The Lariosauro of Lake Como: two hunters fire on a crested creature at Pian di Spagna

Lake Como already had a monster's name waiting for it. In 1830 a fossil reptile was found at Perledo, on the eastern shore. Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli described it. Science called it Lariosaurus balsami, a Triassic nothosaur. For more than a century it belonged to museums. Then came November 1946.

On 18 November 1946, Il Corriere Comasco ran a front-page story. The headline read "La paurosa avventura di due cacciatori brianzoli". The frightening adventure of two hunters from Brianza. The two men were on a hunt at Pian di Spagna, the flat land at the northern tip of Lake Como where the Adda flows in, beside Colico.

About ten metres from the shore, something rose from the water. The reporter, Achille Combi, set the scene. "An enormous crested monster's head with extremely mobile eyes sniffed the air, swaying as if suspended." Then the body broke the surface. Two or three metres long. "Bristling with very hard scales of a reddish-brown colour."

The hunters fired at the beast. The huge lizard-like creature plunged straight back into the depths.

The story spread. The following week La Provincia reported a new face-to-face encounter. The creature, it said, had moved from Colico to the water opposite Varenna. National papers picked up the tale. The monster had a name now. The Lariosauro.

It did not last. Within a week the Corriere Comasco closed the matter itself. It wrote that the beast had simply been a sturgeon, and that the sturgeon had since been caught.

No police, scientific or government inquiry is on record. Nobody has named the hunters. No first-hand statement from either man is known. Combi is the only identifiable source, and nothing suggests he saw the animal himself. No photograph, track or trace was ever reported.

The researcher Giorgio Castiglioni, whose findings Massimo Polidoro published in 2007, concluded that the paper invented the monster. He treats the sturgeon catch as an invention too. Castiglioni judged later Lariosauro reports with the same eye. An animal seen at Argegno in 1954 was an otter. A 1957 bathysphere encounter off Dongo was possibly a pike.

Giancarlo Colombo of the Associazione Scanagatta tells another story. In his version, pranksters from Varenna, tired of the leaden post-war atmosphere, made the monster up. They chose the name because the fossil came from Perledo, and because at least 99% of the population had never heard of it. Colombo also points out that the real Lariosaurus lived some 230 to 240 million years ago, while the lake formed about 1.8 million years ago. And the fossil animal was only about 0.6 to 1.3 metres long.

The Lariosauro outlived its retraction. Retellings stretched it to 10 or 12 metres, gave it a frightening mouth and a hiss as it fled toward the centre of the lake. None of that is in the 1946 text. It is nicknamed "Larrie", il cugino lariano di Nessie. It has inspired books, videos, a stop on an audio tour and even a liqueur. Yet the original record is brief. A head swaying above the water. Two hunters firing. A dive into the dark.