A mysterious creature, known as the 'Ainsdale Anomaly', washed up in Merseyside in August and residents just couldn't figure out what the creature was supposed to be.
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The badly decomposed figure appeared to have no head but it did have both fur and flippers leading some to believe it could have been the body of a walrus.
The 15ft creaturebecame covered in flies but curious beach visitors compared the carcass to a horse, a woolly mammoth and even an alien. One man described:
It's very bizarre. It's like a mishmash of different things in one. It's 15-feet long, it has flippers, it's furry and it seems to have another creature attached, possibly via an umbilical cord, so it could have been giving birth. It was almost like a whale that had eaten a horse that had eaten a dolphin.
The man, also unidentified shared the images of the beast on the Ainsdale community Facebook page. One local woman stated the creature had already been named the 'Ainsdale Anomaly'. She continued:
My first assumption was it was a whale of some kind. Some people think it's a cow or a horse. I honestly have no idea. My favourite theory is that it was a woolly mammoth or a crash-landed alien. It almost looked like an elephant too.
Many interested residents commented on the post, trying to shoot their guess at what the mysterious bloated animal might be, but still, nobody knows for sure.
The local woman also commented that the smell that came from the unknown beast was vile:
I didn't get too close because there were lots of flies and it stank. I made the mistake of going downwind as I worked my way around it and I nearly threw up. It was badly decomposed. It looked like there were three big mounds of bodily areas, all slightly different and unidentifiable to me.
She continued:
To me the body looked quite twisted with flaps of skin here and there. There was no identifiable head, which was strange – possibly it was underneath. What I believe to be rib bones were sticking out the top side of it. It looked like there was a large spine and it seemed to me that the vertebrae were showing through the skin.
However, a researcher from Natural England inspected the creature, and while he could not move the carcass on his own, he believes he found the answer. Senior Advisor for Natural England Stephen Ayliffe stated:
We can confirm that an animal in a poorly decomposed state has washed up on Ainsdale beach and whilst the identification of the animal is unconfirmed it appears to be a species of whale. We are working with an animal removal company to have the animal’s remains removed from the beach as soon as possible.
