The St. Augustine Monster (Octopus giganteus), Anastasia Island, 1896

Anastasia Island, across the bay from St. Augustine, Florida. The evening of 30 November 1896. Two boys, Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter, were bicycling along the beach. They found something huge, half buried in the sand. At first they took it for the remains of a whale.

The next day Dr. DeWitt Webb came to look. Webb was a local physician and founder of the St. Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science, and the only known person of an academic background to see the specimen in situ. It was very mutilated, pale pink, almost white, with a silver reflection in the sunlight. The substance was rubbery and so hard it could only be cut with great difficulty, and it appeared to have the stumps of four arms. The visible part measured 18 feet long and 7 feet wide, and Webb estimated its weight at nearly 5 tons.

On 7 December 1896 two hobbyist photographers, Edgar Van Horn and Ernest Howatt, took pictures. A man named Mr. Wilson dug around the carcass and wrote to Webb. "One arm lying west of the body, 23 feet long." Three more arms lay south of the body. The longest measured over 23 feet.

Then came the press. On 13 December Dr. George Grant, a hotel owner at South Beach, described in the Pennsylvania Grit a head "as large as an ordinary flour barrel" with "the shape of a sea lion head." Tentacle tubes about 30 feet long. An animal that "had a fierce battle with its foes before it was disabled and beached by the surf."

Between January 9 and January 15, 1897, a storm tide dragged the carcass out to sea. The next tide brought it back. It came ashore on Crescent Beach, two miles to the south. Webb had it hauled toward the terminus of a railroad with six horses and strong tackle.

Webb wrote to Harvard, and the letter reached A. E. Verrill at Yale. Verrill called it a "true Octopus, of colossal size." In February 1897 Verrill gave it a name. Octopus giganteus.

Then Webb's tissue samples arrived. In March 1897 Verrill reversed course. "The creature cannot be an Octopus, but is of cetacean nature." Perhaps, Verrill suggested, the upper part of the head of a sperm whale. Webb also sent a specimen to the Smithsonian, where curator William Healey Dall entered it as Accession 31678.

In 1957 F. G. Wood of Marineland of Florida found an old clipping and obtained the Smithsonian sample. It went to Dr. Joseph F. Gennaro Jr. at the University of Florida. In 1971 Gennaro wrote: "The evidence appears unmistakable that the St. Augustine sea monster was in fact an octopus." In 1986 Roy P. Mackal analysed amino acids and copper and iron levels. Mackal concluded it was a gigantic cephalopod, "probably an octopus, not referable to any known species."

In 1995 Pierce, Smith, Maugel and Clark found the tissue was "virtually pure collagen." Their verdict: "the remains of a whale, likely the entire skin." A 2004 study comparing other blobs confirmed whale origin, though an attempt to extract DNA from this tissue failed.

No one ever called it a hoax. As Brian Dunning put it on Skeptoid, it was the first in a long line of globsters. Trunko, the Tasmanian Globster, the Chilean Blob and the Bermuda Blob followed. Each, in turn, was traced back to whale remains.