FOXSYLVANIA

– – I’m always interested in unidentifiable mystery carcasses washing up on shore!  It’s better still if bathers are on the beach when it happens.  Submitted for your approval is this rather ferocious and prehistoric-looking specimen which washed up on Pukehina Beach in New Zealand…and no, I did not make up the name “Pukehina,” although it serves my purposes well.  About 9 meters in length with the lower part of the body mostly entrails from an attack, speculations soon surfaced that the remains were some kind of sea monster.   It probably didn’t smell like roses, either!

A marine mammal expert, however, has identified the remains as most likely being those of a killer whale, or orca.  When creatures wash ashore in a severe state of decomposition, they really don’t look their best, you see, and may not even look much like they did in life.   Bizarre-looking carcasses have been misidentified as sea monsters or even dinosaurs for generations.  Some masses of tissue brought up by the sea are so far gone as to be called, “blobsters.”  

In 1896, for example, a massive, six-foot-high “fleshy corpse” came ashore at St. Augustine, Florida.  After lots of speculation and probably gagging, a naturalist of the time decided that it was some kind of giant octopus previously unknown to science.  Then in 2003, something 40 feet long weighing 13 tons washed ashore on a beach in Chile.  Labeled the “Chilean Blob,” the remains were determined to be whale blubber.   More recently in 2008, I’m sure we can all remember the Montauk Monster, although this was much more modestly sized, being by most estimations the remains of a raccoon or a boxer dog.  Hopefully some more good stuff will wash up sometime soon, giving us material to write about!

…Anyways, there’s gotta be a really memorable bad movie for the Syfy channel lurking amidst all of this talk of fleshy corpses and bizarre-looking carcasses…Attack of the Blobster, maybe, I dunno…

This entry was posted on May 9, 2013 at 12:44 am and is filed under bizarre, creature features, events involving animals, mysteries, strange happenings, weird. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: blobsters, unidentifiable corpses