I knew He was real! I knew He was real!
Ftagn!
In all seriousness, it looks like a giant octopus or squid for sure. If you click on the pic accompanying the BBC artcle, the image is large, and you can see recognisable eyes that look very squidlike.
Fascinating… I’d never heard of any of this before… Thank you, especially Beagle.
Nessie’s escaped and was poisoned by the salt water!
My thought was jellyfish, if it’s not a squid of some kind (with all its innards digested by the whale, perhaps? Does that make any kind of sense?)
When my dad told us about this, my brother’s immediate response was Rush Limbaugh. I said Ari Fleischer. Lets you know something about the house we live in. 
cackle
That was my first thought too.
My second was, of course, God spoo.
Good grief… They say life imitates art, but if they find a giant lizard washing ashore in the next couple of days it’ll be just too surreal for me.
Uh… what is a shoggoth?
I know what it is.
But I´m not going to tell you.
Rhlaxgn!
“Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But Oh! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!”
- H.P.L.
I saw no distinct eyes in that picture. :dubious:
I figure the eyes are as marked in this pic here.
Huh. I see little space raccoons.
My computer has Windows Magnifier. I selected 3X power, & they do resemble eyes.
There also appear to be stumps of what may have been tentacles.
But whether this was a squid, octopus, cuttlefish or nautillus can’t be determined from the remains as shown.
And yes, I know the nautillus has a shell, but merely because a dead specimen lacks one after drifting around for days or weeks doesn’t mean it didn’t have one in life.
While I understand that you can’t identify creatures directly from their DNA samples, I don’t understand why you can’t compare unknown DNA samples to DNA samples of known species and see if they’re members of the same species.
I know that the difference between human DNA and chimp DNA is just 3 to 5 percent. But when you are talking about a minumum of 1,380,000 genes (30,000-60,000 genes per strand of DNA, 46 strands in human DNA) you are talking a lot of difference (41,000 genes minimum, 82,000 maximum).
It seems to me you test some squid DNA, some octopus DNA, some nautiloid DNA and some whale DNA and compare it with a sample of DNA from yer unknown creature. You get matches or you don’t. It’s that simple.
Time consuming? Sure. But interesting results? You betcha!
BTW, I just don’t see whale snot having the same structure as muscle tissue of cephalopods, so I doubt a whale DNA test woud be necessary.
First it was the Jaws movie, then giant squid off New Zealand, now this. This is precisely the sort of thing that made me chose to live in the center of the continental land mass. Resist, I say resist, all efforts to make Des Moines a sea port.
bummer.