Lariosaurus

Lariosaurus is the scientific name of a small, genuinely extinct marine reptile whose fossils were first unearthed in 1830 near Perledo, on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy, and formally described in 1847 by Italian naturalist Giulio Curioni, who named the species Lariosaurus balsami after the lake's Latin title, Larius. It lived roughly 240 million years ago during the Triassic period, when the region was covered by a shallow sea, and it resembled a small nothosaur with a long neck, paddle-like limbs, and a slender body suited to hunting fish. Because well-preserved skeletons kept surfacing from local quarries throughout the 19th century, villagers and later writers sometimes wove the discoveries into loose lake-monster folklore, treating the strange bones as proof that something serpentine still lurked in Como's deep, cold waters. In truth, Lariosaurus is a well-documented fossil genus, not a living cryptid, and modern reports of an unknown creature in the lake are far more plausibly explained by large catfish, otters, or floating debris.