Huge ‘hairy sea monster’ washes up on Pacific coast: what can it be?

The baffling behemoth - shown in a video here - was washed up in recent days on the shore of the Bering Sea, on the Pacific side of the Kamchatka peninsula. 

More than three times the size of a man, the smelly  heavyweight monster has puzzled locals here who are used to seeing what the ocean washes up.

It has a dirty chalk colouring, and appears to have a long tail - or tentacle - but no definite head or eyes as it lies on the dark volcanic sand.

Witness Svetlana Dyadenko posted: ‘This unidentified and strange-looking creature was washed on the shore next to the village of Pakhachi, on the north-eastern side of the Kamchatka Peninsula.'

She said: ‘The most interesting thing to me is that the creature is covered with tubular fur. 

‘Could it be some ancient creature? 

‘I wish scientists could inspect this enigma that ocean threw at us.’

A puzzling find off the north-eastern coast of Kamchatka peninsula. Pictures: The Siberian Times

First comments asked her if it could be the remnants of an extinct woolly mammoth, perhaps released from an undersea permafrost grave by the warm summer. 

But Svetlana said:  ‘It looks more like a hairy octopus. Can’t guess what is it. 

‘People who saw it could not dig or pull it out.

‘You would need an excavator because part of it got completely covered with sand.’

Commenter Slava Shatunov wrote: ‘It looks like normal fur.’

Svetlana replied:  ‘It does look like fur, but it’s tubular, as if a lot of tiny pipes hang down the carcass. This is a really strange-looking creature. 

‘We googled it and couldn’t find anything resembling it.’

Some suggested the 'creature' looked like a globster. Pictures: The Siberian Times

Another confused observer suggested: ‘I wonder if it came from a thawed glacier?’

Another woman replied: ‘It’s got to have been brought from the Arctic.’

More suggestions: ‘It looks like an octopus, or the pelt of some creature’.

Svetlana replied that it seemed to be ‘the carcass of an animal - but we can’t guess which one.’

Elena Vlasova suggested: ‘It reminds of a giant squid.’

But she also asked: ‘Is it a globster?’ 

Eyewitness Svetlana Dyadenko replied: ’It might be a globster, but after googling it I didn’t see that people came across lobsters with tails.’ 

The term globster was first coined in 1962 to describe a mysterious Tasmanian carcass which was said to have "no visible eyes, no defined head, and no apparent bone structure”.

These globsters  may at first resemble a gigantic octopus while others may have some bones or tentacles or flippers - or even eyes, say experts.

They are, though, not usually hairy as this one is. Scientists have suggested globsters are declared carcasses of large sea creatures, like whales or sharks.

They might be lumps of whale blubber released from decaying corpses. 

Yet the hair or fur on this Kamchatka monster doesn’t seem to fit with this description.

But Kamchatka marine biologist Sergei Kornev today partly validated the globster theory.

He believes the monster to be part of a decaying sea mammal.

'Under the influence of the sea, time and various animals, from the smallest to the largest, a whale often takes on bizarre forms.

‘This is only a part of a whale, not a whole one.'