“A crocodile-headed shape that surfaces in Lake Como, named for a real fossil reptile dug from its own shores.”
The Lariosauro is Lake Como's resident impossibility: a large reptilian something reported intermittently from the lake since November 1946. The descriptions never agree — a crested head, hard reddish-brown scales, webbed paws, a crocodile's profile, a ten-metre eel — but the setting never changes: a deep glacial lake with more than enough dark water to keep its secrets.
What sets the Lariosauro apart from other lake monsters is its name, borrowed from science: Lariosaurus balsami, a genuine prehistoric reptile whose fossils were unearthed on the shores of the lake itself. The joke in the christening is scale — the real Lariosaurus was a modest creature only about sixty centimetres long. The monster is thus a rare case of palaeontology supplying a legend with both its pedigree and its punchline.
The Legend
On 18 November 1946, so the story ran, two hunters at Pian di Spagna — the marshy reserve at the lake's northern tip — came face to face with a creature rearing a crested head from the water, its body two to three metres long and armoured in extremely hard, reddish-brown scales. The account, written up by the journalist Achille Combi, ran in the Corriere comasco and made the monster famous on the spot.
It was invented. The first sighting was a press fabrication, and when the rival paper La Provincia produced a second encounter at Varenna, that too was a hoax — post-war newsmen conjuring a monster for a readership that badly wanted one. But the fabrication behaved the way good legends do: it detached itself from its authors, and within a decade people on the lake were reporting the Lariosauro in apparent earnest.
Documented Sightings
In 1954, at Argegno, witnesses described a rounded creature with webbed paws. August 1957 brought word of an enormous monster in the waters between Dongo and Musso, and that September an animal with a crocodile-like head was reported in the same reaches of the lake. Then came a long silence, broken in 2003 off Lecco, when a witness described a giant eel ten to twelve metres long — the largest Lariosauro ever claimed.
The researcher Giorgio Castiglioni has worked through the file and found ordinary animals in it: the webbed-pawed thing at Argegno was likely an otter, the 1957 reports resolve into a pike and a hoax, and the 2003 leviathan was probably a school of fish swimming in line. Nothing requiring a lake dinosaur has ever surfaced — which has not stopped the deep water off Como from keeping the question pleasantly open.
The Lore
The name is the best part of the story. Lariosaurus balsami was described from fossils found by Lake Como generations before the monster's debut, and lending the genus name to the 1946 apparition dressed a newspaper invention in scientific respectability. It is monster-making in the classic surviving-prehistoric-reptile mode — except that here the prehistoric reptile is real, local, and embarrassingly small.
Around the lake the Lariosauro now functions as light folklore: an anecdote for boatmen, a curiosity for the Italian mystery press, a mascot in waiting. Its dossier is thin and its origin is compromised, but it documents something true about lakes and the people who live on them — given a sheet of dark water and a sixty-centimetre fossil, a town will build itself a dragon.
Field Notes
- ✦ The original November 1946 report in the Corriere comasco was a press fabrication.
- ✦ Named after the genuine fossil reptile Lariosaurus balsami, only about 60 cm long.
- ✦ Sightings continued through the 1950s at Argegno and in the Dongo-Musso waters.
- ✦ The 2003 report off Lecco described a giant eel 10-12 metres long; sceptics saw a school of fish.
- ✦ Researcher Giorgio Castiglioni attributes the file to otters, a pike, hoaxes and misread fish.
Case File
- Classification
- Lake monster
- Category
- Lake/Sea Monster
- Territory
- Lake Como, Lombardy
- First Sighted
- 1946
- Habitat
- The deep waters of Lake Como
- Reported Size
- Reported several metres long
- Also Known As
- Lake Como Monster