Guangdong fisherman was shocked by the recently discovered artifacts. On South China Sea coast the wave threw out 17 meters long unexplained sea animal which. As long as scientists are still speculating what this could be the media amuses recalling the mythic sea monsters.

Is this a fantasy or reality?

Oldest one that was mentioned and still most popular mythical sea monster, of course, is the Kraken. The first who started to speak about it were the Icelandic seamen and the word Kraken is derived from Icelandic.

Kraken, as the giant sea monster, was also extensively described by Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his "Natural History of Norway". Erik Pontoppidan without his direct pastoral responsibility of the religious community was seriously interested in wildlife. Early accounts, including Pontoppidan's, describe the kraken as an animal the size of a floating island also was described the destructive potential of the giant beast: which could grab the largest warship; it could manage to pull it down to the bottom of the ocean.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) included kraken as cephalopods with the scientific name Microcosmus in the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1735), a taxonomic classification of living organisms, but excluded the animal in later editions.

The spoiled reputation

In 1802, the French malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort recognized the existence of two kinds of giant octopus in Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques, an encyclopedic description of mollusks. Montfort claimed that the first type, the kraken octopus, had been described by Norwegian sailors and American whalers. The much larger second type, the colossal octopus (depicted in the above image), was reported to have attacked a sailing vessel from Saint-Malo, off the coast of Angola.

Montfort later dared more sensational claims. He proposed that ten British warships that had mysteriously disappeared one night in 1782 must have been attacked and sunk by giant octopuses. Unfortunately for Montfort, the British knew what had happened to the ships, resulting in a disgraceful revelation for Montfort. Pierre Dénys de Montfort's career never recovered and he died starving and poor.

In defence of Pierre Dénys de Montfort, it may be noted that some of his sources for the "kraken octopus" may have described the very real giant squid, Architeuthis, proven to exist. In 1887 in the New Zealand coast was found in 17.4 meter long squid. Now scientists say that in the depths of the oceans in blind darkness lives and feeding on fish Architeuthis DUX fish can grow to 21 meters in length and weigh 2 tons.

Literature and cinema

Some biologists offers in the legends of sailors vividly characterized giant squid to confirm as the symbol of ocean the animals diversity, as pandas living in the land has become a symbol of animal diversity.

Kraken artistic image is often used in fiction and film. In 1830, Alfred Tennyson published his popular poem "The Kraken". Pontoppidan's description influenced Jules Verne's (1828-1905)  depiction of the famous giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1870 as well as the works of Arkadij Strugackij (1925-1991) and the current English writer China Tom Mielville (1972) who were described and still describes giant monsters.