The Tecolutla Monster Carcass, Veracruz (1969)

Tecolutla is a small town on the Gulf coast of Veracruz, Mexico. South of it, a beach runs towards Nautla. English accounts call the spot Palmar de Susana. Local tradition names it La Vigueta, about 10 km south of town.

The date is still disputed. The Museo Marino Comunitario de Tecolutla gives 14 March 1969. The fisherman Alejandro Salas Pérez remembered the 18th or 19th.

A group of farmers found it at night. For about a week they told no one. Then word reached the mayor, Prof. César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane, he organised a volunteer rescue party. They found "the immense head of some unidentified beast and a huge, partially buried lump of meat."

The descriptions that followed were extraordinary. A serpentine body 22 m long and 2 m wide. About 24 tons. Armour plating. "Wool like a lamb, immense eye sockets, and a gigantic beak, and horns."

The smell was extremely bad. Spanish accounts went further. About 36 m long. A brown horn about 3 m long, weighing about one ton. Woolly skin that resisted knives, machetes, axes and saws.

Salas Pérez was there. "It was an enormous animal," he recalled. "It didn't look like a whale; it looked like a giant worm." The head was half stripped of flesh, its fibres hanging like a mane. Some people, he said, mistook the fins for horns.

It took 14 hours to get the animal out of the water and onto the shore. PEMEX lent a crane and a trailer with a 15-metre platform. The carcass was lifted, hauled to Tecolutla and laid on the beach in front of the lighthouse. Crowds came to look, and a young photographer took the only photographs. By then sharks had bitten it, and locals had cut into it for its "large fangs".

Biologists from the Fishing and Biology Station of Tampico could not identify it. The farmers, they said, had disfigured it beyond recognition. In April 1969 a seven-member scientific commission concluded it was a rorqual. That year Bernardo Villa-Ramírez of UNAM published a paper naming it a sei whale, Balaenoptera borealis, reportedly the second record of the species in the Gulf of Mexico.

At the time, speculation ran wide. Theories included a prehistoric animal, a narwhal, comparisons with the Loch Ness Monster, and a creature preserved in an Arctic iceberg before thawing out. Ivan Sanderson, John Keel and Bernard Heuvelmans all came down on the side of a whale. Keel concluded the rumours had been "combined with various other rumours in order to create a bizarre and perplexing story."

In 2008 Darren Naish explained the rest. The beak was the long, pointed rostrum. The horns were the lower jaw bones, which often splay apart in rorqual carcasses. The wool was decaying fibre. Not everyone was convinced. The blogger Megaraptor placed it among Heuvelmans's hypothetical "merhorses".

In 1994 Rafael Augusto Lara Palmeros revisited the case. He found that UNAM biologists had kept photographs and concluded it was a sei whale. Today a skull and a "horn" are shown at the museum, beside Salas Pérez's naive paintings of the monster. Yet the museum also holds bones from 3 or even 4 sperm whales. What visitors see may not all be the animal of 1969, but the legend of this globster lives on in the town that hauled it ashore.