Typo - that should be “bottom right” when referring to the carving link in the above post.

However, I can’t get a real feel for what the carving really looks like… the image is a bit too small and I don’t understand why it’s split into the light and dark portions. Is the white portion “completing the picture”, or “reproducing it to illustrate a point”. Do you know anywhere else online that shows another photo of the carving?

Chris.

Still not convinced - eel physiology enables flexibility from side to side, and not much up and down. (even with the exotic species) And certainly not “swanlike”. And as far as land travel is concerned they are pretty much limited to slithering from waterway to waterway - not loping or trundling across roads as indicated by some of the sightings.

Re: What some of these cryptids are.

My hack opinions, without having read any books on this since childhood and just surfing the net, are as follows:

Lake Champlain: I think Champ is the most defined cryptid of the bunch - I am pretty sure that if there are cryptids in Champlain they are relatives of tanystropheus. The sightings pretty much support this, including the land sightings. The ABC video and stills pretty much support this. The footage from ‘03 seems to support this. The Mansi photo seems to support this. And most strikingly, the indian stone carvings in Battleboro, VT not far from Lake Champlain seem to support this.

(Scroll down, the stone carvings are at the bottom left of the linked page.)

Tanystropheus anatomy, in my opinion, is just too improbable and wacky for indian artists to “guess” at. In my opinion, they pretty much had to see a living one or a dead body to come up with the carving.

Here’s a drawing of a tanystropheus derived from the fossil record.

Loch Ness: I think Nessie, if real, is also a relative of tanystropheus. This would reconcile all the sightings that claim it looks like a pleisiosaur with those that have it travelling for fairly long distances on land. (tanystropheus had legs, not flippers) Although I do admit there is less evidence for tanystropheus at Loch Ness.

Okanogon: A lot of the Ogopogo sightings point to a mammal, and a large one at that. Although there are some pleisiosaur-like sightings as well. Who knows - maybe there are two kinds of cryptids residing there. Maybe Okanogon is one of those pockets of habitat that acts like a “lost world” - sometimes several new species are found together.

Great Lakes: Back Bay Bessie and the other Great Lakes cryptids seem to be large, aquatic, constricting snakes, but who knows. Could be and/or tanystropheus and/or some kind of cryptid mammal as well. That’s if anything is actually there, of course.

Don’t know anything about Nahuelito.

“C. apus has a specially adapted spine which gives it extra flexibility, allowing it to tilt its head. The fish uses the rest of its long body to maintain stability while it is out of the water. “

and

“”[T. rosea] had a neck that appears to be quite mobile, and strong fins. If you ask me if it could feed terrestrially in a similar way to catfish or mudskippers - I would say it probably could,” said Mr Van Wassenbergh.”

And wouldn’t you know it - just today I was reading an ABC Science article about freshwater eels which occur in Australia (and nearby).

You’ll read there that these guys can climb over land and up dam walls. I even have a video I took myself about 2 years ago of an eel coming up a dry creek bed and then entering into a waterhole.

What really fascinated me though, was learning that our freshwater eels can live 40 to 50 years. They are born thousands of kilometers away in the ocean, then migrate to a single freshwater waterway to spend their entire lives before heading out to sea again to breed. They have three life-stages and gender is probably environmentally determined; not genetically. They grow to 2 meters and 20 kgs.

Back to our cryptid at hand. I guess a giant eel can’t be discounted - especially in nahuelito’s case where it is described as “similar to a snake”.

So first things first - is it possible to show photo number three?

Back to the eels theory (shovethenos, 3) during the Champ discussion I posted a link to a video showing an eel-catfish (not an eel, but both are fish) lifting it’s body up out of the water and onto “land” to catch food. Unfortunately the video seems to have been taken down, but the eel-catfish article is still there.

At present though, I make no comment as to what I think Nahuelito is. Scott’s translation was enlightening though - giving a bit of background on both the photos and the Nahuelito legend.

I understand Ogopogo to be a serpent-like animal according to eyewitnesses, including the native folks. Some film footage of this critter also indicates a large eel-type figure.

Samuel de Champlain, the 1st European to record a large lake serpent in a river running from the St. Lawrence River to what is now called Lake Champlain.

The ancient Six Nations people also had many encounters with the giant serpents of the Great Lakes. Maybe these animals are a phenomena of the fresh water lakes of North and South America as Nessie appears to be a different large freshwater animal.

This is based on nothing but pure conjecture. Of course if it is the same animal then sightings would look more alike than different. I find it curious that it seems that when it suits you to emphasize the similarities you do so, but you can’t just dismiss any sightings and descriptions that don’t fit your hypothesis. That is not logically or scientifically sound.