In August 1960, something washed ashore on a remote beach in western Tasmania, about two miles north of the Interview River. It was 20 feet wide, 18 feet long, weighed somewhere between five and ten tons, and had no eyes. Instead of a mouth, it had what witnesses described as soft, tusk-like protuberances. Six fleshy appendages hung from its underside. Stiff white bristles covered the body. Nobody could figure out what it was.
The carcass sat there for two years before a journalist at The Mercury in Hobart called it "Sea Santa" in a March 1962 article. The naturalist and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson coined the word "globster" specifically to describe it — a portmanteau that has since been applied to every large, unidentified organic mass that washes up on a beach anywhere in the world.
The globster's true identity remained a mystery for nearly two decades. It wasn't until 1981 that L.E. Wall published an identification in the Tasmanian Naturalist: whale carcass. Later cetacean-remains research confirmed it. What looked like tusks and appendages were decomposing whale blubber — whale flesh breaks down in ways that look nothing like what you'd expect, shedding skin and soft tissue in bizarre configurations while the collagen fibers hold together in matted, bristly sheets. The Tasmanian Globster that launched a thousand cryptid headlines was, in the end, a very large dead whale in an unfamiliar state of rot.
"Globster" is now in standard cryptozoology use worldwide, thanks to a decomposing whale that had the decency to be unrecognizable for twenty-one years.
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