Globsters: The Beach Monsters That Turned Out to Be Whales
On the morning of November 30, 1896, two boys, Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter, were cycling along the beach on Anastasia Island near St. Augustine, Florida, when they came upon a pale mountain of flesh half-buried in the sand. The exposed portion alone measured some eighteen feet long and seven wide, and the local physician who reached it the next day, Dr. DeWitt Webb, founder of the St. Augustine Historical Society and the only academically trained person to examine it in place, put its weight at close to five tons. It had no head, no eyes, no limbs anyone could name. Webb grew convinced it was the body of a colossal octopus and mailed tissue to the eminent Yale naturalist Addison Verrill, who in February 1897 gave the thing a Latin name: Octopus giganteus. For a moment, the American coast had a monster on the books.
It was not the last of its kind. In 1924 a white, furry-looking carcass washed ashore at Margate in South Africa, later nicknamed Trunko, after witnesses claimed to have watched it fight killer whales. In August 1960 a still larger mass, roughly twenty feet across and matted with stiff bristles, appeared on a remote Tasmanian beach. In 1962 the zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson gave these apparitions the name that stuck: the globster, a blob with no recognisable front, back, bones or organs.
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