‘Florida Monster’ washed ashore over 100 years ago. What was it?

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Well over 100 years ago, a giant blob washed up in Anastasia Island, leading to a decades-long mystery.

According to the JSTOR Daily, the 7-ton blob — later dubbed the “Florida Monster” or “St. Augustine Monster” — was found by two boys walking along the beach in 1896.

It was described as a “giant, pear-shaped blob of grayish goo,” which was spotted laying across the sand. One end was “bulbous,” with “seemingly mutilated appendages trailing off at the other.”

After the boys reported their findings to Dr. DeWitt Webb — a local physician and president of the St. Augustine Scientific Society — he dug it out and had it hauled up from the sand.

While Webb was only an amateur naturalist, he came up with the hypothesis that the blob was the carcass of a giant octopus, a theorized animal that was large enough to sink ships.

Information about the discovery eventually reached Addison Verrill, an esteemed zoologist and professor at Yale.

Verrill initially believed that the remains were of an undiscovered colossal octopus — an Octopus giganteus — due to the carcass having what appeared to be the “stumps of mutilated arms.”

However, he soon changed his mind.

Webb had reported finding mutilated arms near the remains, which initially led Verrill to believe that it could have been an octopus. However, it turned out that there had been no arms nearby.

Verrill said that the remains smelled like “rancid whale oil” but didn’t seem to come from “any mobile part of any animal.” Instead of an octopus, he believed the remains were a chunk from a sperm whale’s head.

“It is possible to imagine a sperm whale with an abnormally enlarged nose, due to disease or extreme old age, which, if detached, might resemble this mass externally at least,” Verrill wrote.

Despite the retraction, many scientists still believed in the giant octopus theory, leaving the issue unsettled for the time being.

Decades later in 1957, Dr. Forrest Wood — the curator at Marineland of Florida with a knack for cryptozoology — dug up an old newspaper clipping about the Florida Monster, sparking Wood’s interest in the mystery.

Wood traced the remains back to the Smithsonian Institution, which had preserved specimens from the carcass.

After eventually persuading the curators to give him a sample for study, Wood found that — perhaps due to the amount of time spent on the beach or in formaldehyde — the sample had no discernible “cellular material.”

Despite that, Wood analyzed the tissue fibers, concluding that “the St. Augustine sea monster was in fact an octopus,” according to his 1971 report in “Natural History.”

“After 75 years, the moment of truth was at hand,” he wrote. “Viewing section after section of the St. Augustine samples, we decided at once, and beyond any doubt, that the sample was not whale blubber.”

During this time, the monster became popularized again in the media, and another test for amino acids in 1986 appeared to support the giant octopus theory, according to the Smithsonian Institution.

However, researchers in 1995 published a report titled “On the Giant Octopus” in 1995, discussing their own examination of the remains.

According to that study, the research team was able to find that the remains were “virtually pure collagen,” which would have belonged to a large, warm-blooded creature — not an octopus.

“Altogether, and with a profound sadness at ruining a favorite legend, we find no basis for the existence of Octopus giganteus,” the study reads. “We concur with Verrill’s and Lucas’ final words on the matter, that the St. Augustine sea monster was ‘the remains of a whale, likely the entire skin… nothing more or less.’”

As a final nail in the coffin, 2004 DNA tests compared the St. Augustine monster to other “monster remnants from around the world,” determining that the collagen matrices held together whale blubber.

While the “Florida Monster” appears to simply be a whale, there are still other “globsters” — mysterious, gooey masses that wash up on shorelines — that have been found across the globe.

While Live Science reports that many of these end up being creatures like basking sharks, whales or oarfish, there’s always the chance of a new monster being discovered on a beach near you.

Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: