Tasmanian Monster

[Anonymous]

Charles Berlitz claims that in July in 1960 a large, circular mass, about twenty feet in diametre and six feet thick at the centre, covered with short course hair washed up on a Tasmanian beach after a violent gale. The skin was an inch thick and they had to cut a tissue sample with an axe. It was found to be not part of any species already known on earth.

Does anyone have any ideas what this might be?

I thought perhaps a giant sea urchin that had kind of deflated but it definitely says short hair and not spines!

A bald one washed up here a few weeks ago didn't it? A large white fibrous mass that isn't Robert Maxwell being studied 'somewhere' in labs around the world but I have a feeling we're not going to hear any more about it and it'll just be filed away with all the other curiosities that Charles Berlitz and his kind sporadically dig up and publish.

Some one of us must be able to come up with something????

 

[Jerry_B]

I think the case Berlitz described was later identified as the remains of some sort of whale, the 'hair' in fact being plankton filters from the whale's mouth.

 

[Anome]

I have a vague recollection of hearing about the unidentified biological mass described above, but can't think where I heard about it from. If it was a whale, then that would make it much the same as the more recent find, which I believe turned out to be part of a sperm whale carcasse. (Whales decompose in interesting ways, and DNA testing was pretty much the only way to work it out I understand.)

 

[Anonymous]

I have a vague recollection of hearing about the unidentified biological mass described above, but can't think where I heard about it from. If it was a whale, then that would make it much the same as the more recent find, which I believe turned out to be part of a sperm whale carcasse. (Whales decompose in interesting ways, and DNA testing was pretty much the only way to work it out I understand.)

Actually, they found whale oil glands in the mass, so no DNA testing was even necessary.

 

[stu neville]

Idle thought

Actually, they found whale oil glands in the mass, so no DNA testing was even necessary.

What if it was an unknown creature that eats whales?

Semi-serious point: this is where conventional science tends to lose us: when it comes up with the first answer that satisfies it, science stops looking. And any attempt to look deeper has scorn poured upon it...

 

[Anome]

I believe the evidence that it was a piece of rotting sperm whale carcasse is somewhat conclusive. (Although I was probably wrong about the DNA testing, as I am recalling this entirely from memory. Which means I may be completely wrong, but I do trust my source. I'll just have to go on a bit of a hunt for more details. At some point, I don't know I feel like doing it tonight.)

 

[stu neville]

Fair enough, it probably was a rotting sperm whale. The point I was making was that if the identification was based on the presence of sperm whale oil glands alone, wouldn't it be feasible that in fact it was something that had ingested a sperm whale?

 

[Anome]

The glands are unlikely to go through the creature's digestion and be incorporated intact into its own body. It could be the contents of another creature's stomach, which had recently eaten a sperm whale, but I doubt the stomach contents and remnants of the body would form a cohesive lump like that.

An idea that just occurred to me is that it was a giant squid's vomit. I don't feel well, now.

 

[TheOrigDesperado]

I'm not sure that anything eats sperm whales. The stories of squid attacking whales, I don't know. Squid have beaks. Whales are pretty big.

I don't know what my point is.

Coat!

 

[Anome]

To be fair, they are talking about really big squid eating sperm whales.
[EDIT]Or, more accurately, really big Sperm Whale-eating Squid.[/EDIT]

 

[Anonymous]

Well, I believe they were doing DNA testing as a sort of formality, but they were pretty sure it was jsut whale blubber (I don't recall what kind, likely sperm or humpback whale).