EEEE!! What the fuck is that thing? Email me, please, so for the sake of science, we can understand the slaughtered beast that lay in front of us. Also, naming suggestions, please.

PREVIOUSLY: The Panama Gollum!

BEFORE THAT: The Southhold Something Creature!

AND EVEN BEFORE THAT SOUTHOLD CREATURE: The Spotted Taunting Toronto Doe Thing!

AND WAY BEFORE THAT, LIKE, WAY BEFORE THAT TORONTO THING: The Lime-Soaked Limey!

AND HOW ABOUT The Russian Monster, Where In Soviet Russia, Monster Blog About You!

AND THEN THERE WAS THE Monster Who Is Not So Much A Monster As It Is A Four-Earred Kitty!

THE ORIGINAL GANGSTER: Him.

Update: Let's get to know Carmello the Cowbeast—which I've decided to name him, just because—a little better.

EWWWWW. Our monster-spotter, Evan, notes:

I met this deceased beast at 6am this morning in Carmel, CA [Ed. Hence, his name]. His face looked pretty gnar, and there was still fresh blood around the nose that was getting sucked back out to sea by the waves. Crazy right? Ugly little fella. Mezoloic era, if I'd have to guess. People and dogs were ignoring it like it wasn't even there -but I can assure you- it was.

Cheers,
Evan

Gnar, indeed. Evan, Gawker Monster Investigations thanks you for your hard work and commitment to the cause. We will continue to seek out the truth regarding washed-up monsters, both of the figurative and literal kind, for as long as we possibly can. The truth is out there.

According to reports in Panama, the teenagers spotted the creature crawling out of a cave while playing in the town of Cerro Azul north of Panama City.
Fearing for the safety as it moved towards them, the youths claim they attacked the beast with sticks before throwing its lifeless body into a pool of water.

All it wanted was to play with the children. And now this. A sad statement on our fear of the unknown.

But at least our new friend will leave a legacy. As Telemetro noted in the original (translated) report, "while some say it may be a being from another planet, others simply believe that is an animal."

Some say it's a sloth. We say: It's a lost friend.
[Pic via Telemetro]

The creature was photographed by a Toronto resident named Jeffrey Freeman as it was rummaging around in his backyard. What could this hellish thing possibly be? Freeman thinks it's an opossum, but his boyfriend thinks it's a "freakish alopecia marsupial." Torontoist suggests that it may be a bald raccoon, something they say is increasingly common in their area. Whatever it is, it looks like a damn monster!

Here's another shot of it:





See the resemblance?





They're both monsters!

Local Creature Learns to Shave [Torontoist]

This beast washed up on Southhold, Long Island last week. The people who discovered it contacted Nicky Papers of Montauk-Monster.com, and he went and took this footage you see here. Monty's winter hibernation is over.
[Montauk-Monster.com via Animal NY]

The Beast of Exmoor is a black big cat, a puma or panther maybe, believed by some to have eaten sheep and farm animals in the 1970s and into 1983, when 100 sheep were "mauled or killed," accoding to the Daily Mail.

The government apparently tried to cover all this up, or something, because the same very exact specific day this creature washed up, the "Forestry Commission officially confirmed big cats DO live in Britain," reported the Sun (with that very emphasis).

Here's a police commissioner, called to investigate after a surfer stumbled upon the remains at sunset Tuesday, describing the creature in the Mail:

'It's a good 5ft and it has black fur. It certainly looks quite beast-like with those teeth.'

And his sergeant:

'It almost definitely looks like it could be a Beast of Exmoor,' said Sergeant Pearce, with admirable caution. 'It's only about five miles away to Exmoor by sea, it could easily have floated down.'

The British tabs are now warring over what this thing is. The Mail reported samples from the carcass were analyzed and found to be a grey seal, its flippers decomposed.

The Sun is having none of that:

Some locals suggested it could be a seal, but The Marine Conservation Society and the National Seal Sanctuary both stated it was not.

And now the thing's skull has been stolen. Just as the Montauk Monster's whole carcass was disappeared after captivating New York for much of the summer. Many newspapers will be sold. And eventually maybe we'll find out about the movie or reality TV show or whatever behind all this, and that the awfully chatty police commissioner and sergeant were actors.

[via Adfreak]

It's her hand, above. This part below is the head! Duh.

You can see the entire beast-lady in person here, on Halloween. There, now you have plans.

"To me, it looked like a dead raccoon," Mr. [Edward] Bie [a director of the North Shore Beach Property Owner's Association,] said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "It did remind me of the Montauk Monster...

"Flies were all over a hole in its skin and there was just bone where the head used to be ... It must have been in the water for awhile."

