No vacation is complete without hearing a little bit of local color and urban legend, and the story of the sea monster from Florida can't be beat. It begins on a sunny evening in November of 1896, when two boys named Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter decided to go for a bike ride on the island beaches near their St. Augustine home. They spotted a huge carcass half-buried in the sand, and thought that it had to be the body of a recently deceased whale. The youngsters rode back into town to report their findings to a local physician, Dewitt Webb. But the "whale" was unlike anything that the citizens could have imagined.
Webb was the only academic to see the body as it was found on the beach. He noted the advanced state of decomposition, and that the mass was at least 18 feet long and 7 feet wide. It was pale pink in color and its surface was rubbery and tough, plus it had a noticeable sheen in the sunlight. As the creature had four stumps were it might have had arms at one time, Webb thought that the carcass was likely that of a giant octopus. The doctor got a few local hobbyists to photograph the monster from different angles, but the prints were lost soon after development; for decades, the only known images of the Saint Augustine monster were drawings based on the images.
It didn't take long for the press to catch up to the story, and one of the first articles about this mysterious carcass was published by a local hotel owner. He described the monster in dramatic detail, from the sea-lion-shaped head down to the 30-foot tentacles and gigantic eyes. Accuracy was thrown to the wind in the writeup, which was more titillating than factual. The press attention, along with Doctor Webb's findings, soon landed on the desk of a Yale professor named Emery Verrill. He was the nation's leading expert on octopus biology, and he initially concluded that the Saint Augustine monster had to be the remains of a giant squid. He even gave it a formal Latin name: Octopus giganteus. However, upon further sample analysis, Verrill decided that the remains were probably that of a sperm whale.
The mysterious creature was dragged inland, to prevent the tide from washing it out again. It briefly became a tourist attraction, and then at some point the carcass was lost. With few photographs, the story soon faded from cultural memory--until 1957, when a Florida museum curator happened upon a newspaper clipping that mentioned the Saint Augustine sea monster. The curator learned that tissue samples had been preserved at the Smithsonian institution, and the true identity of the creature had never been determined.
Over the next forty years, four different attempts to come to the bottom of the mystery were made. The first two papers, published in 1971 and 1986, pegged the sea monster as a giant octopus based on tissue examinations and basic biochemical amino acid comparison. But as technology got better, scientists couldn't help re-testing the Saint Augustine Monster samples with electron scanning micrographs. These new analyses, in 1995 and 2004, revealed that the monster was made of collagen, and didn't resemble invertebrate skin or tissue. The remains were likely the blubber layer of a whale, which floated along and washed up on shore after a long period of decomposition at sea. Even with this conclusion, the St Augustine Sea Monster has remained an alluring and unique part of Florida's local history, and there are some who still believe that it was the remnants of a totally new, undiscovered species from the deep.
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