For most people mermaids are just creatures of myth. They belong in stories we tell our kids at night, but Animal Planet decided to give those that believe mermaids are real a chance to make their point. The premiere screening of Animal Planet’s “Mermaids: The Body Found” made many think mermaids could be real.

If you remember the Disney version of the mermaid, Ariel was quite a character to meet. However, Animal Planet’s speculative documentary has another version in mind. Take it from folklore or look for it on Wikipedia, the mermaid is always described as a creature that lives underwater, had a female upper body and the tail of a fish.

Mermaids have been known as mythological creatures since the Romans’ time. There are so many things about them that made people think they could be real. Animal Planet’s speculative documentary, “Mermaids: The Body Found” tried to answer a few question. The premiere aired May 27 and got a lot of people thinking.

The speculative documentary is the work of Charlie Foley, senior vice president of development for Animal Planet. He invested five years of his life in the production of “Mermaids: The Body Found”. He explained for New York Post that every culture has some kind of version of a mermaid legend, but all creatures are described similarly and even the theory of human evolution talks about something like that.

If human evolution says that we moved from sea to land, why wouldn’t the opposite be legit, also? “The idea is that people pulled back and we stopped evolving into a marine animal, into an aquatic animal. But what if we kept going?”

Charlie Foley also added that there were “cases of animal going from terrestrial to aquatic”, so the Aquatic Ape Theory might be the one to explain the mermaids. “And when you look at what makes humans unique among other terrestrial animals, it raises some interesting questions on whether mermaids might be plausible”.

Some have said of Charlie Foley’s interpretation of a mermaid that it looks a bit like the merpeople of the Harry Potter series. But Foley explains their mermaid’s “tail is paddle shaped, it’s not horizontal like a shark’s tail like in the Harry Potter films…These don’t look like what you expect mermaids to look like”.