Oddly, there seem to be a disproportionate number of real estate people involved with both the Montauk Monster (e.g. the guy who supposedly had the body last) and this monster (e.g. everyone in the article, basically). Maybe monster sightings are the latest way to drive up property values. It's hard, after all, to write about monster sightings without mentioning Long Island's miles and miles of beaches!

[North Shore Sun]

(Photo by Jennifer Vorraro via North Shore Sun]

The Monster That Washed Ashore In Our Bank Accounts
Unless one person clicked on the post 1.4 million times, I'm pretty sure most have you have heard of our good friend the Montauk Monster. He's an international phenomenon, featured on CNN and Fox News and in David Edelstein reviews of art house movies. Is he a dead raccoon? A movie marketing ploy? A terrible Plum Island experiment gone kablooey? No! He's a monster from some hell planet that brings bad tidings of doom and misery for this American life. But he's also kind of fun and charming in a gross, leathery, bloated and beaked way. Oh Monty, never let us go. Srsly. Need summer home in Montauk, kthx.

El Chupacabra Es Un Diablo!
No, it's not viral marketing for the X-Files movie. That piece of junk was already a terrific bomb when video footage of this bordertown beast surfaced. It could be some sort of dog, a goat's blood-sucking fiend, or a mournful Jennifer Lopez wandering the desert searching for validation. Really, though, he represents our completely legitimate Lou Dobbsian fear of illegal immigrants. If such a creature can roam our edges unmolested, what nefarious El Salvadoran dreaming of working at a car wash could be threatening our most desolate and boring American towns?

Bruce Davison's Night Terrors Made Manifest
Perhaps our most famous and elusive monster, Bigfoot is America's Loch Ness Monster. The legend has thrilled and fascinated people for years, tying into international cryptozoological study of the Yeti of the Himalayas, the Yeren of China, and, of course, Orang Pendek of Indonesia. People have suggested that he is some sort of missing link, perhaps a member of the supposedly extinct Homo Erectus (heh heh heh) species. What mystery! What history! Oh it's all so exciting! And now, well, the lumbering fucker is dead. Yep. Curled up dead in an old freezer in Georgia. (The peachy one, not the warry one.) Sad.

The Great Two-Headed Turtle Caper
One of our tiniest and adorablest and "oh my gawd Mother Nature has a dark, dark sense of humor"est monsters has been pilfered! Freak-face McSnappers is a two-headed turtle who was taken from a Brooklyn pet store on Sunday. The owner of the store—who brews strange potions in the backroom and cackles wildly, her one jaundiced eye sparkling with some demonic knowledge—says it's not a good situation, because the turtle(s?) needs special handling, "each head has to be fed by hand because otherwise they fight over food." Um shriek! that's shriek! so shriek! sad shrieeeek!!! KILL IT! BURY IT DEAD AND SEND IT BACK TO THE HORRIBLE NUCLEAR INFERNO FROM WHENCE IT CAME!!

So those are the four big monster stories of the season, but I'm sure there are others. Perhaps you took a wrong turn near the Pine Barrens on the way home from Denise's house (maybe you should just kiss her, Ricky said she liked you a few months back, right?) and you saw some shadowy something loping through the trees. No, it wasn't the Jersey Devil. It was Jim McGreevey looking for men! Haha, gay jokes.

So, in conclusion, gay people are monsters. Happy summer y'all!

The producer of the film, Darren Goldberg (pictured above), and/or his associates would have left two distinct props from his movie on beaches near Montauk. Some honest people came across these props and were fooled into thinking they were corpses. The first to surface was, as has been reported, photographed by the sister of a friend of publicist Alanna Nevitski, who forwarded the picture to Jezebel, which forwarded the picture to Gawker, which published it to mass hysteria.

Another picture, appearing less decomposed, was taken earlier in the day by Ryan O'Shea and Christina Pampalone and appeared in Newsday, which also reported tips from readers who had see the monster all over Long Island. It was later noted that, given the timing reported by Newsday, the body seemed to decompose awfully quickly over the course of one day. The paper also reported a sighting of a live version of the monster, which would have, under the hoax scenario, been made as part of the prank.

A group of three women later appeared on Plum TV to talk about discovering the monster and taking the photo that appeared on Gawker. One of the women was Rachel Goldberg, not identified at the time as the sister of Darren Goldberg, who is making the carnie movie, Splinterheads. The women insisted the creature "exists" and was not a Photoshop creation, and claimed they were looking for a scientist to study what remained of it. This seemed to jibe with what Colin Davis and their other male friends said on CNN. Both groups of friends would have been working in conjunction with the movie producer at this point to keep the hoax going. They claimed the body had already decomponsed to a bones and "goo," which they were keeping in a bag. One of the group later said, quite suspiciously, that the remains had been stolen.

