Montauk Monster

This photograph of the creature's corpse appeared in July 2008, quickly circulating through local papers and the Internet.

The "Montauk Monster" is an unidentified creature which washed ashore dead on a beach near the Montauk, New York business district in July 2008. The identity of the creature, and the veracity of stories surrounding it, has been the subject of unresolved controversy and speculation. Its discovery has been covered by national news channels such as CNN, and has generated popular discussion on the Internet.

History

The story began with a July 23 article in a local newspaper, The Independent. Jenna Hewitt, 26, of Montauk, and three friends said they found the creature on July 12 at the Ditch Plains beach, two miles east of the district. The beach is a popular surfing spot at Rheinstein Estate Park owned by East Hampton, New York. Hewitt was quoted:

We were looking for a place to sit when we saw some people looking at something...We didn't know what it was...We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island.

Her color photograph ran in black and white, under the headline "The Hound of Bonacville" (a take-off on the name Bonackers, which refers to the natives of East Hampton). The light hearted article speculated that the creature might be a turtle or some mutant experiment from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center before noting that the East Hampton Natural Resources Director Larry Penny had concluded it was a raccoon with its upper jaw missing. The article concluded that "someone took it away... to be buried... we hope." An unidentified woman told the same reporter that the animal was only the size of a cat, and had decomposed to a skeleton by the time of the press coverage. She would not identify its location for inspection.

Hewitt and her friends were interviewed on Plum-TV, a local cable television show. Alanna Navitski, an employee of Evolutionary Media Group in Los Angeles, California, passed a photo of the creature to Anna Holmes at Jezebel, claiming that a friend's sister saw the monster in Montauk. Holmes then passed it along to fellow Gawker Media website Gawker.com which gave it wide attention on July 29 under the headline "Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk". Photographs were widely circulated via email and weblogs, and the national media picked up on it raising speculation about the creature. The potential urban legend stature of the Montauk Monster was noted by Snopes.

Possible identifications

Speculation in published reports included theories that the Montauk Monster might have been a turtle without its shell—even though a turtle's shell cannot be removed without damaging the spine—a dog, a raccoon, or perhaps a science experiment from the nearby government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The creature's appearance was believed to have been altered through immersion in water for an extended period before coming to rest on the shore, making it difficult to identify.

The father of the woman who took the photo told a reporter that reports that his daughter was holding out to the highest bidder to make some cash were "nonsense."

William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, interpreted the photo along with a colleague; they deemed the creature a fake, the result of "someone who got very creative with latex." Wise discounted the following possibilities:

• Raccoon. ("The legs appear to be too long in proportion to the body.")
• Sea turtle. ("Sea turtles do not have teeth")
• Rodent. ("Rodents have two huge, curved incisor teeth in front of their mouths.")
• Dog or other canine such as a coyote. ("Prominent eye ridge and the feet" don't match.)
• Sheep. (Sheep don't have sharp teeth).

On August 1st, Gawker published pictures and x-rays of a Rakali (or Water Rat, Hydromys chrysogaster) showing several convincing similarities with the Montauk Monster: the "beak", tail, feet, size, and general appearance are similar. The Rakali originates from Australia. On the same day, Jeff Corwin appeared on Fox News and claimed that upon close inspection of the photograph, he feels sure the "monster" is merely a raccoon or dog that has decomposed slightly. This was backed up by Darren Naish, a British paleontologist, who examined the images and agreed that, if real, the creature was a raccoon. Naish says that "claims that the limb proportions of the Montauk carcass are unlike those of raccoons are not correct", and on his blog he furnishes an illustration of an intact raccoon corpse drawn over the corpse in the photograph.

On August 5, Fox Channel's Morning Show repeated speculation that the beast is a decayed corpse of a capybara, even though capybaras do not have tails. The next day, the same program reported that an unnamed man claimed that the animal's carcass had been stolen from his back yard.

From August 5, the promoters of the independent horror film Splinterheads announced that the creature was a prop they had made, and that the story was an intentional viral marketing promotion. The film's website included the claim "We have the Montauk Monster", but this was taken down a few days later.

See also

• Zuiyō Maru
• Globster
• Stronsay beast
• Cryptid