Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

On July 6, 2000, Dennis Jay Hall obtained
about forty-five minutes of digital video of two
long-necked animals in shallow water just south
of the mouth of Otter Creek, Vermont. He has
several videos of single animals taken on several
other occasions, one as recently as October 6,
2000, in Button Bay, Vermont.
Possible explanations:
(1) Newspaper hoaxes, especially in the
nineteenth century.
(2) Wave effects created by passing
watercraft.
(3) Floating logs.
(4) The Lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens)
is still found in Lake Champlain. This fish
can grow to 7–9 feet in length, though most
are a bit smaller. The lake supported a small
commercial fishery that harvested 50–200
sturgeons annually in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The annual
harvest declined rapidly in the late 1940s,
and the fishery finally closed in 1967. In
1998, the Vermont Department of Fish and
Wildlife began a project to assess and
ultimately restore a viable lake sturgeon
population in Lake Champlain.
(5) A stray Harbor seal (Phoca vitulina),
known to colonize small lakes and rivers in
northern Canada, may account for some
early sightings. In February 1810, a 4-foot
seal was found crawling on the ice of Lake
Champlain south of Burlington. Two other
specimens were found in 1846 and 1876.
(6) An evolved plesiosaur has been theorized
by J. Richard Greenwell and Karl Shuker.
Long-necked plesiosaurs such as
Elasmosaurus had a large body, short tail,
four limbs modified into paddles, a long
neck with a small head, and a maximum
known length of 46 feet. Their primary
food was probably fishes. Plesiosaur fossils
are found continuously from the Middle
Triassic (238 million years ago) to the end
of the Cretaceous (65 million years ago),
though there was a smaller extinction at the
end of the Jurassic (144 million years ago)
that resulted in a reduction in diversity.
Fossils have been found in abundance in
marine sediments in England and Kansas,
but all continents including Antarctica have
yielded some remains. They were exclusively
marine; consequently, a variety that could
subsist in a freshwater environment would
have had to undergo significant
modifications.
(7) A surviving archaic basilosaurid whale
has been suggested by Roy Mackal and Gary
Mangiacopra. These predecessors of modern
cetaceans lived in the Late Eocene, about 42
million years ago, and had serpentine bodies
that grew up to 80 feet long.
(8) Tanystropheus longobardicus, a diapsid
reptile from the Middle Triassic, 230
million years ago, has been suggested by
Dennis Jay Hall, although it has a much
longer neck and smaller body than Champ
appears to have. Young specimens have
relatively short necks, which apparently grew
quickly as the animal reached adulthood. Its
long neck was more than twice the length of
its body and tail, and it apparently attained
a total length of 10 feet. Found in marine
sediments in Central Europe, Tanystropheus
may have been a coastal swimmer that fed
on fishes. In the 1970s, Hall discovered a
12-inch reptile with a forked tongue in a
marshy area bordering Lake Champlain. It
was sent to the University of Vermont,
where it was subsequently lost. He later ran
across a drawing of Tanystropheus and
thought it was very similar. A smaller
relative from the Late Triassic,
Tanytrachelos, has been found in Virginia.
Sources: Leon Dean, “Champlain Ace in the
Hole,” Vermont Life 13 (Summer 1959): 19;
“Monster Time Again,” Vermont Life 16
(Spring 1962): 49; Marjorie L. Porter, “The
Champlain Monster,” Vermont Life 24
(Summer 1970): 47–50; Gary S. Mangiacopra,
“Lake Champlain: America’s Loch Ness,” Of
Sea and Shore 9, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 21–26,
and no. 2 (Summer 1978): 89–92; New York
Times, Science Times section, June 30, 1981;
“People,” Time 118 (July 13, 1981): 64; Joseph
W. Zarzynski, “‘Champ’: A Personal Update,”
Pursuit, no. 54 (1981): 51–53, 58; Paul H.
LeBlond, “An Estimate of the Dimensions of
the Lake Champlain Monster from the Length
CHAMP 97