Tissue specimens saved from the 150-foot-long remains of an unidentified creature grounded on a Florida beach in 1896 are almost certainly part of an ordinary whale, the researchers conclude. And a similar fleshy mass that washed ashore in Bermuda seven years ago was probably part of a very large fish or shark.
"I wanted it to come out to be an octopus. Everybody likes a giant octopus story," said Sidney Pierce, a professor of zoology at the University of Maryland who led the study. "I'm sorry to say it did not come out that way."
Pierce and colleagues from the University of Maryland and Indiana University describe their findings in the April issue of Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Clyde Roper, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, praised the research for its scientific rigor: "This settles the question of the great Florida sea monster and the Bermuda Blob."
But even the best evidence is unlikely to quash the widespread belief that giant octopi and other oversized aquatic ogres prowl the seas.
It was a stormy winter night 99 years ago when waves threw a gargantuan fleshy corpse upon the beach at St. Augustine. A local physician trained in natural history examined the six-foot-high heap of rubbery cadaver. Based in part on what appeared to be a tentacle-like limb 18 inches in diameter, he made an initial determination that the mass was the remains of a giant octopus many times larger than anything ever seen.
Specimens were sent to the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere. Most experts eventually concluded that it did not resemble octopus flesh after all. But the animal's identity remained a matter of debate and came up for discussion every few decades -- most recently with the arrival of the Bermuda Blob.
The blob washed into a lagoon on the island of Bermuda in the summer of 1988, and fishermen familiar with the St. Augustine story immediately saw similarities between the two carcasses.
Recently, University of Maryland zoologist Eugenie Clark, a world renowned marine researcher who teaches an undergraduate course called Sharks and Sea Monsters, organized a new effort to settle the issue. She arranged to get preserved tissue samples from both corpses for analysis.
Microscopic studies indicated that both specimens are almost pure collagen, a stretchy kind of connective tissue that can accumulate in thick layers beneath the skin of whales, fish and other creatures. But an analysis of each sample's amino acids, the building blocks of collagen, showed differences between the two. The older specimen showed a pattern typically seen in the collagen of warmblooded mammals such as whales, while the blob's amino acid fingerprint indicated it had come from a coldblooded fish, such as a shark or ray.
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