Tubby, the Toothless Sea Monster: the Old Hairy carcass of Delake, Oregon

Delake sat on the Oregon coast, in Lincoln County. Its name came from the way local Finnish settlers said "Devils Lake". The D River joins that lake to the Pacific. Today Delake is one of the communities of Lincoln City. The region already had a sea serpent tradition, built around Cadborosaurus, the creature better known as Caddy.

March 4, 1950. Reports that a 22-foot hairy-chested monster had washed up on the beach at Delake brought people hurrying to the spot.

A teenager had found it first. "Pretty teen-ager Marybell Allum of Delake was the first to stumble on Old Hairy," the Oregonian later wrote. Then her father, town marshal Andy Allum, had a look. He said it weighed all of 1,000 pounds. He described it as covered with hair, with a cowlike body.

Lloyd Cable, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, examined it too. Under the hair he found an eight-inch long mouth. Not a tooth in it. There was no separate head. The opening sat at the far end of the body from the tails.

The wire story was blunt. "Hairy, four-tailed and long dead." A mass of membrane, about four feet across, with a globe-like body that appeared to be covered with hair. Four hairless, tapering tails, ranging from three to 16 feet long. Officials were most intrigued by its underside, said to be covered with "feathers".

It was not a verified sea monster, "of course". But it "fits no description of other marine life in these waters." The press named it Tubby, the toothless sea monster, and locals called it Old Hairy. The story ran in the Times-News of Twin Falls, Idaho, and the Victoria Daily Times. Another, more enthusiastic account gave it "the body of a cow, approximately nine tails", with hair "all over the body and legs".

Cable expected marine life experts to examine it later that week. What they concluded, if anything, was never reported, but opinions from further away were easier to find. Dr. E. W. Gudger of the American Museum of Natural History was certain: "It's a whale shark, undoubtedly." A biologist with the Oregon Fish Commission had a two-word answer: "Whale blubber." Prof. Fred J. Kohlruss of the University of Portland called it an elasmobranch, a sea creature whose bones remain cartilage.

Three experts. Three answers. In September 1967 the Oregonian looked back. "Despite all of this learned thinking, the who and what of Old Hairy was never satisfactorily explained."

Later lists were less hesitant. The Cadborosaurus timeline on Wikipedia files it as identified as a whale shark. One version names a basking shark instead. A 2011 note on the Frontiers of Zoology blog calls it a globster case, probably a decayed shark. Rotting sharks are the classic hairy globster, their exposed connective tissue fibres looking like hair. A 2019 blog suggested drowned feral pigs.

No photograph of Old Hairy is known, and no specimen is known to have reached a museum. What survives is print. The 1967 Oregonian piece, "Colossal Claude and The Sea Monsters", set Old Hairy beside Colossal Claude of the Columbia River Bar and Marvin. In 2014 T. W. Paterson revived the name Tubby in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Blogs have since folded Old Hairy into the legend of the Devils Lake monster.