Koch's Hydrarchos sea-serpent skeleton, New York

Albert C. Koch was a German-born fossil collector and a showman, and he had done this before. His Missourium, the Missouri Leviathan, was an enlarged mastodon put on public show. Between January and April 1845 he collected bones in Clarke, Choctaw and Washington counties, Alabama. His best find was an articulated partial skeleton, including much of the skull, near the Tombigbee River. His own pamphlet dated the discovery to March 1845.

July 1845. Koch arrived in New York. His monster went on show at the Apollo Saloon, 410 Broadway. Admission was 25 cents. The posters did the shouting. "Exceeds 114 FEET in Length!" They promised a creature "WEIGHING AT LEAST 400,000 POUNDS" and, "when ALIVE!," "30 FEET IN CIRCUMFERENCE!!" One broadside called it "The Hydrarchos or Leviathan! of the Antediluvian world, as described in the Book of Job, Chapt. 41."

What the crowds saw was a head and a vertebral column, 114 feet in all. A few ribs were attached to part of the column, and there were parts of supposed paddles. The skull was large and serpent-like. A broadside dated 19 September 1845 announced "Now exhibiting for two weeks." By October, an advertisement in Boston was selling "that colossal and terrible reptile the sea serpent."

Even the name caused trouble. Koch first called it Hydrarchos sillimani, after Benjamin Silliman of Yale. Silliman objected. The skeleton became Hydrarchos harlani, after Richard Harlan.

Charles Lyell was visiting Boston in October 1845. He saw the advertisement and judged the skeleton a fraud made from Zeuglodon bones. Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard anatomist, examined the mount itself. His verdict was blunt: the remains "never belonged to one and the same individual." The teeth were "not those of a reptile, but of a warm-blooded mammal."

Richard Owen credited Wyman with having "confirmed and illustrated this fact in a masterly manner." In 1847 Johannes Müller wrote from Berlin that the Hydrarchus "is identical with Harlan's Basilosaurus and Owen's Zeuglodon cetoides." The skeleton still had defenders. A writer in the American Phrenological Journal in 1846 noted that "Some affect to consider it as a 'humbug,' made by human hands on speculation," and argued that it was genuine.

Modern sources agree on what Koch had built. Hydrarchos was a composite of Eocene archaeocete whales, Basilosaurus or Zeuglodon, with paddles made from ammonite shells. Counts of the animals inside it vary, from at least two to at least six. One historian, R. Bruce McMillan, has framed the question more carefully: "Albert Koch's Hydrarchos: A Hoax or A Bona Fide Collection of Bones."

From 1846 the skeleton toured Europe: Dresden, the 1847 Leipzig fair, Berlin. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia bought it, and reportedly granted Koch a yearly pension for life. Scientists at the Royal Anatomical Museum took the mount apart. The Encyclopedia of Alabama records that it was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, though other accounts say some parts survive in Berlin.

Koch built a second composite, 96 feet long, in 1848. It was sold to Colonel Wood's Museum in Chicago. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed it.

In 1892 A. C. Oudemans illustrated "Hydrarchos Sillimanni" in The Great Sea-Serpent. Gordon Stein later listed it in his Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. But for a few weeks in 1845, a sea serpent 114 feet long lay on Broadway. And New York paid to see it.