Mermaid.net

Real mermaids – are they fact or fiction?

The question has puzzled sailors, scientists, and writers and poets ever since the earliest days of sea travel. The truth is, in this day of high tech equipment and underwater cameras and submarines, we are no closer to knowing exactly if mermaids exist or not.

One of the pieces in this puzzle comes from realizing that many sea creatures can, at times, grow to have human like characteristics. Sea Cows can mutate to have very human looking features because, as mammals, they once lived on land as monkeys, and ony later returned to the sea. Humans, too, can grow in the womb with fused feet in a process known as Sirenomelia. Our earliest ancestors were sea creatures, and it is for this reason that babies can be born that look identical to the mermaids depicted by sailors and artists from the past.

If this can occur in people in cities, how much more could it happen in isolated ocean communities, in islands and peninsulas away from the towns we have today? And if a group of these babies were born and lived in the seas, what if they formed families and reproduced, continuing and perhaps developing this condition. It would certainly help them survive when the main source of protein was fish and looking for food underwater.

People are always fascinated by the stories, legends and mythologies of mermaids speculations about real mermaids continue to exist. People for ages have been looking for real live mermaids that seeing sea animals like the Manatee, or sea cow, are often mistaken to be real mermaid sightings. Other creatures that are featured in the museums from the 1800’s are fakes, build to cash in for a curiosity with these magical creatures from the sea.

Such fakers would usually find a preserved body of a monkey, and a large fish such as a Groper or other reef fish. Using the taxidermist’s art, these two creatures could be combined to form one seamless ‘creature’. A clue to spotting these types of fakes is if the ‘mermaids’ are said to be only baby or pigmy mermaids. Full sized mermaids are too difficult to make, as monkeys only grow so large.

In 2005, a story of a “real mermaid” which was allegedly found in Chennai following the Indian Ocean Tsunami in December 2004 circulated in the internet.The story was backed up with pictures of the Legendary creature with mermaids tail which inevitably made people ask “do mermaids really exist?”.

According to Source, the body of the “real mermaid” is at the Egmore museum guarded under tight security. Does this prove that mermaids are real? The source claims that the mermaid called Kadal Kanni is a hoax like P. T. Barnum’s Fiji mermaid. Others are not so sure. All we can do is compile the evidence and let our science – and our imagination – take hold…