Mark A. Hall, Loren Coleman, David Goudsward. Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Merman and Lizardfolk. Anomalist Books, 2023. This is a very strange book. The ‘True Story’ of the varied crypto-creatures covered in this book is, largely I think in Mark Hall’s view rather than the two other contributors, that they are scale-and-tail, fully evolved real animals. And not just animals, but primates, in fact our sea-going cousins.Hall’s candidate for the origin of this hitherto-unknown extension of the Order ‘Primates’ is the Oreopithecus bambolii, most fossil remnants of which have been found in the Tuscan region of Italy. What makes Hall suggest that Oreopithecus is the ancestor of an entire universe of semi-human sea creatures is the curious formation of it’s feet, with a big-toe at right angles to the other four. In one great leap of palaeozoological derring-do, he hypothesises that “the tripod like foot of this primate may have developed into the four-toed foot of the North American freshwater apeman.”Hall takes every every folktale, legend, campfire story or traveller’s tale and spooky encounter in the swamps and presents it as a first-hand account of ‘scale and tail’ aquatic hominids. They seem to come in a great variety…
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A RATHER FISHY BUSINESS
