A sea serpent or sea dragon is a type of Greek sea monster either wholly or partly serpentine. Sea serpents descriptions have a number of things in common, but also enough variety that it sounds like more than one species. Sea serpents come in a variety of colors, including black, brown, gray and green, and have adult lengths ranging from twenty feet to hundreds of feet. Most of them are reported to move in an undulating up-and-down motion, with a series of humps visible above the water at times. They generally have a split tail, like a whale, and may have one, two or more pairs of paddle-legs along their lengths. They may have armored segments like a millipede, large plates or scales, or a smooth rubbery skin. Most often, they have smooth skin suggestive of a mammal.
Sometimes sea serpents have a mane of hair or hair-like fins running in a row along the back. The head is generally described as horse-shaped, with huge cat-like or eagle-like eyes. On sea serpents that don't follow that body plan, the head and neck instead resemble an elephant's trunk, with tiny eyes and a small mouth near the "tip" of the "trunk." Some sea serpents sport whiskers, but it is not always clear whether witnesses mean the same kind of whiskers that cats, dogs and seals have, or whether they mean fleshy "whiskers" of the sort that are found on catfish.
The creatures described in these reports tend to look fairly serpentine, as far as their overall body shape goes, although in some cases it is only the head end and tail end that look serpentine, with a roundish body between the two ends. At first, this generally serpentine shape meant that sea serpents were universally thought to be huge ocean-going snakes or sea dragons. Witnesses would confidently label them as snakes even when some features inconsistent with this conclusion were also noted, such as a mane of hair (typical of mammals only) or an up-and-down motion (all known snakes swim with a side-to-side motion).
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