A beachcomber was baffled when she came across a faceless sea creature washed up on a North Yorkshire beach.

The animal, estimated to be nearly 16 feet long, has left experts stumped after appearing in a rock pool at Hayburn Wyke.

Caroline Pindar, 61, was exploring the remote area, which is only accessible by foot when she saw the bizarre animal.

She said: ‘There had been a severe storm and there was a lot of foam amongst the rocks where the tide had receded.

‘At a distance I wondered if the remains were foam or washed-up fishing debris – there is lots of this type of pollution around here. But as I got closer it was obviously far too big.’

Caroline said the remains were decomposing, with bones ‘protruding through the skin’ and ‘mounds of blubber’ to the side of the carcass.

She added: ‘The way it was hunched made it look as if the exposed bones were tusks, semi-walrus-like. No head or tail were obvious. The smell was very strong.’

In her photos, the faceless creature is covered in blotchy white skin that’s stringy in texture, with bones poking through in places.

Caroline shared her pics with a specialist marine life group online in hopes of finding out what the mass was, but no clear consensus was met.

Guesses included a walrus, a Minke whale, or some sort of seal, or ‘oversized dolphin’.

Experts at the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme also couldn’t decipher what the beast could be.

Project manager Rob Deaville said: ‘Looks like the rotted remains of a larger cetacean – I think I can see remnants of throat pleats in one of the images.

‘Given the size with the person in the background as scale, I’d perhaps lean towards something like a minke whale.

‘But to be honest, it’s difficult to tell given the decomposition. I’d perhaps just call it an unidentified or indeterminate-identity baleen whale?’

But Caroline said the discovery was baffling: ‘I had seen dead porpoises in various states of decomposition around here, and seen/smelt a decomposing whale from the water in Orkney, but nothing like this.

‘My overwhelming feeling was sadness that an animal had died. Then concern, wondering how and why it had died, hoping it had not been entangled in nets and drowned in distress.’

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Sarah Hooper

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