• The 9-foot-long pterodactyl with murky blue eyes and a lolling tongue was created for the Web site “FreakyLinks” as a hoax.

The story – as it was set up – involved a man having found within the pages of an old book on the paranormal a sepia-toned, blotchy photograph of a group of Civil War-era soldiers posing with the bird.

Some people believed it was a Thunderbird, bagged at last.

• The Fiji mermaid is from the 1999 A&E movie “P.T. Barnum.” It’s withered like one giant, shrunken head.

Back in the day, the showman planted letters about its discovery around England before “finding” and bringing it to the States. The original burned in an 1866 museum fire.

Coleman thinks Barnum used the mermaid as bait to get people in the door so he could show his real natural history exhibits.

(Other movie props at the museum include frogs from the Tom Cruise flick “Magnolia” and actress Laura Linney’s police uniform from “The Mothman Prophecies.” Coleman was a consultant on that film.)

• The Turner Beast, in wood. Small enough to fit in your hand, and looking a bit cat-like, it was carved by R.J. LaVallee in northern Maine shortly after last year’s hoopla. LaVallee penned “Terror of Turner” on the bottom of the base.

“He was selling this for $100 on eBay” – and it didn’t move – “so I obtained it for less,” Coleman said.

• The cast of an enormous blue fish with white dapples, the coelacanth, has an interesting back story.

“A wealthy millionaire approached me and wanted to give me a gift for the museum. This must have been 14 years ago,” Coleman said. “He had to pay $1,000 for it. There’s a man in Florida who makes casts of this and there’s only two in the United States and I have one.”

The fish – presumed dead for millions of years only to be caught off the coast of South Africa last century – is “the darling of cryptozoology,” Coleman said.

• The ambling alleged- Bigfoot captured in the famous Patterson film 40 years ago this month left behind 10 footprints, Coleman said. He has casts of three of the 10.

Early Bigfoot enthusiasts’ mistake: “Everybody would keep the best-looking footprint, and what we know now today is you keep the ones that show the most movement because everybody looks at these and says, ‘This is fake.’… Other ones from the same track series show the foot was animate, moved, it stepped on rocks. And that’s not something, if you’ve got fake feet, (that) would show up.”

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