Aquatic Dragon off the coast of Victoria

What a day for nature lovers! Classic Rock radio 101 has reported the sighting of a rare Aquatic Dragon off the coast of Victoria, BC! Praise Cthulhu, we thought they had been hunted to extinction, along with their distant cousins, the Pacific Tree Octopus. This amazing creature, nearly 100m from its savagely curved beak to its tippiest tentacle, once blotted out the skies in its annual migrations from the Arctic plateaus to a still-undiscovered location somewhere in the South Pacific. Such were its numbers, and its fierce fighting ability, that it seemed unthinkable the species could ever be threatened.

That was, of course, before the advent of aircraft. Their soft, boneless bodies proved no match for slashing propellers and insatiable jet intakes, and for a generation or more the skies were greasy with carnage. You think you know how calamari was invented? Let me tell you, it was the act of a hardscrabble wartime population desperate for protein of any kind. When the planes flew overhead, housewives would run into the streets with buckets to catch the crudely hacked pieces of Aquatic Dragon that fell in a slimy torrent from the skies.

And soon, all too soon, it was all over.

WWII had done irreparable damage to the breeding population, and it is believed that nuclear tests in the South Pacific may have destroyed their traditional wintering grounds, leaving them with an unsustainable, nomadic, and doomed few survivors. This latest discovery is heartening in the extreme, for this juvenile specimen attests to the atavistic survival of at least two healthy Aquatic Dragons somewhere off the coast of Vancouver Island. My old alma mater, Miskatonic University, is gathering specialists in marine biology and herpetology to undertake an expedition in search of the creatures.

Hey, what could go wrong?