Wildlife experts in
North Carolina were mystified this week after a mysterious carcass was
found along the Outer Banks. The remains were found by a beachcomber at
Cape Lookout National Seashore, a section of NC’s Crystal Coast operated
by the National Park Service. After Park Service personnel were unable
to identify the remains, they of course turned to social media for help.
The Cape Lookout Lighthouse
“Weird things are found on the beach,” the park service said in a Facebook post
accompanied by several pictures of the odd-looking remains. “We need
some help identifying this object. … So far, we’re stumped as to what it
might be.” The pictures show the remains to be some sort of long,
tube-like soft tissue covered from tip-to-tip in strange three-pronged
bony structures, almost like a candy bar covered in poultry wishbones.
They’re truly bizarre-looking and unlike any animal remains I’ve ever
seen.
TIL this thing is called a furcula.
Some Facebook users think they’ve
seen them before, though. The comments on the National Park Service’s
post range mostly from the ridiculous to the absurd, and there is still
no consensus as to what type of creature the remains may have once
belonged. However, several users note that the remains look like those of members of the Diodontidae
family, a family of fish which includes what are typically called
blowfish, pufferfish, and various synonyms thereof. The leading
candidate seems to be the striped burrfish, a small spiny fish native to
the Atlantic coast of the Americas.
While that may be true, I’ve yet to
dig up a picture of a Diodontidae skeleton that looks anything like this
one. Weird things happen to animal carcasses after they’ve been in
water for a long time, though, leading to frequent mistaken maritime identities and the globster phenomenon. There’s no telling exactly what creature may have once inhabited that skeleton.
Judging from the few pictures of dead
pufferfish I have been able to find, I can see how a heavily decomposed
specimen could turn out looking like the one found along the Outer
Banks this week. Mystery solved? Probably. Still, given that the vast
majority of the world’s oceans still remain unexplored, we never know
when one of these odd finds may turn out to be something truly weird and
wonderful. Keep combing those beaches.
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