Art Deco Adventures: Patagonian Plesiosaurus
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 15th, 2007
Click on image for a full size pdf version of the April 9, 1922, Lima, Ohio, graphic.
Today, the lake monster reported in Lago (English: Lake) Nahuel Huapi in the northern Patagonia region between the provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén, in Argentina, near the border with Chile, is called “Nahuelito.” The huge lake itself, which is about 1350 feet deep, covers over 300 square miles at the base of the Patagonian mountains, a perfect site for a watery cryptid, variously described as a giant serpent or a huge hump. Or a prehistoric dinosaur?
Forget about Africa’s Mokele-mbembe hunts in the early 20th century, for a moment. This year marks the 85th anniversary of another “dino expedition” that was conducted in South America. According to old news accounts, they appeared to be truly Art Deco adventures in search of “Lost World” monsters. During the 1920s, all the rage in the media came from the quest for the celebrated “Patagonian Plesiosaurus.”
The “Patagonian Plesiosaur” or “Plesiosaurus” first attracted press coverage in the beginning of the Roaring 1920s, though sightings go back well into the previous century. The director of the Buenos Aires Zoo Clementi Onelli had gathered accounts for years.
In 1897, a Chilean farmer in Patagonia reported hearing the sounds of a heavy creature dragging itself along the pebble beach of a nearby lake. Sometimes, at night, the witness could see a long-necked, swan-like form in the water of White Lake.
Next, a man named Vaag discovered animal remains and spoor along the banks of the Rio Tamanga. Onelli was convinced that the traces Vaag found were those of a plesiosaur. Onelli revealed a third sighting in 1913, when locals said a similar creature surfaced in a body of water in the Santa Cruz area.
The international search for the “Patagonian Plesiosaur” began in earnest in 1922, after Onelli was sent a fourth series of reports of large unknown tracks and matted weeds on shore, which Onelli placed in the context of the reports of the locals seeing a monster in the middle of Lago Nahuel Huapi. In 1922, a specific report was brought to Onelli’s attention by a prospector named Martin Sheffield who encountered one of the monsters in the hilly Chubut Province of Patagonia. Sheffield said he saw a creature with “a huge neck like a swan,” that moved like a crocodile.
Onelli mounted an expedition to find Sheffield’s “Pleisosaurus,” but the trek produced no results. Nevertheless, the media followed every move they could of the search and added new stories to the mix. For example, during the 1922 press attention, George Garrett came forth to tell the Toronto Globe on April 2, 1922, that he had seen a monster (Nahuelito) in Lago Naheul Huapi in 1910.
A subsequent expedition, led by zoo superintendent José Cihagi, produced nothing of consequence.
Regarding all the hunts, writing in the July 1922 issue of Scientific American, Leonard Matters remarked that the plesiosaur, “if it ever existed, appears to have fled to parts unknown.”
Reports of Nahuelito continue today, into the 21st century.
Sources: Thanks to Craig Heinselman for the old news clipping scans. Material on the expeditions from Cryptozoology A to Z (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (NY: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003).
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Anyone know how frequent the modern sightings are?
And it’s strange that they would refer to the animal having “tracks” and moving “like a crocodile”. If it was a plesiosaur on land it would probably drag and shuffle itself along like seals do. The only “tracks” to speak of would be a furrow with marks along its length on either side.
Professor Onelli also put forth the hypothesis that the “creature” may have been a glypotdont or sloth of some sort.
Here is a snippet of an April 28, 1922 article on other ideas. It is a little tongue-in-cheek, but is only one of several around the time outlining the alternative theory:
Most Likely.
Not a pleasionsaurus at all, but possibly a somewhat lees belated megatherium, or a horny plated glyptodon, is Professor Onelli’s latest conjecture as to the strange creature seen by Mr. Sheffield in the Chubut wilds of Patagonia. As the question is thus seen to be still open, we suggest with some diffidence the possibility that it may have been a lepidodendron, a paralleiepipedon, or a demijohn, -From the Columbus Dispatch-
From Davenport Democrat And Leader, The Friday, April 28, 1922 Davenport, Iowa
Craig Heinselman
Peterborough, NH
Megatherium or glyptodon? That’s insane considering the fact that both of those were not even semiaquatic.
Actually, the glyptodon “is believed to have been a herbivore, grazing on grasses and other plants found near rivers and small bodies of water.” (Wikipedia)
Here is one additional piece. this outlines the reported “joke” Onelli had on people by using the plesiosaur as a means for financing for a zoological search for other things. Note, the RED OCTOPUS mentioned. Had this on a stick drive, more at home….
From “The Bee” out of Danville, Virginia dated 4-20-1922:
The correspondence with the expedition sent to Patagonia under the auspices of the Buenos Aires Zoo are now writing back in a jocular strain announcing that the expedition never expected to find the plesiosaurus or anything resembling it. They are hunting another specimen, a giant edentate belonging to the armadillo family, similar to the one found in Patagonia in 1898. If it is found, it will not even have the virtue of being a novelty, since thousands of people have seen the mounted one in the’ La Plata museum. The animal which is sought bores and burrows in the earth and could never exist in the waters of a lake.
The curator of the Buenos Aires zoo always contended that he never said the plesiosaurus existed, but he gave it the first publicity when he reported that a swan-necked monster with an alligator body, swimming in a Patagonian lake, had been seen, and his statement that the description answered that of a plesiosaurus led a news agency to announce the discovery of a live plesiosaurus. The belief that the prehistoric monster might exist led to popular subscription, wherewith the expedition was financed. Correspondents report that the public was purposely fooled by the members of the expedition and appear to think it a huge joke.
So far the expedition has not even sought the armadillo, which is said to be its object. The expedition has spent its time near a small lake awaiting the appearance of a. strange giant red octopus, which, it is reported, has been scaring Indian women washing clothes on the banks of the lake
Clemente Onelli has his little joke at the expense of the world and his plesiosaurus has far outlived the span of life of none-day enders and was one of the best human interest news sources South America has known, but the expedition now has shed its romantic atmosphere of mysteries and assumed its a true character, which is that of an ordinary zoological expedition, and an unimportant one at that.
Craig Heinselman
Peterborough, NH
I like the part about the use of tanks!
“During the war the tanks were used for destruction and death. With the arrival of peace the tremendous power of their caterpillar traction has been turned to many varied purposes, but no one anticipated that they would ever be put to such a curious use as this.”
Ah…the memories of Saturday mornings watching Godzilla stomp on tiny tanks.
An Octopus in a South American lake would be an “unimportant” find?
They are all obviously aliens from another dimension. But seriously, very interesting article!
I know that a lot of cryptozoology people frown on the whole “surviving plesiosaur” idea (even when it’s as much of a catchy alliterative name as anything else, more literal), and maybe that’s putting it mildly, but I’ve been attached to the “Patagonian Plesiosaur” since I first read of it in “Strange Secrets of the Loch Ness Monster” by Warren Smith (a book whose title makes it sound a lot more “sensationalistic” than it is). The story has almost everything – the South American “Lost World” setting, the “scandal” of the expedition allegedly vacationing with the money they’d been given. And of course, the “surviving plesiosaur” idea itself, which some of us still haven’t given up on.