BEFORE you press play on that video (we’re sure some of you just went for it anyway) put down whatever it is you’re eating.
This is a ribbon worm called a Gorgonorhynchus. When it senses nearby prey it launches what looks like a root out of its face. Anything caught in those flinchingly terrifying ‘roots’ get hauled into the worm’s belly.
These adorable little worms live in the ocean…
It’s summer.
Good luck out there.
That nightmarish thing in the photo above isn’t a screen-used graboid prop from Tremors.
Nope.
That’s an actual creature that lives in our oceans…you know…that giant mass of water that you swim in when you vacation?
Caught off the coast of Australia by a fishing trawler, that thing is a six-foot long monster known as a frilled shark.
Frilled sharks haven’t evolved in almost 80 million years simply because a nightmare is always going to be a nightmare. On very rare occasions frilled sharks are found close to the surface because they’re dying. “Close to the surface” is around 4,000 feet below the surface.
Simon Boag of the trawling company that caught the creature:
“It does look 80 million years old. It looks prehistoric. It looks like it’s from another time! It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you’re in that mouth, you’re not coming out.”
According to a marine conservation society in California there is a report of a frilled shark from 1880 measuring in at 25 feet.
Next time you go splashing around in the ocean for fun just remember…
These live there.
[NatGeo]
Jonathon Bright, a paranormal investigator who’s started adding ‘Monster Hunter’ to his resume – because who WOULDN’T want ‘Monster Hunter’ on their resume – has started sharing a photo that might be the famous camera-shy creature that has become legendary.
“Three years ago, I came to Scotland to investigate the Nessie legend and took thousands of photographs. It took me six months to look at them all and I found this one which I showed when I spoke at the Scottish Paranormal Festival in Stirling this week. After I had finished there, I came north to spend more time searching for an answer to the Nessie story. My picture is a talking point. Some people will say it is physical and the monster, others will say it is a trick of the water, others will say it is a hoax.”
It would be great if this was in fact the mysterious animal that everyone says lives in the Loch.
It would be even greater if a professional photographer with ninja-like focusing skills and a decent camera would add “Monster Hunter’ to their resume.
Florida rides a double-edged sword.
On one side people proclaim it’s a great place to vacation. On the other side are the people who live there who are completely aware of the fact that it’s just wet sand covering a giant Hellmouth.
Seriously…the sky tries to kill people with bolts of lightning, the ground tries to swallow anything that lives on it whole and the things that crawl around aren’t like things that crawl around anywhere else.
Case in point…
A fisherman off the coast caught the Face-Grabber’s cousin the other day.
It’s called a Mantis Shrimp…and the one that was caught (at night we’d like to add) is bigger than most (and probably a sign that something’s also happening in Florida’s water because…well…it’s Florida).
Imagine if you rolled a predator, one of Ridley Scott’s aliens, a mole person, a little bit of a Grim Reaper and a highly skilled ninja into a living animal and slathered it in ugly.
Ta-Da! Mantis Shrimp.
Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission posted a picture of a super-sized one of these nightmares on their Facebook page and it’s gone viral with good reason…it’s terrifying and it lives in the sand…under your feet.
Next time you think about exploring Florida because you’re bored of the theme parks?
Just…here watch this and imagine one of these about 7 times the size of the one in the video…and crawling up your leg.
You’ve been warned.
Giant squids are legendary.
They’ve taken on Moby Dick, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and even a bunch of Goonies.
While giant squids have been captured in the past and alleged parts of them have surfaced here and there…seeing one in the wild has been something of a Holy Grail moment that misty-eyed scientists and cryptozoologists have dreamt about forever.
Everyone can prepare to drop your jaws because there is now video of one of these mysterious monsters going about its business deep in the Pacific Ocean.
A team of three Japanese scientists spent over 400 hours crammed in a 31 foot submersible over the course of 100 missions about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima.
At a depth of 2,066 feet, the lights from the submersible reflected onto the creature’s silver skin as it eyeballed the sub curiously before it swam off.
The Discovery Channel’s new branch, Curiosity, is keeping the footage secret until the season finale later this month when they’ll unveil it to the world for the first time…
Up until then? A lot of “Release the Kraken!” headlines.
[ UPDATE: Giant Eye Mystery Solved! ]
Florida always seems like it’s sitting on some kind of undiscovered Hell-Mouth.
Between Bath-Salt Zombies, giant snakes slithering through your lawn, Night Creepers and lizards eating humans there’s just something…not…quite..right.
Which brings us to Pompano Beach..in Florida.
Some guy’s going for his morning stroll and spots something odd drifting around in the surf. Just like in any other horror film, the dude goes to investigate…and kicks it over…revealing at a huge eyeball staring right back at him.
“It was very fresh,” he said Thursday. “It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag.”
Police referred him to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who, frighteningly couldn’t identify what species the eye came from.
The Fish and Wildlife officers place the eyeball on ice and sent it to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute for analysis.
In the end who really cares about where the eyeball came from…the Fish and Game Commission people should be looking for the thing that ripped apart the thing with the giant eyeball.
Paul Clerkin, a shark ecology graduate student at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has been spending the last couple of months on a deep-sea trawling vessel in the Indian Ocean to see if the ship’s nets might pull up anything interesting in the way of sharks.
