A bizarre blob of ocean yuck surfaced on a beach in Papua New Guinea in September, and scientists still can’t figure out what it is.
The aptly nicknamed “mermaid globster” is arguably one of the grossest and weirdest things I’ve seen since writing for the Daily Caller. The mysterious thing washed up on Simberi Island, home to around 1,000 people, in the New Ireland Province (NIO) of Papua New Guinea, according to a Facebook post from a local group.
The thing is huge, but there are no specific size and weight measurements of the corpse on record since locals buried it before gathering the data, NIO reps told LiveScience. And no one thought to take DNA samples, so there really isn’t any way to figure out what the huge creature was.
Occam’s Razor dictates the thing was probably just a half-eaten sea creature, maybe a marine mammal. Most of the thing’s head and some large chunks of flesh were missing, so it’s basically impossible to guess what it could have been, even from the photographs.
“It looks like a very decomposed cetacean to me,” University of St. Andrews marine mammal expert Sascha Hooker suggested to LiveScience. (RELATED: Camera Catches Mysterious Beast Roaming In Texas, Officials Ask For Public’s Help)
Part of me hopes it was a real mermaid. We could really do with something positive and magical happening in the world right now.