Archive for August, 2008

Montauk Monster

Friday, August 1st, 2008

First seen on Gawker, a Manhattan media news and gossip Web site, the Montauk Monster allegedly washed ashore on the far eastern end of New York’s Long Island. Some people say it looks like a turtle with no shell, a bird, an alien, and some even assert that it’s a fabrication, dreamt up to create some Interweb hype or even visibility as a new guerrilla advertising campaign.

Persoanlly, I think it could very well be real, and I’m going to put my money (what little I have) on the hunch that it’s nothing more than a decomposing boar.

Below are the two pictures I’ve been able to find of this alleged monster:

Montauk MonsterMontauk Monster 2

I could see how these two very different images could be of the same thing; one you see of the Montauk Monster’s back (which one could only assume has been frying beneath the summer sun for quite a few hours/days) and the other is of little beast’s underside, unharmed by the sun’s rays. There’s also no telling how much time transpired between the two photos, perhaps someone flipped said beasty over and unbound (what looks to have been bound) its front extremities.

My personal take on this is that the beast is neither monster nor fabrication, rather it looks to me like a simple Boar that has been given a few days/weeks to decompose whilst bathing in some H2O.

The reason I think it’s a boar is because it kind of looks like one. The “beak” on the forefront of its face looks more like a decomposed (or potentially injured/chopped off) snout. It has tusks much like a boar has and its head and general body fits the size and shape of a boar. The underside also reveals patches of what looks like hair (which boars also have, in case you didn’t know :-) ).

Below is an image I got from a Web site of a boar’s skeleton.

Boar Skeleton

Source: http://www.archeozoo.org/en-article134.html

Now, I’m no scientist nor am I educated in any type of animal science, but to me, the pieces just seem to match up. The only thing that sort of seems out of place is the Montauk’s long tail and seemingly longer and possibly malformed front appendages.