The Mystery Fish – X-CMing
Posted by: Loren Coleman on December 8th, 2005
Is there such a thing as X-CMing? Extreme Cryptomundo.com -ing? You, the Cryptomundo readers, have demonstrated that the Mystery Fish Postcard Photograph is one of the most popular all-time cryptid image enigmas, yet.
Due to popular demand, here is a roundup of all four direct links to the "Mystery Fish Photo" entries in the Cryptomundo.com blog, from earliest to most recent:
"Name the Mystery Fish Continued"
Almost two hundred comments, most of them extremely thoughtful and detailed, can be found at these entries, and yours are welcome here. To date over 100,000 views of these four Cryptomundo.com entries have occurred.
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Loren Coleman no longer writes for Cryptomundo. His archived posts remain here at Cryptomundo.
Loren-
I seem to remember a friend having a book on cryptozoology with that picture in it sometime in the early 80′s. Do you know which book that was?
Nope, not at all, or I won’t have asked here.
But we know what it looks like now, so what is it?
The picture looks very familiar. It might have been a kid’s book, as I was a kid at the time.
Are you sure this isn’t like everyone thinking they have SEEN the magazine picture of the men in front of the barn wall with the ‘thunderbird’ or ‘pteradactyl’ pinned to it?!?
I’m fairly certain I saw it before because there were some heated discussions about it – just like now. It might have been a book from one of those book clubs that kids used to order from through school – Troll was one of the companies, there were others. Could be wrong, through.
Someone said it reminded them of the “silure”.
I don’t know if that is indeed what it is, as I don’t know much about the fish, but some sort of large catfish pulled dead from the water, would seem logical to me. I’ve seen a lot of skinned fish and while skin seems to be missing from this one, it strikes me as more likely slightly decomposed than “skinned”. Besides, wouldn’t you take a photo before skinning a fish if you were going to skin it?
At first glance I honestly thought shark, but the silure/giant catfish theory is intriguing too.
I think we’re looking at a skinned shark of some sort. In the link below which shows a dead shark; skin, gut and de-fin it and you’d have basically the same type of critter at roughly the same scale.
This photo happens to also be a postcard image. It’s of a 20 foot tiger shark caught in 1964.
It’s either a brutally killed mosasaur or a fish that was beaten with an ugly stick.
Well, I guess everyone makes mistakes. Turns out this is very similar to the elephant’s trunk snake, but the apparent coloration is wrong, as is the positioning of the eyes, nostrils, and the fact that most of us agreed that it was found in the SE United States, not Java.