The Dragon Stone

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Location:
Alabama, USA

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Description:
In 1845 Albert C. Koch unveiled a complete sea serpent fossil skeleton, which he called Hydrarchos harlani. It was alleged that it had been recovered in Alabama. The bones were put on display for the public with a great deal of publicity. Koch certainly knew how to get the viewers in for his finds.

It was soon discovered to be a fraud. Koch has constructed the creature from five fossil whale skeletons. Charles Lyell (1849) wrote about how the fraud had been worked out:

"I visited, with Mr. Pickett, the exact spot where he and Mr. Koch disinterred a portion of the skeleton afterward exhibited in New York under the name of Hydrarchos, or "the Water-king." The bones were imbedded in a calcareous marly stratum of the Eocene formation, and I observed in it many casts of the chambers of a large nautilus, which were at first mistaken by Koch for the paddles of the huge animal. Portions of the vertebral column, exhibited by him, in 1845, at New York and Boston, were procured in Washington County, fifteen miles distant in a direct line from this place, where the head was discovered. Some single vertebrae, which I found here, were so huge and so impregnated with carbonate of lime, that I could not lift them from the ground without an effort. Professor Jeffries Wyman was the first who clearly pointed out that the bones, of which the factitious skeleton called Hydrarchos was made up, must have belonged to different individuals. They were in different stages of ossification, he said, some adult, others immature, a state of things never combined in one and the same individual. Mr. Owen had previously maintained, that the animal was not reptilian, but cetacean, because each tooth was furnished with double roots, implanted in corresponding double sockets."

J. Wyman renamed the species Hydrarchos sillimani after the discovery of the hoax.

Other Dragon Stone Pages:

• Charles Lyell's Travels

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