Mermaids Mislead at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman

For those brave souls who wish to see the fantastic, up close and personal, I bring you Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids: Mythic Creatures now showing at the Museum of the Rockies through January 5th.

But what we think we know may not be so.  Take the Mermaids from the exhibit's realm of Water.  These lovelies of the deep have enchanted hearts and imaginations since the ancient Greeks.  They are associated with the Nymphs and the Sirens, explained at the MOR as Lasirens.  Then Hans Christian Anderson and Disney made the mermaid into a fairy tale star.

But the legends warn of these seductresses that lure sailors and other men to their deaths.  Disney even reiterated this in the later Pirates of the Caribbean film On Stranger Tides.

Of course, a story is one thing, the actual creature as a scientific find is something else entirely.

"There's a Sucker born every minute."

Men capitalized on the cryptozoology, especially P.T. Barnum the circus guy.  He obtained this sewn-together creation called the Fiji or FeeJee Mermaid, originally crafted by a Japanese fisherman.  At the time, exotic animals were being discovered and the public clamored to see them.  So Barnum advertised the mermaid with the image of beautiful and topless women with the long fish tails.

But while the paying spectators expected a vision of beauty resembling this:

What they actually saw was more like this:

Hahaha, imagine the horror on the customers' faces.

So come over to the Museum of the Rockies to see these and other legendary creatures.

P.S. Now that I think about it, I haven't been to the Sip 'n Dip in Great Falls in a long time.  The live mermaids there is definitely worth the road trip.  See ya...

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