The trawler’s nets have been dropping to a depth of 6,500 feet off the coast of an island called Mauritius. What’s come up have been hundreds of strange-looking sharks. Several are species known to be very rare while others may be absolutely unseen before now.
“I tell people I have a ton of sharks, and they keep thinking I’m joking,” Clerkin said. “It was an actual ton. I brought back 350 sharks.”
What’s even cooler is that if any of the strange sharks are entirely new species? Clerkin gets to name them. He’s said that he’ll name a few after his mentors and possibly one after his mom and maybe himself.
We can hear his intro now…”I’m Paul Clerkin. You may not know me. A species of shark bears my name.”
Awesome.
[See a photo gallery of these weird sharks via OurAmazingPlanet.Com]
[MSNBC]
Could this be an alien invasion in the beginning stages?
Millions of little, purple, crab-like creatures have washed up on the coast of O’ahu in Hawaii! The animals are about the size of a large pea and seem to be some kind of crab in its larval state. The problem is that even local biologists have never seen these things before and there are literally millions of them all over the beaches. Most them are either dead or dying but biologists have captured many that seem to be healthy. Those same biologists that will probably be responsible for nurturing the first wave of an alien strike force, are hoping to see what the larva will grow into.
While we all wait for a definitive answer from the scientists and biologists now showing We’ve all seen enough science fiction/monster movies to know EXACTLY what these will turn into…
Crab-like harvestors of mankind.
In the movie, Jurassic Park, sound designer Ben Burtt tried to create what he thought prehistoric beasts might’ve sounded like when they walked the Earth. Using currently existing animals and a little exaggeration, no one will ever forget the sounds Uncle George’s sound guru created.
Now an art installation in France created by Marguerite Humeau is bringing us as close as we may get to what they might have actually sounded like and it’s pretty awesome to hear.
Titled ‘Proposal for Resuscitating Prehistoric Creatures’, the exhibit displays the recreated vocal chords of three different prehistoric animals: the entelodont, known as the ‘hell pig’, the mammoth imperator and the ambulocetus, known as the ‘walking whale.’
Because the vocal chords are made of soft tissue, Humeau has spent years working with researchers in various fields from throat specialists to engineers to paleaontologists to get everything in order to recreate as accurately as possible. Humeau also gathered data on these particular animals current ancestors: an Asian Elephant for the mammoth, dolphins and harbors porpoises for the ‘walking whale’ (which is pretty damn frightening to consider this whale had ridiculous teeth…and it walked) and a wild boar for the ‘hell pig’ (again…frightening).
Using foam, similar soft materials and an enormous amount of data collected over several years about these animals, Humeau stated:
“I’m not only recreating a shape, but also the data that has disappeared — we’ll never be 100 per cent sure this is accurate,” Humeau told Wired Magazine UK. “But when I heard it roar, it felt real.”
Why are you still reading this? Press play and listen to what it might’ve sounded like 50 million years ago when a ‘hell pig’, a ‘walking whale’ (again…a walking whale..with freakin’ teeth) and a mammoth just casually strolled the planet.
You can all rest easy now.
NOAA, a government body that apparently has a lot of time on their hands, have recently laid to rest the idea that mermaids might actually exist.
According to NOAA? They don’t.
Thanks, NOAA…you’ve single-handedly just slapped several million little girls who adorably talk-sing ‘Part of Your World’ and dress up like Ariel right in their precious, red-wigged face and told them to “Knock it OFF!”
After a recent faux documentary called “Mermaids: The Body Found” aired on Animal Planet, NOAA decided it was time to put this silliness to rest once and for all.
“Mermaids: The Body Found” took small truths and sort of expanded upon them keeping the show just within the bounds of plausibility. Much like the “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” ‘documentary’ that aired on television in the 90s or going even further back to the original mayhem-causing broadcast of “War of the Worlds”, “The Body Found” sauntered up to the wall where science fiction and science fact eyeball one another and occasionally hi-five each other.
The mix of vague fact and more exciting fiction was just enough of a mix to get NOAA’s imagination police flustered enough to step in and settle this whole thing once and for all.
In a post titled “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found,” NOAA states that:
The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few. But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.
NOAA has also stepped up to swing a bat at the Lost City of Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle.
NOAA’s statement about ‘No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found” shows that they’re oblivious to our shark-people ancestors we posted about on this very blog.
Up next for NOAA? Proving that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a dude in a rubber suit and that Davy Jones really doesn’t have a locker.
Release the Kraken! Oh…wait…
A sentient bed sheet.
That’s pretty much the only descriptor that comes to mind when looking at this video. In reality, this blob caught on a deep sea drilling camera off the coast of the UK is a massive jellyfish.
Steven Haddock, a scientist for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., says that the mysterious creature is a Deepstaria enigmatica jellyfish, much to the chagrin of some Reddit users who thought it was a whale placenta.
“This bag-like jelly is not that rare, but is large, so rarely seen intact,” Haddock said on his “JellyWatch” Facebook page. “In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate and it even turns inside-out.”
It’s kind of hypnotic. Just makes you want to submit to our jellyfish overlords and walk into the ocean to bask in their omnipotent glory.