The Giant Penguin of Clearwater Beach

by Jonathan Morrill

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Price

$300

Dimensions

16.000 x 20.000 x 0.500 inches

Title

The Giant Penguin of Clearwater Beach

Artist

Jonathan Morrill

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Art On Canvas

Description

This piece pays homage to a hoax initiated on the shores of
Clearwater Beach, Florida, in February of 1948.

The giant penguin is a creature allegedly seen in Florida during the 1940s.
The legend has no scientific merit and is at least partly documented to have been a hoax.

In 1948, several people reported finding large, three-toed animal tracks at
Clearwater Beach in Florida.
Later, more tracks were found along the shore of Suwannee River,
40 miles from the ocean.
A young couple also reported having been harassed by a large creature
that had risen from the ocean.
Later that year a giant penguin was allegedly sighted at distance.
The huge bird was described as 15 feet tall, and having alligator-like feet.
During this same period, people in a boat off the Florida gulf coast reported seeing
an extremely large penguin-like bird floating on the water.
These incidents were reported in several newspapers.
Later that year, another huge, penguin-like bird was allegedly seen from an airplane
on the banks of the Suwannee River in northern Florida.

Cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson declared that the creature was a giant penguin
that had somehow been driven away from its natural habitat.

On April 11, 1988, St. Petersburg Times reporter Jan Kirby revealed that
the penguin hoax had been perpetrated by Tony Signorini and Al Williams,
a locally known prankster who died in 1969.
Signorini stated they had been inspired by a photograph of fossilized dinosaur tracks,
and showed the reporter the huge penguin feet made of iron used in creating the tracks.
The other sightings are either also hoaxes or based on observer error.

There were numerous prehistoric species of gigantic penguins,
such as Pachydyptes ponderosus, Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi,
and Palaeeudyptinae.
These are known from considerable fossil remains,
but all such lineages certainly became extinct some 25 million years ago at latest;
they were never encountered alive by humans, and just barely were contemporaries
of the earliest hominids.

Actual prehistoric mega-faunal birds only occurred in South Pacific
and Cape Horn ocean waters.
No ecological niche is known to have existed anywhere which could have ensured
their post-Paleogene survival, as their known habitat and the neighboring regions
are known to have been continuously inhabited by other penguin species
and similar competitor taxa ever since.

Giant penguins based on the fossil finds also appear in Jules Verne's novel
'Journey to the Center of the Earth', and in 'At the Mountains of Madness'
by H. P. Lovecraft.
In the latter case, they are found in a fictitious Antarctic underground setting
and their presence is given a comparatively plausible evolutionary explanation.

Uploaded

May 5th, 2019

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