The latest entry in nature's proverbial game show 'weird things that wash ashore' comes by way of Wales in the form of a particularly gruesome dead creature. The ghastly remains were found by a woman walking her dogs along a beach in the Welsh town of Rhossili. Curious about what the creature might be, Beth Jannetta snapped a photograph of the five-foot-long oddity and posted it online.
And, as often happens, the image sparked a bit of an online debate as various theories for the animal's origins were offered by observers. Chiefly among them was some kind of cetacean, like a dolphin or porpoise, which is what Janetta had guessed when she first encountered the dead beast.
However, others argued that, based on the animal's apparent snout and tapered tail, the creature could have been a crocodile. Thankfully, there doesn't appear to have been any guesses of 'sea monster' or Nessie just yet, but the animal was only found today, so one shouldn't be surprised to see such ideas in the media at any moment.
Meanwhile, an ecological expert Dr. Dan Forman, who had the unenviable task of investigating the rotting creature offered his own take on the matter. According to a Welsh media outlet, he dismissed the crocodile theory as pretty preposterous and proposed that it was, indeed, likely a cetacean whale or a dolphin.
While the animal may have seemed bewildering to laypeople looking at the photo, Forman seemed rather nonplussed by the case, musing that "we have porpoises washing up quite regularly, as well as dolphins and seals and sometimes sheep." Unfortunately, he did not explain how or why sheep occasionally wash ashore, leaving us incredibly curious about that oddly glossed over bit of information.