Ask an Amateur Scientist: The Montauk Monster

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

Did you know CNN.com sells t-shirts of their headlines?  I don’t know what the criteria for shirtdom are, though I’m assuming not many people would want “Housing crisis reaches record low” or “Karl Rove indicted” plastered across their chests.  Well, maybe that second one.  So color me confused when I saw the headline “Monster washes up on beach” being offered on a tasteful black cotton tee for $15. Robbed of context, the phrase could probably do very well with the non sequitur hipsters on Threadless.com (where a red umlaut over a field of abstracted black condors suddenly becomes a limited edition fashion statement), but the little “I just saw this on CNN.com!” ad-hump underneath is just a little too corporate.

But even though no one would ever want that headline on her shirt, it somehow captured the world’s attention regardless.  To a certain extent, I understand.  Everyone likes monsters (despite the box office performance of Hellboy II), and who isn’t intrigued by the things that wash up on beaches?  But this summer’s mysterious severed foot scare seemed to already corner the strange flotsam market for the season, and it’s rare that two similar entertainments can survive in such a crowded marketplace.  Sure, there’s actually a clear picture of this creature, which is more than anyone can say for literally every alien, bigfoot, ghost, or leprechaun sighting in recorded history, but the problem with this clear picture is that there’s no denying the thing is clearly some kind of bloated, rotted animal.  It’s not so much a monster as it is roadkill.  Still, curiosity had been aroused, possibly due to the media’s insistence on calling the thing some kind of “dinosaur-beaked” rodent.  That still doesn’t qualify as “monster” in my book, but what do I know about branding?

II. The Findings

Speaking of branding, it’s a sad commentary on American culture when the first explanation that pops into the collective consciousness for a strange beached body is that it’s probably a viral marketing campaign.  At last year’s Comic-Con, the under-the-radar advertising reached a disturbing fever pitch as a hundred thousand geeks fished their cell phones from their cosplay costumes and jabbed in whatever numbers they saw trailing sky-written into the sky above the San Diego convention center.  Apparently the number was to some kind of psychotic giggling voicemail service.  Personally, I’d rather they just smacked everyone in the registration line with a “go see The Dark Knight” tattoo-paddle.  At least then I wouldn’t feel like an extra in Cloak and Dagger.  When I found a bumper sticker for Showtime’s Dexter at the bottom of a urinal, I almost snapped before realizing that it was probably dropped there accidentally by any number of the conventioneers unwittingly plastered with them by buxom PR interns.  I didn’t make it to this year’s Comic-Con, and that’s mostly because I’d rather just watch a trailer for Star Trek than pass by a bunch of starving college students paid to give me the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign at random intervals.

So what were we talking about?  Oh yeah.  So, this corpse was supposedly found on a Montauk, New York beach by 26-year-old amateur corpse finder Jenna Hewitt and three friends.  She took pictures of it, which ran in The Independent on July 23 before being reposted on Gawker.com, where the story exploded.  The viral marketing rumors weren’t entirely without merit, since Hewitt’s story about the details of the event were sketchy and no one knows where or why the carcass was taken after the photos were snapped.  Plus, an energy drink called Venom spat out a press release offering a reward for the capture of a live “Montauk Monster”.  Why any kind of beverage company would choose to use a random corpse finding as a marketing campaign is anyone’s guess, though an explanation might be found in the fact that Venom tastes exactly like rotting flesh.  But while it was pretty obvious that the Venom connection was just a case of opportunistic advertising, it was still suspected that the carcass might be some kind of Hollywood prosthetics or Photoshop job.  Possibly a viral ad for the upcoming Cloverfield 2: Even Shakier, though if the monsters in that movie look like this one, I’ll personally roshambo J.J. Abrams.

So, if it’s not viral marketing, what the hell is it?  It clearly doesn’t look like any common dead animal, though those tend to be found in a highly flattened and tread-marked state.  And from the angle of the first released photograph, its snout does look rather beak-like.  But the most common hypothesis for its animal origin in the first few days after the story broke was almost more depressing than the “oh, it’s just a bloated billboard” reaction.  Many, many people truly believed this thing was a turtle without its shell.  Take a moment to think about that.  Maybe most Americans’ only exposure to turtles is from old Loony Tunes shorts, but a turtle can’t just slip off its shell and lounge around in a one-piece swimsuit.  And they sure as hell can’t outsmart Bugs Bunny.  As anyone who’s ever been to a zoo or a back yard or has even a basic understanding of the world around her can tell you, turtles are attached to their shells.  A turtle shell is not clothing.  Sweet Jesus.

While the beak-like appearance of the animal’s snout in that first photo is vaguely turtle-esque, if you look closely you can see canine teeth along the animal’s lower jaw.  This rules out a lot of explanations.  It’s a carnivore, for one thing.  And with its spindly fingers and patches of fur, it’s a good bet that this thing is a mammal.  When an animal dies and decomposes in the water, there’s a certain pattern of disgusting horror that follows.  The fur goes rather quickly, the body bloats, and the soft tissue of the face and feet starts to slough off.  So the supposed beak isn’t so much a beak as it is exposed skull.  And when you look at the subsequently released photos of the body from another angle, you can clearly see that this is the case.  Also, you can see its junk.

About this time, you should be wondering why you’ve spent so much time looking at pictures of a dead, rotting animal.  And you should.  You probably have much better things to do, and your family is most likely beginning to miss you.  Please, return to them and speak not of what you’ve seen here.  But before you go, you should probably know what this creature really is.  I’ll let TV’s kindest and least impaled by a manta ray personality, Jeff Corwin, give you the news.  “What we have is an incredibly rare” — dramatic pause — “raccoon.”

III. The Conclusion

Of course the thing doesn’t look like a raccoon.  I thought the explanation was a little far-fetched myself until I saw this composite picture from Animachina.com:

But as sad as America’s desensitization to advertising and its disturbing lack of turtle knowledge is, the fact that such supposedly viable news sources as CNN reported this story without first consulting any animal experts just shows you how incredibly inept science reporting can be when it comes to a “mystery” story.  It may make for an interesting headline, but there’s no way I’m wearing it on a t-shirt.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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