THE SEA MONSTER OF SANTA CRUZThis apparent Plesiosaur washed up on Moore's Beach (now Natural Bridges State Beach) in Monterey Bay, California in 1925. The neck was described as being about 20 feet long. Some scientists postulated that it was an extremely rare type of beaked whale, while others believed it to be a variety of plesiosaur. After thoroughly examining the carcass, the renowned naturalist E. L. Wallace concluded that the creature could not be a whale and might be a plesiosaur that had been preserved and subsequently melted out of glacial ice. The story is given in Randall Reinsted’s 1975 book Shipwrecks and Sea Monsters. It is also prominently featured in Skin Diver magazine of November, 1989 which discusses the Monterey Submarine Canyon. This mysterious underwater trench extends many miles into the Pacific and is one of the least studied ocean chasms.