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Imagine that you are with your family on vacation—the sun is warm, the gulf waters are perfect for swimming. So you leave your sandcastle behind, since you are feeling hot and want to take a dip in the crystal blue waters. You are a pretty good swimmer, but your Red Cross safety instruction did not prepare you for what you think you just saw.

Treading water, you wipe he salt water from your eyes and look towards the gleaming horizon again. Nothing. So, you decide to resume your swim. A few minutes pass, and you see it again: a slithering black figure, shining in the sun for just a second, has caught your attention.

It doesn’t take long to decide that there is NO WAY you are going to stay in the water any longer. You run back to shore, your heart is thumping and your chest is heaving. Your mom runs over to you and is asking you what is wrong. Your mouth is too busy gulping down air to be able to speak. All you can do is point to the water’s horizon. A small crowd begins to gather around you. What is it? They want to know. Finally, you are able to stammer an answer…”S-s-s-s-sea s-s-serpent!”

“Yeah right,” you’re thinking right now. “Like there is any chance that I would ever see a sea serpent at the beach. They don’t even exist!” you think. True. They don’t exist. But they did.

Once upon a time, 35 to 40 million years ago, creatures slid through the water, averaging between 45 and 70 feet in length. Their wedge-shaped head measured up to 5 feet in length, and contained two types of teeth. The teeth up front were shaped like ice-cream cones and were used to hold the creature’s victim in its mouth, while the triangular teeth in the back of its mouth ground the prey into digestible pieces. From what scientists are able to discern, these creatures didn’t eat up little kids who were swimming in the water (maybe because little kids didn’t exist 35 million years ago.) No, these sea creatures’ diets consisted of squid and fish. So, you can rest easy.

The creature to which we refer, is known as the “Basilosaurus cetoides.” It seems that this ancient sea serpent was actually a primitive whale, also called an “archaeocetes” by paleontologists. These old school whales used to inhabit the Southern United States, including Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. Evidence of these creatures has also been unearthed in Australia and Egypt, so they got around.

And guess which animal these ancient whales seemed to resemble? Look around your neighborhood, and you are sure to find a couple. Give up? Well, according to fossil evidence left behind, the archaeocetes had similar characteristics to dogs! For example, their skulls possessed many of the same characteristics of “Mesonychids,” the predecessor to the modern day canine. They had the same distinctive teeth with specific canines, incisors, premolars and multi-rooted molar teeth as the Mesonychid. Not only that, but the Basilosaurus possessed rear legs that helped them paddle around in the water. This information lends new meaning to the term swimming “doggie paddle,” does it not?

As time went on, these ancient whales evolved into toothed whales such as orcas, dolphins and sperm whales. Then, the toothless whales, called Baleen whales, developed a filtering mechanism which allowed them to filter plankton and other microscopic sea life from the water.

The discovery of the Basilosaurus fossils in 1834 bridged the gap between the creatures roaming the earth, and those swimming in the seas. These fossils have helped paleontologists map the history of evolution. In other words, these sea creatures provided the missing link between mammals that lived in the seas and those who lived on land.

Even though it’s not exactly a sea serpent, the next time you see a dog swimming in the water, you can recognize that it is a distant relative of the ancient whales that once populated the seas.