A bizarre faceless sea creature has been dragged from the bottom of the ocean by an earthquake.
Merica Lynn, 28, and her boyfriend Adoni Tegner were left stunned when they saw a white-haired remains washed up in Florence in the US state of Oregon.
The couple thought they had spotted a sea monster on the beach as Mr Tegner was summoned to return from his quad bike to look at the strange discovery.
Ms Lynn recalled: “Adoni was riding his quad around and rode back to me and said ‘Hey babe, there’s a sea monster on the beach’.
“I was like ‘What? A sea monster? Show me!’
“So I hopped on the back of the quad, he took me down to the beach, and we pull up to this giant creature there and it was about the size of a car.
“There was this giant mass covered in weird hair.”
The couple said the size of the creature was as big as a car with the texture said to be firm.
Ms Lynn admitted: “Our initial reaction was just kind of like ‘Whoa! What is this?’
“And I poked it with my foot a little bit and felt the hairs which seemed very stringy. And the texture was more like a firm muscle kind of thing.
“It looked like it had a ribcage and almost like tentacles but they were very large; it was just hard to tell because it was just one huge lump.”
The smell was apparently horrific according to the couple as they both admitted it smelt like sea lions but a whole lot worse.
Ms Lynn confessed: “When we first pulled up to it, it smelt pretty bad. It smelt sort of like sea lions but worse.”
The 28-year-old, who makes custom jewellery for a local store, believes a recent earthquake might explain the mysterious presence.
She said: “We did have an earthquake nearby about three or four days before Adoni and I saw this thing on the beach, so that could have something to do with it.
“It could be like a decomposed creature that kinda came to the surface and washed up on the beach after the earthquakes.
“But it is one of the most unique things we have ever seen wash up.”
In Merica’s footage of the creature, there are no obvious clues as to its identity – it’s a formless lump seemingly clad in a coat of stringy white hair .
After sharing her footage online, some people said it appeared to be a globster.
It’s a term first coined in the sixties to describe washed-up remains with “no visible eyes, no defined head, and no apparent bone structure”.
In the past, other so-called globsters have been found to be decomposed whales or large sharks.
Jim Rice, stranding program manager at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, thinks it may be the former.
He told local media: “What looks like hair is the decomposing remains of other body tissues: muscle, nerves, tendons etc.
“I would estimate that this one has been dead for several months.”
However, Ms Lynn has seen dead whales before and is not so sure.
She said: “It doesn’t look like a whale at all but it may very well be.
“It didn’t have a distinct figure to it; a lot of dead whales we’ve seen have looked much different.
“Some of them have been stuck out here on the beaches for weeks and have never decomposed like that.
“You’d think if it were a dead whale that’d be a more common thing.”
