Strange animal washed ashore
At Monterey Bay in the state of California, on the east coast of the United States, there is a rather quiet but beautiful beach called Natural Bridges State Beach (“Beach of Natural Wild Bridges”), which attracts many photographers. to practice skills.
Photo: siliconvalleyandbeyond.com
Not only famous for possessing a poetic beauty, this beach is also famous because this place, many years ago, witnessed a strange creature drifting ashore.
Nearly a century ago, on June 1, 1925, a local dairy man named Charles Moore took a trip to the beach. Here, he happened to discover the body of a monster more than 11 m long washed ashore.
The creature’s carcass is decomposing and stinking. Visually, this animal has a duck-like head, a long neck, and whale-like tail, and “elephant-like” legs with enough big toes.
Mysterious creatures wash up on the coast of Monterey Bay. Photo: genesispark.com
Photo: genesispark.com
Photo: genesispark.com
In a local newspaper, a man named E.J. Lear told of a ‘terrible fight’ between a mermaid and more than a dozen sea lions, days before Charles Moore’s discovery. He said, while driving in the area, he suddenly saw a group of sea lions teaming up to attack an underwater monster. The surrounding waters were violently stirred, the battle was extremely balanced. Glancing in the dark, he estimated the monster fish to be more than 9 meters long.
Although he had not yet seen the animal wash up on the beach, he thought it was possible that they were one. If that is true, it is possible that the strange animal was attacked by sea lions and died, its body washed ashore a few days later.
A curious woman came to examine the strange animal at Monterey Bay beach, 1925. Photo: The Old Man of Monterey Bay.
The Sentinel describes the creature as possessing an elephant-like tail, mammalian head, and duck-like beak. Photo: The Old Man of Monterey Bay
The shocking conclusion about the monster’s identity
E.L. Wallace, who was twice president of the Natural History Association of British Columbia (Canada), went to the scene to examine the animal’s body.
He said:
“I did a thorough examination. I checked and found it has no teeth. Its head is quite large and its neck is up to 6 meters long. The body is quite weak and the tail is only about 0.9 m long, extending from the spine to the end. This fact proves this is not a whale, because the whale spine is much larger than this animal. Its tail is very weak, so it certainly does not reside in deep water.
“Based on the structure of its beak, its food must have been vegetation… I would assume it was some kind of [sea lizard] plesiosaurus.”
This is certainly a shocking conclusion. Plesiosaurus is an ancient sea lizard. Because they were huge in size, lived and died at the same time as terrestrial dinosaurs, they are often called “sea dinosaurs”.
Illustration of the marine dinosaur Plesiosaurus. Photo: dinosaurpictures.org
By the time 65 million years ago, this sea lizard along with the dinosaurs on the shore reached the brink of extinction, because of the meteor disaster. Therefore, to find such a plesiosaurus in the flesh is very surprising.
However, not long after that, Mr. Wallace added another theory about this plesiosaurus. He suggested that this extinct animal tens of millions of years ago had died, but its body was preserved intact in an iceberg, like a mammoth. After the iceberg gradually melted, the mummy of the animal escaped, floating in the sea to eventually wash up on the coast of this Monterey Bay.
But things don’t seem to be that simple.
The question revolves around the time of the animal’s death
In order for this animal to be preserved in an ice sheet, it would require the Earth’s climate then to remain at a low temperature for a certain length of time. But in fact, there was not a single frozen region that existed continuously for the entire time that dinosaurs dominated the Earth, from their appearance until their extinction 65 million years ago. The Earth’s climate at that time was quite warm. It was not until much later that large animals preserved in ice intact (not fossilized), such as mammoths, appeared, beginning about 10,000 years ago. So the fact that a species of sea lizard went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, being able to preserve their bodies intact for millions of years, is an impossibility.
During the time of the dinosaurs, the Earth’s climate was quite warm. HER