Querqueville Thing

On the grey coast of Normandy at Querqueville the sea last week cast up a monstrous thing. Fearsome enough in life, it lay now battered by waves & rocks, pecked by gulls, decomposed by death. It was 25 ft. long, about 5 ft. around and its bluish-grey skin was covered with what seemed like fine white hairs. What was left of its head, hung on a 3-ft. neck, looked like a camel's. What was left of its tail looked like a seal's. It was disemboweled. Rolling gently in the surf, its liver stretched out a full 15 ft.

Big as French copper sous grew the eyes of Professor Corbiere, distinguished naturalist, when he sighted the monster. Never in his life had he seen such a thing as this. The world was waiting for him to speak and for France he must not fail. "It is," he proclaimed, "a cetacean."

That seemed safe enough. Many aquatic mammals--whales,*dolphins, porpoises--belong to the order of cetacea. Thereupon Professor Corbiere grew bold. "If I dare risk a hypothesis," he ventured. "I would say that we have here a kind of hyperoodon from the North Atlantic."

"Nonsense!" cried Dr. William King Gregory from across the sea. The hyperoodon or bottle-nosed whale, explained the Curator-in-Chief of Living & Extinct Fishes in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, has an enormous head and a ridiculously short neck. Rapidly Curator Gregory ran through the list of creatures living & extinct which the monster resembled. It had the neck of a sea lion, the head of a sea cow, the body of a long dugong. But the parts did not fit. It could not, he concluded, be what it seemed.

Words, however, could not conjure away the rotting carcass on the beach at Querqueville. Perhaps, someone suggested, it was the Loch Ness monster (TIME, Jan. 15) sighted last December in Inverness Harbor heading out to sea. But on that subject Professor Corbiere was firm. "Non!" he cried. "Nae!" echoed a thousand voices from Scotland, where six workmen promptly reported having seen the monster thrashing through Loch Ness "at a terrific rate."

"I think," said Dr. Burgess Barnett, curator of reptiles at the London Zoo, "that it is a small whale."

"I think," said M. A. C. Hinton, deputy keeper of zoology at London's Natural History Museum, "that it is a large seal."

At last two professors from Paris' Natural History Museum arrived at Querqueville to settle the matter. Gravely they poked & peered. When they departed, carrying the creature's head and tail for comparison with museum specimens, their minds were made up. The monster was definitely: 1) not a whale; 2) not a sea cow.

Said one of the professors, M. Petit:

"For the moment I can only commit myself on one point--it is a selachian [shark and ray family]. ... As for the individual characteristics of the monster, it is possible we are in the presence of an unknown species. C'est epatant."

*In midocean one night last week the S. S. Bremen struck something huge and soft, quivered from stem to stern. Officers stopped the ship, peered out, saw nothing. They thought they had hit a sleeping whale.

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