Question: What was the "St. Augustine octopus"?
Answer: From time to time, mysterious masses of organic tissue wash up from the sea.
The grandaddy of all such masses washed ashore near St. Augustine, Fla., in 1896. It was a fibrous, pinkish mass more than 20 feet long. What seemed to be several massive arms, one more than 30 feet long, were found later. A local scientist decided the remains were those of an octopus.
The carcass weighed several tons. It washed out to sea and back onto the beach a couple of times before disappearing from the record. Although the globster was gone, some samples made their way to Addison Emery Verrill, a prominent zoologist at Yale University.
Verrill determined that the specimens indeed came from a truly colossal octopus, which he dubbed "Octopus giganteus." Later, he changed his mind, deciding the blob was probably the badly decayed carcass of a whale.
Verrill's specimens were lost, but the Smithsonian Institution had a few scraps. In 1957, researchers examined them and declared they were probably from an octopus after all.
In 1995, Sidney Pierce, a marine biologist at the University of South Florida, re-examined a Smithsonian sample and concluded that it was from the skin of a whale.