Montauk Monster - Identifications

Identifications

Palaeozoologist Darren Naish studied the photograph and concluded from visible dentition and the front paws that the creature was a raccoon, with its odd appearance merely a byproduct of decomposition and water action removing most of the animal's hair and some of its flesh.

Speculation in published reports included theories that the Montauk Monster might have been a turtle without its shell — even though turtles' shells cannot be removed without damaging the spine, and they do not have teeth as appear in the photograph — a dog, or a science experiment from the nearby government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The creature's appearance was believed to have been altered through immersion in water for an extended period before coming to rest on the shore, making it difficult to identify.

William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, interpreted the photo along with a colleague; they deemed the creature a fake, most likely the result of "someone who got very creative with latex", although his "next-best guess" was that the creature could be a diseased dog or coyote which had "been in the sea for a while". Wise discounted the following general possibilities:

• Raccoon - the legs appear to be too long in proportion to the body.
• Sea turtle - sea turtles do not have teeth.
• Rodent - rodents have two huge, curved incisor teeth in front of their mouths.
• Dog or other canine such as a coyote - although the body appears doglike, neither its prominent eye ridge nor its feet are canine.
• Sheep or other ovine - although the feet and face look "somewhat ovine", sheep do not have sharp teeth.

On August 1, Gawker published pictures and X-ray images of a water rat, an Australian rodent with several similarities to the Montauk Monster, such as the beak, tail, feet, and size. On the same day, Jeff Corwin appeared on Fox News and claimed that upon close inspection of the photograph, he feels sure the monster is merely a raccoon or dog that has decomposed slightly. This was backed up by Darren Naish, a British paleontologist, who examined the images and agreed that, if real, the creature was a raccoon. Naish says that "claims that the limb proportions of the Montauk carcass are unlike those of raccoons are not correct", and on his blog he provides an illustration of an intact raccoon corpse drawn over the corpse in the photograph. Furthermore he points out the strong resemblance of the skull profile to that of a raccoon, and the long fingers, which are typical of raccoons, and unlike those of other carnivores, e.g. dogs.

On August 5, 2008, Fox News Channel's Morning Show repeated speculation that the beast is a decayed corpse of a capybara, even though capybaras do not have tails. The next day, the same program reported that an unnamed man claimed that the animal's carcass had been stolen from his front yard.

In a 2009 episode of Monster Quest, cryptozoologist Loren Coleman examined a latex replica of the Montauk Monster's remains and proposed that it was the remains of a raccoon, due to similar body structures and skull shape.