Creature record / 2023
Tuesday, 19 September 2023. Morning on Simberi Island, the northernmost island of Papua New Guinea's Tabar Group. Something pale had come in with the sea. Residents and children hurried down to the shore. On the beach lay a ghostly white lump of rotten flesh. Its body narrowed into a tail. To the people standing over it, it was shaped like a mermaid. A local Facebook page, New Irelanders Only, posted the photographs and asked if anyone could identify it. Then the carcass was buried. No one measured it. No one kept a sample. Marine scientists studied the pictures from afar and could not agree. A whale, a dolphin, a dugong, perhaps a shark. Its identity remains anyone's guess.
Simberi Island is the northernmost island of the Tabar Group, in the Bismarck Sea off New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. It is small. About 9 by 7 kilometres, home to roughly 1,000 people living mostly in villages on the north and west coasts, and to the Simberi gold mine.