It makes everything we do possible. Subscribe to The Star. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share through email. Published 1 year ago. The creature reminded him of the infamous Montauk Monster. Evan Didyk. By Christine Sampson. July 3, And now for something completely different. If you are still experiencing issues, please describe the problem below and we will be happy to assist you. Photo courtesy of John Graziano. A strange carcass has washed up on the beach at Wolfe's Pond Park.
It certainly does. For those of you who may not remember, the Gawker first published the image of an odd carcass that washed up on a beach in Montauk in July When the story broke last Tuesday, it was wrapped in red flags: the original source was an email sent to Jezebel , Gawker 's sister site, by an employee of a public relations firm specializing in viral marketing something that Gawker didn't bother to mention until later -- but no worries, because they promise they're telling the truth, and just figured they'd solve the mystery quicker by contacting a tastemaking blog and not, say, a scientist.
With extraordinary coincidence, the Cartoon Network had just started running ads for Cryptids Are Real , a show about fantastical creatures that may or may not exist. And when they appeared on a local TV show , the Montauk Monster's finders were as believable as teenagers with fake IDs buying beer for the first time.
Was the Montauk Monster, in an eery confluence of those things that annoy me most in this world, really just a marketing campaign perpetrated by rich Long Island kids and spread by the pop culture blogosphere?
Had the sense of wonder and innocence that keeps alive the Yeti and Loch Ness Monster been so cynically betrayed? But more photographs surfaced, as did proper journalistic coverage and kudos goes Newsday 's Joye Brown , who showed how valuable an on-the-scene reporter can be, and Nicky Papers, proprietress of the Montauk Monster blog.
Several weird-looking carcasses, all identified by amateurs as freak, mystery creatures, and even intimated by some to be the bodies of genetic experiments or aliens, appear in Alien Investigations.
As is reasonably well known these days, I argued in an August article at the ScienceBlogs version of Tetrapod Zoology that both the overall form and proportions of the carcass and the detailed configuration and anatomy of its teeth and skull reveal that it is not an alien, a mutation, hybrid or otherwordly monster of any sort, but actually a partially decomposed Raccoon Procyon lotor. There is no doubt about this identification whatsoever. I was merely able to use Tetrapod Zoology as a vehicle to bring this hypothesis to widespread attention.
So far as I know — and so far as I can judge, given the theme and content of the interview segment I provided for the show — the people behind Alien Investigations have done the right thing, and are balancing the incredible claims and misidentifications that have surrounded the Montauk Monster and other such carcasses with rational explanations.
Comparatively few people are able to evaluate and identify decomposing raccoons, cats or monkeys — these days, even the majority of qualified biologists know a lot about genetics and perhaps behaviour and ecology, but tend not to be good on anatomy. Besides the Montauk Monster, Alien Investigations definitely features a weird, pink, naked-skinned, primate-shaped creature, also alleged by some to be remarkable and other-wordly.
How these carcasses have been interpreted and discussed by the media, by the online community, and by people in general is itself a fascinating subject worthy of coverage, no matter what the carcasses themselves turn out to be. In fact, a good argument could be made that the Montauk Monster and other cases covered here are 21st century versions of the Hydras, Jenny Hannivers, stuffed mermaids and other such 'monsters' of centuries past.
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