A note from the Archivist
Dr. Silas Wenlock Pell was the honorary, and largely self-appointed, Curator of the Pacific Society for Unlikely Fauna, a three-member learned society that met above a chandlery on the San Diego waterfront. From 1887 to 1899 he and a rotating cast of draughtsmen catalogued creatures no other naturalist could find.
The Society’s minutes describe him as “unshakeable in his convictions and frequently damp.” In 1903 he sailed past Point Loma to confirm the back half of the Fog Eel, and was not recorded again.
His plates were left in a tin-lined sea trunk. We are unsealing them one at a time. The plates are reconstructed with AI, and the creatures are fiction. The tide pools are real, and you can visit every one.
— the Archivist