Cryptid Whale: Is a cetacean lurking in the ocean waters, supposedly extinct millions of years ago?

The mystery of the so-called cryptid whales has not yet been solved. Photo: AI-Generated

The calendar shows September 4, 1867. On board the Italian warship Magenta, which is sailing in South American waters on its way to the Chilean coast, the zoologist Hillyer Giglioli is walking.

His attention is suddenly drawn to the dark mass of a giant beast that has disturbed the monotonous surface of the ocean. What kind of animal is this?

Enrico Hillyer Giglioli (1845–1909) was an Italian zoologist who specialized in marine vertebrates. As a recognized scientist, he also took part in the long-distance voyage of the Corvette Magenta of the Italian Navy.

Cryptid whale

The animal that Giglioli saw and described in the Pacific eventually got his name. It is called “Giglioli’s whale”, although the zoologist himself gave it the Latin name Amphiptera Pacifica.

The strange cetacean found itself on the list of whales that could not be identified. Cryptozoologists are convinced that this is a living fossil. After all, the Latimeria chalumnae fish is an example of such a fossil teeming with life.

Scientists were originally convinced that it became extinct seventy million years ago. However, this assumption took hold in 1938, when one Latimeria was caught off the coast of South Africa. Is Giglioli’s whale a similar example of a living giant fossil?

The whale is described by Giglioli. Photo: Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Another observation

Official science is still skeptical. He argues, for example, that a creature as large as a whale would have a very difficult time escaping attention on the surface of the world’s oceans. Even the precedent we mentioned with the strange Latimeria would probably not convince marine biologists.

They would argue that the Latimeria dwells at great depths, and comparing its size with the cryptid whale does not hold up — it reaches a length of up to two meters.

What did Signor Giglioli see then? We don’t know yet. But remarkably a similar whale was seen off the coast of Scotland in the nineteenth century and the twentieth century in the Mediterranean Sea, between the island of Corsica and the French coast.