The original supplier of the photo, Nevitski, told New York that Goldberg and the other women on Plum TV were "full of shit" because Nevitski's friend, still anonymous, took the original picture. If the monster was a hoax, Goldberg would have seen the interview as a golden opportunity to inflate the hoax further by appearing on TV, but needed to lie about taking that specific picture in order to get in front of the camers. Nevitski's friend was refusing interviews. When she went on, Goldberg suddenly had a new, alternate picture of the monster, indicating she had her own, original photos.

Blogger Nicky Papers also thought the women were lying, and wrote on Montauk-Monster.com about their nervous ticks, like giggling and breaking eye contact. He also noticed that Goldberg talked first and her friends followed her lead.

The blogger was then contacted by a source who claimed Rachel Goldberg was related to Darren Goldberg. The source said Goldberg was making Splinterheads and that the monster will appear in the movie. This was the first time the movie was tied to the monster.

The website for the movie seemed to admit to the whole thing yesterday, posting, "We have the Montauk Monster." The blog for the movie also made an admission, linking to Papers' story and another hoax report and adding, "Thanks Darren's sister." The blog, especially, has enough content that it seems genuine, as opposed to the work of a prankster.

Arguments in favor of the hoax theory:

• The body is missing, supposedly "stolen," a fishy story. Who steals a bag of bones and goo?
• There has been no examination by scientists, as promised.
• It's the simplest explanation. Occam's razor.
• The movie people are claiming credit on their website and blog.
• Goldberg and the other women were acting kind of funny on Plum TV.

Arguments against Splinterhead creating the monster:

• Splinterhead is about a carnival. Why would there be monsters is such a movie? Further, it has been described repeatedly not as a horror or paranormal movie but as a comedy. Falsely claiming credit for creating the Montauk Monster would fit better with a comedy than actually having such an ugly creature in the movie, right?
• The moviemakers never come out and say on their website or blog that they actually made the monster. They only imply it. Perhaps they are having a bit of fun.
• There is no proof that Darren and Rachel Goldberg are related, only a statement on Darren Goldberg's blog, which could be a joke.
• Papers is trying to sell montauk-monster.com. Maybe this is all a big scam to drive traffic to the site, somehow!
• How has the story stayed under the radar all week? Montauk-monster.com had this days ago, why did it take so long for anyone to notice? And was Gotham News really the first news publication to cover the story, beating the TV people, blogs (save for Montauk-monster.com) and at least one newspaper on the case? How?
• How could so many people have been fooled by a movie prop? Wouldn't it have looked suspiciously plasticky or something?

Either way, a movie has managed to attach itself, cheaply, to a fairly large media phenomenon. One way or another, it's guerilla marketing. And we all kind of new that's how it would end up, didn't we?

[Montauk-Monster.com, Montauk-Monster.com, Gotham News]

(Darren Goldberg picture via Sersen Park)

Plum Island studies the deadliest sorts of animal viruses, and kept spilling its stash of foot-and-mouth disease for decades until it finally contaminated a neighboring farm in 1978 (it only admitted this recently). Whoops. But also the lab maybe invented Lyme disease, possibly with captured Nazi scientists, which is why the virus first showed up in 1975 in Lyme, Connecticut right across the water.

Also, remember how West Nile Virus suddenly entered North America in 1999 via areas immediately surrounding Plum Island? Yeah.

In 1999, the lab really wanted permission to mess around with human-compatible diseases. So it had Judy Miller write one of her "OMG we're all going to die from scary clouds if we don't do this thing" articles in the Times. But no one wanted to perish in an anthrax mist created by incompetent government scientists so instead the lab gave up.

And perhaps decided to specialize in weaponizable mutants!

Think about it: First the Dover Demon was spotted within 150 miles of the lab in the late 1970s. Then, the Department of Homeland Security privatized the island's guards, making monster "escapes" even easier. In 2006, a stronger, faster, more furry hybrid made it all the way to Maine, where it feasted voraciously on pets until hit by a car and photographed by AP. Now the Montauk Monster has washed ashore close to the island, and the lab can't get its story straight, except to say they had nothing to do with it. But really, if you're building a secret evil monster army, and just lost one of your experimental "marines," what else are you going to say?

Hollywood already knows all this, which is why an effects studio has already started mocking up replicas of the Montauk creatures for the inevitable Oliver Stone expose:

(You can buy this on eBay, by the way.)

Read the blog post (below) that will convince you to finally purchase a large shotgun. Or maybe you'd rather die??

[Wonkette]