Montauk Monster

[3][4] Similar carcasses have washed up on American and Canadian shores, and have been called omajinaakoos, or "The Ugly One", by First Nations groups, believing it to be an omen of bad luck.

It then noted that Larry Penny, the East Hampton Natural Resources Director, had concluded that it was a raccoon with its upper jaw missing.

[7] A local newspaper quoted an anonymous resident who claimed that the animal was only the size of a cat, and that it had decomposed to a skeleton by the time of the press coverage.

[9] Alanna Navitski, an employee of Evolutionary Media Group in Los Angeles, California, passed a photo of the creature to Anna Holmes at Jezebel, claiming that a friend's sister saw the monster in Montauk.

Holmes then passed it along to the website Gawker.com which gave it wide attention on July 29 under the headline "Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk".

Wise discounted the following general possibilities:[6] Palaeozoologist Darren Naish studied the photograph and concluded from the corpse's visible dentition, skull shape, and front paws that the creature was a raccoon, with its extremely odd appearance merely a byproduct of decomposition and water action removing most of the animal's hair and some of its flesh.