Sea serpents are, of course, a venerable demographic of oceanic lore, with legends and sightings dating back about as far as humans have been writing stuff down -- begin with Job's Leviathan and just work your way forward from there. These days not a lot of stock is put in the old stories by the more scientifically-minded among us, though they don't dismiss the whole phenomena out of hand. Instead, they offer alternate explanations: giant squids are a perennial favorite, along with whales, seal herds, and big clumps of seaweed. Charles Paxton offers a new explanation in his article published in the Archives of Natural History: "Cetaceans, Sex, and Sea Serpents". In case the article's title didn't make the gist of Paxton's theory clear, let me sum it up thusly: whales are mammals, with all the proper mammalian bits -- and some are markedly serpentine in aspect.
Ahem.
So, to conclude: on the upside, Paxton appears to have made a valuable contribution to the study of unexplained marine phenomena; on the downside, one now must mentally insert a whale orgy into all those old sea serpent accounts, which is (to me) a bit depressing.
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