![]() ![]() Addison Verrill of Yale, the nation's foremost expert on cephalopods, pronounced it a remnant of an unknown species of massive octopus, and gave it a scientific name - Octopus giganteus. ![]() Local doctors, naturalists, photographers and journalists thought they could discern the remains of a head, eyes, mouth, tentacles and a tail.ĭr. Augustine, Fla., when two boys found a gigantic lump of white, rubbery flesh, 21 feet long, 7 feet wide and weighing perhaps 7 tons. This does in fact appear to be the end of the great blob story, a tale that began in late 1896 near St. Richard Ellis, author of the 1994 book ''Monsters of the Sea,'' an exploration of some of the world's most bizarre fauna, called the DNA finding convincing and devastating. ''To our disappointment,'' the scientists wrote last month in The Biological Bulletin, ''we have not found any evidence that any of the blobs are the remains of gigantic octopods, or sea monsters of unknown species.'' The answer is all too mundane: The blobs are old whale blubber. Other experts suggested it was a giant squid or perhaps an entirely new kind of sea creature unknown to science.īut now a team of six highly skilled, if somewhat whimsical biologists centered at the University of South Florida has applied DNA analysis to the blobs and, alas, solved the mystery. While experts oohed and aahed over what appeared to be fragments of its huge tentacles, the Internet buzzed over news of the monster and the BBC pronounced it perhaps the remains of a lost species of giant octopus. Last summer, a gelatinous blob as long as a school bus washed up in Chile. In 1972, a jittery analyst wondered if one particularly enigmatic blob was the decomposing body of a giant alien from outer space. Perhaps the blobs were remnants of living fossils more fearsome than the dinosaurs. For more than a century, scientists and laymen who examined the tons of that protoplasm filled in the glaring gaps in knowledge of blob anatomy by imagining eyes, mouths and slimy tentacles long enough to sink cruise ships. ![]()
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