Con rit

Con rit is Vietnamese for “millipede,” a name applied to the special form of Sea Serpent found in the oceans off South East Asia. Initial research on the Con Rit was conducted by Dr. A. Krempf, director of the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indo-China, in the 1920s. He interviewed an eyewitness who reportedly touched a beached Con Rit in 1883. The body was sixty feet long and three feet wide. Dark brown above and yellow below, the animal had regular armored segments every two feet along its body (thus its millipede and centipede names). The Con Rit appears as the dragon of ancient Vietnamese legends, not as a snake but as an animal seen in the Gulf of Tonkin, fabulously long “like a centipede.”

Bernard Heuvelmans has formally designated the Con Rit and its relatives, the Cetioscolopendra aeliani (“Aelian’s cetacean centipede”), and links it to the ancient whales. He views the Con Rit as the prototype for the Oriental dragon. Heuvelmans writes in Cryptozoology 5 that this type of Sea Serpent is “strangely provided with many lateral fins and with a segmented, jointed armor of bony dermal plaques which were common among archaic whales. It is found only in the belt of tropical and subtropical waters around the world.”

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark