bones placed end to end (rather un-
naturally since some of the vertebrae are missing) measured 11' 6".
Examination of the bones shows quite clearly what the animal
was in life. It shows all the characteristics of a whale of the
family Ziphiidae. This family includes the Beaked and Bottle-
nosed Whales—not, one might add, the Pin Whale, which was
the final identification made by the Press. By comparison with
complete skeletons of these creatures, this one should have been
about nineteen to twenty feet in length. How did it get there?
A whale of this type was buried there some seven years ago.
Figure 1. The East Mersea "Monster".