First the facts, then the theory!

Yeah, this should really help the tourism industry, eh? Snap above, from the neighbor of the photographer, story below (link in previous sentence) from Canada East.

Marine scientists in Canada and abroad are puzzled by bizarre photographs that appear to show the skeleton of a large mammal jutting out of an iceberg that recently drifted past Newfoundland’s east coast.

The six pictures show what looks like a brown rib cage and spinal column, slightly bent, sticking out of a crust of ice.

But researchers throughout Canada, Greenland and Norway are unable to determine the origin of the skeleton, said Garry Stenson, a marine mammal scientist with the federal Fisheries Department.

“It’s definitely unusual,” Stenson said Monday. “It’s not something that I’ve encountered before.”

His colleagues have been debating whether the carcass belongs to a bearded seal, a walrus or a beluga whale. But without the actual specimen in his hands, Stenson said he can’t resolve the mystery.

“It would be really nice to get a copy, a sample, a hold of it, but at this point we’re not quite sure what it is,” he said.

The photos were taken near Newtown, in Bonavista Bay…”If it was Photoshopped, it’s a damn good job,” he said. “The way that it’s laying there, with what looks to be part of it underwater, looks authentic.”

Stenson said he was told the backbone was roughly 2.4 metres out of the ice, leading him to believe the spine belonged to a large mammalian creature.

But he is uncertain whether the animal would have fallen into a crevasse in an iceberg and then got stuck, or if it simply died on an ice floe and later became embedded by other pans of ice.

“It could be a walrus, for example, that died and is laying on its back and the pressure of the snow and the ice has flattened those ribs,” he said….

“Sometimes a lot of my mysteries never get solved,” Stenson said with a sigh.

Oh man, I hear ya. If I had a dime for every time I said that I’d have enough to go on cruise to Newfoundland.

Despite suggestions from the unruly mob that this could be the corpse of a bucket-mourning, suicidal lolrus, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog are in fact quite certain that these are the remains of the Byakhee that was reported missing over the Plateau of Leng more than sixty years ago. Would the owner please come to the information desk at the Kadathian Lost and Found to pick it up, preferably before the warm weather starts.

Newfies would be ill-advised to mount a scientific expedition at this point. VERY ill-advised. Not that we don’t love scientists: why, the last ones were delicious…

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::