By Tim Binnall
A British couple was left scratching their heads when they stumbled upon what appeared to be the nightmarish remains of a creature sporting the head of a human and the body of a fish. According to a local media report, Paula and Dave Regan made the gruesome discovery earlier this month in the coastal town of Margate. "We thought we'd blow the cobwebs away with a walk along the beach," she recalled, noting that their stroll came to a sudden stop when they spotted the bizarre object (seen below) sitting in the sand.
From afar, Paula suspected that the oddity was simply some driftwood or perhaps an unfortunate seal, but "when we got up to it, it was the weirdest thing. For the life of me, I can't tell you what it was."The debris that baffled the Regans resembled a diminutive mermaid with a humanoid head and a fishtail. "It didn’t feel slimy or decomposed," Paula observed, "but it was definitely strange." The peculiar find soon drew a small crowd of bewildered beachgoers wondering what the weird creature could have been.
While some suggested the oddity could have been a carved decorative piece from a ship, Paula mused that ultimately "nobody could work out what it was." Suspecting that "no one would believe" their account of the unsightly discovery, the couple smartly snapped some photos of the mystifying object. When the pictures began circulating online, cryptozoologists and sideshow aficionados quickly identified the find as a form of the famed Fiji Mermaid, a once-popular type of fabrication passed off as an exotic animal by unscrupulous promoters. How exactly this particular specimen wound up on the beach in Margate is, of course, a mystery, though one imagines it may have been placed there by a prankster hoping to cause the kind of stir that it did.