A 15-feet long seabeast that’s been compared to a washed-up mammoth and an alien has left locals mystified after turning up on a British beach.
The creature was spotted on the Merseyside beach in Liverpool on Wednesday and has been dubbed the Ainsdale Anomaly.
People have been unable to identify the animal which has no identifiable head but is furry, has flippers and is badly decomposed and covered in flies.
‘It’s very bizarre,’ said one man. ‘It’s like a mishmash of different things in one.
Mystery as bizarre 15ft creature washes up on beach in Merseyside
An unidentifiable creature was spotted washed up on a Merseyside beach in Liverpool on Wednesday. It is badly decomposed, covered in flies and very smelly
‘It’s 15-feet long, it has flippers, it’s furry and it seems to have another creature attached, possibly via an umbilical cord, so it could have been giving birth.
‘It was almost like a whale that had eaten a horse that had eaten a dolphin.’
The man, who asked to remain anonymous, shared photos of the seabeast with the Ainsdale community Facebook page.
And while plenty of people had suggestions, nobody could identify it for sure.
One local woman, who filmed the strange creature, said: ‘It’s been called the Ainsdale Anomaly.
‘My first assumption was it was a whale of some kind.
The 15ft long seabeast has no identifiable head but has flippers, is furry and seems to have another creature attached, possibly by an umbilical cord
‘Some people think it’s a cow or a horse. I honestly have no idea. My favourite theory is that it was a woolly mammoth or a crash-landed alien.
‘It almost looked like an elephant too.’
The 32-year-old, who wished to remain nameless, said the remains smelled so bad they almost made her ill.
‘I didn’t get too close because there were lots of flies and it stank,’ she said.
‘I made the mistake of going downwind as I worked my way around it and I nearly threw up.
‘It was badly decomposed. It looked like there were three big mounds of bodily areas, all slightly different and unidentifiable to me.
‘To me the body looked quite twisted with flaps of skin here and there.
Baffled locals have speculated that it is a woolly mammoth, a walrus, a whale, a cow, a horse, a donkey – even an alien!
‘There was no identifiable head, which was strange – possibly it was underneath.
‘What I believe to be rib bones were sticking out the top side of it. It looked like there was a large spine and it seemed to me that the vertebrae were showing through the skin.’
She added that an official from Natural England had been down to inspect the remains, but was unable to move them alone.
When photos of the creature were shared online, people guessed that it was once a walrus, a cow, a horse and a donkey – among other stranger suggestions.
Marine biologists at the University of Liverpool have been contacted for comment.