Unidentified Sea Creature Found After Typhoon

In the strange happenings department...

An unidentified creature's body was found washed up on shore in China. It's been said that it has a long thin head and snout and is about 3 feet (1 meter) long.

Partly rotten, with its spine exposed, it has been impossible to identify, but has been described as having some hair, and orange stripes across a three to four-meter wide belly. The skull, which alone weighs over 100 kg, and coccyx of the creature have fallen from its body.

Mei said four young people took away a 100 kg piece of the corpse to study and many experts have come to inspect it, but all in vain.

From the degree of putrefaction, the animal may have been dead for a week and beached by Typhoon Haitang several days ago, said Hu from Beilun’s sea and fishery bureau.

www.china.org.cn...

This doesn't seem to be the typical shark carcass confusion happening here. The creature has a very different overall description. I'm not sure they will ever figure it out, but it's still interesting.

Thats very interesting. I just wish they had more pictures, in color. Anyway, at this rate it doesn't look like they will ever figure out what this thing is.


I just realized, this being disucussed already.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 8/3/2005 by cereal]

Probably a Basking Shark. Those things are always misidentified, due to their rapid rate of decay. Back in the 70's, one was mistaken by some Japanese fisherman as a possible Plesiosaur!

The black and white photo makes it look like it is made out of concrete to me. I dunno. The only other reasonable/possible sea monster picture I ever saw was the rotten "plesiosaur-like" one on the fishing boat. Both happened in China. Coincedence? Likely... but maybe they are starting to get onto something.

I have always approached sea monsters with an "unlikely but still very much possible" attitude.

The rotting dinosaur one happened in Japan. They even released a commemorative stamp to honor the occasion.

If you have a way to check the AP photo archives there was a Japanese fishing vessel that had caught something like this in its net.There was a picture in the papers several years ago.I don't recall what the outcome was or if it had been positivley identified.Might be the same thing.

When a whale dies it takes a long time before the skin and muscle would decay. But once all that's gone the blubber is free to float around the ocean. So I say it's just a big chunk of whale fat.

same thing happened to the 2 jap boats same type of body and smell the last i heard they took a sample this time and nothing is known of the dna

Very cool info Zedd. Hopefully tmore information is released on any further testing results.