Creature record / 2003
June 2003. Pinuno Beach, on the coast of Los Muermos in southern Chile. Fishermen found something the swells had thrown ashore. A mass of grey flesh about 12 metres long, estimated at 13 tons. It did not move. Elsa Cabrera, director of a cetacean conservation centre, came to take samples. The tissue was very hard. Its smell, she said, was unlike a whale's. And the mass had a tentacle. A giant octopus, perhaps. The legendary Octopus giganteus. Samples went to Florida, Italy, France and Santiago. The answer, when it came, was written in collagen and DNA.
Every so often the sea gives back something nobody can name. Researchers call them globsters. Shapeless lumps of tissue, washed ashore, stripped of anything that says what they once were. The most famous was the St. Augustine "giant octopus" of 1896, the specimen behind the proposed species Octopus giganteus.