The Moore's Beach Sea Monster Carcass, Santa Cruz (1925)

Moore's Beach sits about two miles north-west of central Santa Cruz, on Monterey Bay. It took its name from Moore Creek, which ran through the ranch of Eli Moore. Today it is Natural Bridges State Beach.

Days before the discovery, E. J. Lear was driving a team toward Capitola. He noticed young sea lions lined up offshore, with larger lions swimming back and forth in front of them. Much farther out, the water was churned to foam. "It was shiny and I took it for a big fish," he said. A dozen or more lions were battling it. He put it at about 30 feet.

Late May 1925. A carcass lay on the sand at Moore's Beach. It was heavily decomposed. But the head was mostly intact. Small eyes. A bulbous forehead. A beak like a duck's.

The descriptions grew with each paper. The Monterey Merchant called it a "serpent-like monster" about 50 feet long, with "elephant-like legs every few yards along the body" and "ivory toenails." The Monterey Peninsula Herald measured 35 feet and noted a strong odour. The Santa Cruz News reported a "head bigger than a barrel," "eyes larger than abalones," and a covering of "semi-hair and feathers."

Judge W. R. Springer saw "a duck-like head, a twenty foot long neck" and "evidences of two short feet (or flippers, or fins)." Then came E. L. Wallace, who said he had been president of the Natural History Society of British Columbia. "I would call it a type of plesiosaurus," he said. He was reported declaring it "positively and conclusively the remains of a plesiosaur, and being toothless, a vegetarian one at that." He proposed that it had been preserved in glacial ice.

Barton Warren Evermann, director of the California Academy of Sciences, came down from San Francisco. His verdict on the beach was plain: "the eviscerated carcass of a beaked whale." He had the remains sent to the museum, where G. Dallas Hanna was among the examiners.

In 1929 curator M. E. McLellan Davidson published the result in the Journal of Mammalogy. "Examination of the skull after its arrival at the museum proved it to be that of the rare Baird's beaked whale (Berardius bairdii Stejneger), previously known to science by only ten specimens."

The skull settled the species. Darren Naish later re-examined the case and confirmed Berardius. He explained the famous neck: "the body and tail formed a 6-m-long, tubular shape, thereby creating the impression of a super-long neck." The legs, he noted, "clearly aren't visible in the photos." The duck bill was the whale's own beak-like snout.

In 2014 Douglas Long, a research associate at the Academy, went looking for E. L. Wallace. He found him in no scientific literature, in no records of the society he claimed to have led, and in no period indexes. The Museum of Hoaxes put it simply. Wallace "was the real hoax."

The skull is still held at the California Academy of Sciences. The story ran in papers from California to Texas, reached Mysteries at the Museum in 2013, and still circulates as a "modern plesiosaur." In June 2016 a sculpture by Arnold Martin, the "Monster of Monterey," was installed in downtown Santa Cruz.