The Naden Harbour Cadborosaurus Carcass

Naden Harbour whaling station sat on the north coast of Graham Island, in what is now Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Built in 1911, it was taken over by Consolidated Whaling of Toronto in 1918. Three ships hunted mostly fin and sperm whales. By 1937 the coast already had a sea serpent. Sightings in 1933 had given it a name. Caddy.

July 1937. A bull sperm whale was caught on the continental slope off Langara Island. Some 8 to 10 hours later, flensers opened its fore-stomach. Inside lay a long, sinuous body. There was no digestion.

They alerted their supervisor, F. S. Huband. Witnesses described a "reptilian appearance" and "animal-like vertebrae". The head, in one contemporary account, "resembles that of a large dog with features of a horse and the turn down nose of a camel." Huband's report described the tail as "resembling a single blade of gill bone as found in whales' jaws." The body measured about 10 feet. About 26 oval bumps ran along its back. Two pointed structures sat where the neck met the body. James Wakelen, the assistant blacksmith, later recalled the excitement among the flensers.

The body was laid on a worktable, with packing cases and white sheets as a backdrop. Huband took one photograph. G. V. Boorman, the company's first-aid officer, took two sharper side views for his album, Whaling in the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1937. On 31 October 1937 the photograph ran on the front page of the Victoria Daily Colonist.

Pieces of spine, skin and tissue were sent on for study. Francis Kermode, director of the BC Provincial Museum, examined a tissue sample. On 23 July 1937 the press carried his verdict. A fetal baleen whale. The remains were presumably discarded. None survive. Wakelen later said the carcass had been coiled up, preserved in salt and kept at a warehouse in Bellevue, Washington. No records confirm that part of the story.

Ian McTaggart-Cowan, the museum's vertebrate zoologist, was away at the time. He later considered the dismissal "inappropriate" and called the carcass "indeed a valuable piece of evidence."

In 1992 Bousfield and LeBlond found Huband's photo in the Provincial Archives in Victoria. In 1995 they formally named a new species from the images, Cadborosaurus willsi, with a Boorman photo as its holotype. They argued that men who knew six-gilled sharks and ragfish could not have been mistaken. The journal's own co-editors published objections, saying they were "opposed to its publication as a formal species description."

Other explanations followed. Ben Speers-Roesch suggested a basking shark in 2000. Darren Naish, in Hunting Monsters, argued for a decomposed white sturgeon, pointing to the rectangular braincase and the shape of the tail. Naish called the 1995 description "superficial and wholly amateurish". No one has accused the photographs themselves of being faked.

The specimen is gone. Three photographs remain. And the question of what those flensers pulled from the whale is still open to argument.