![]() ![]() Similarly, a bit of a sperm whale’s head that washed up on a beach in Mexico became the Mexican Sea Monster. And so last year, when a dead marine mammal washed up on a Welsh beach, it quickly became the Beast of Port Talbot. They are always required by journalists to fit the narrative of a grog-induced pirate yarn. ![]() Photograph: IndependentĪnimals that have the audacity to wash up on beaches in various stages of decay can never, ever, be familiar creatures. Nothing (apart from spiders and wasps) brings out the worst in journalism like a decomposing whale, it seems.Ī video report in the Independent online. As such, in the news reports, the whale’s decomposing skin became “fur” and its blood became “mysterious red fluid” floating in the water. Still, why let a bit of science get in the way of a good monster story, right?Īnd so, within hours, a familiar narrative was playing out in the world’s media as the whale became a dead sea monster that no one could identify, a Scooby Doo mystery that could be maintained by journalists for days as long as nobody checked Twitter, where 10,000 scientists were screaming “That is clearly a whale” at each other. Although the species of whale remains unknown (DNA analysis should solve that problem in time), the big giveaways were the presence of whale jaw-bone, the baleen plates, the vertebrae, the fins, the throat pleats, the whale shape and the fact that whales live close by and have skeletons that look exactly the same as this one did. It was never a sea monster, no matter how hard we all tried to believe or hope it might be. It was a whale that washed up on the Indonesian island of Seram late last week. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I guess I’ll have to. ![]()
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