Trunko

[Peter Cox]

hey all many years ago something happend on the S,A south coast line.

Here is the wiki page for it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunko

To cut a long story short this sea creature had a fight with 2 killer whales and then died and wased up on shore for 10 days but no one came to investigate the carcass before the sea reclaimed it.

What are your thoughts?

Look at the wiki page for details or google Trunko.

Thanks

[Abramelin]

This is what I read on that Wiki page:

On 6 September 2010, however, the long-awaited identity of Trunko was finally revealed. Karl Shuker announced that a hitherto-unknown photograph of Trunko had been discovered by German cryptozoologist Markus Hemmler on the website of the Margate Business Association, and Shuker recognised from this photo that Trunko had been nothing more than a globster, i.e. a massive, tough skin-sac of blubber containing collagen that is sometimes left behind when a whale dies and its skull and skeleton have separated from the skin and sunk to the sea bottom.

(...)

These close-up photos showed a classic globster, confirming Shuker's identification of Trunko, and clearly revealed its white 'fur' to be exposed connective tissue fibres.[4] So it was the sight of two whales some distance out to sea tossing this globsterised mass into the air, a common practice, that had fooled observers on Margate Beach into assuming that it was alive. Instead, Trunko as a living, white-furred, elephant-trunked cryptid had never existed after all.

Case closed, I should say?

[Peter Cox]

This is what I read on that Wiki page:

On 6 September 2010, however, the long-awaited identity of Trunko was finally revealed. Karl Shuker announced that a hitherto-unknown photograph of Trunko had been discovered by German cryptozoologist Markus Hemmler on the website of the Margate Business Association, and Shuker recognised from this photo that Trunko had been nothing more than a globster, i.e. a massive, tough skin-sac of blubber containing collagen that is sometimes left behind when a whale dies and its skull and skeleton have separated from the skin and sunk to the sea bottom.

(...)

These close-up photos showed a classic globster, confirming Shuker's identification of Trunko, and clearly revealed its white 'fur' to be exposed connective tissue fibres.[4] So it was the sight of two whales some distance out to sea tossing this globsterised mass into the air, a common practice, that had fooled observers on Margate Beach into assuming that it was alive. Instead, Trunko as a living, white-furred, elephant-trunked cryptid had never existed after all.

Case closed, I should say?

lol - yea i suppose that is a good point. - but there are still some that think that is not right. Im not one of them, im just curious to know hat people think or have read or heard or had a similar thing in their region.

but I would go with the scientific approach and agree on the above.

[Abramelin]

lol - yea i suppose that is a good point. - but there are still some that think that is not right. Im not one of them, im just curious to know hat people think or have read or heard or had a similar thing in their region.

but I would go with the scientific approach and agree on the above.

It's always a good thing to check the references on a Wiki page:

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2010/09/behold-trunko.html

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2010/09/trunko-two-more-photographs.html

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2011/03/trunko-returns-fourth-photograph-has.html

[keninsc]

Ok, so a blubber sack got tossed around by a couple of killer whales. Now if you want an education, go back and read the description of the mysterious "battle" that took place. Just goes to show how stupid we humans can be when witnessing actual events.

[CloudSix]

Though i would feel sorry for the poor thing. It probably would have come out a of a deep slumber or something, to be thrown around by 2 ordinary whales

[+DieChecker]

hey all many years ago something happend on the S,A south coast line.

Here is the wiki page for it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunko

To cut a long story short this sea creature had a fight with 2 killer whales and then died and wased up on shore for 10 days but no one came to investigate the carcass before the sea reclaimed it.

What are your thoughts?

Look at the wiki page for details or google Trunko.

Thanks

I always that Trunko was just an elephant seal. Maybe a large and long nosed one, but one none the less.

An elephant seal is comparable in size (16-17 feet long) to a killer whale (Approx 20 feet long).

By "no one came to investigate", I take it that no scientist came to investigate?

Case closed, I should say?

Seems very reasonable to me. As long as the proposed photos are of the correct carcase.

The photo on the Wiki site does look like a classic whale blubber globster.

Edited April 5, 2012 by DieChecker

[Marozi]

Seems very reasonable to me. As long as the proposed photos are of the correct carcase.

The photo on the Wiki site does look like a classic whale blubber globster.

We indeed assume that this first picture was taken from Jones and appeared in the Rand Daily Mail. In his article in the WWM he wrote that he has "poked it with a stick". And Karl Shuker realised that The Mail report of 24 December 1924 documenting Ballance's eyewitness testimony had contained "a very small sketch of a long but largely featureless white carcase on a beach with the silhouette of a human figure standing in front of the carcase at its extreme left-hand end, looking down at it, with one arm outstretched. This sketch had simply been labelled “A sea monster”, and so provided no hint that it might be directly related to the Trunko report. However, looking at Jones’s photo of the Trunko carcase, it was immediately obvious that the sketch had been based directly on this photo as every discernible detail was the same: the carcase’s shape and pale colour, the skyline, the precise location, shape, and orientation of the human figure, even the angle of its outstretched arm.

This was clearly no coincidence, and as Jones had snapped his photos during the same month, December 1924, as the Mail report had been published, I can only assume that the Mail had somehow seen this particular Jones photo somewhere and had prepared a sketched vers­ion of it for inclusion. Confirmation of this notion may well exist in a statement on the MBA’s Trunko page that Jones’s Trunko account had been published not only in the Wide World Magazine but also in the Rand Daily Mail (a Johannesburg newspaper).

No date of publication was mentioned for this Rand Daily Mail report (which no doubt included Jones’s photos as well as his account), and neither Markus nor I have so far been able to trace it. However, if this report had been published prior to the publication of the London Daily Mail’s own, separate Trunko story (which is more than likely, given the much greater newsworthiness of a South African sea monster to a South African newspaper than to a London one), then it well may be that the Rand Daily Mail report would have been seen by at least a few reporters and artists at London’s Daily Mail. In turn, this may conceivably have inspired the latter newspaper to produce its own Trunko report, complete with a sketch of a photo from the Rand Daily Mail’s version." (http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5536/youve_been_trunkoed.html)

Indeed Jones acknowledged that the Rand Daily Mail included his pictures(!) in a letter which is published in the document "Margate Area Annals 1917 to 1969" compiled by Margate Women's Institute (in this document at Margate Museum our correspondent Bianca Baldi found the other pictures). So if we accept that Jones told us the truth (and we have no reason to think he did not btw) this pictures indeed show Trunko.

In view of completing the story: if anybody out there collected this issue of the Rand Daily Mail please contact Karl or me.

Edited April 5, 2012 by Marozi

[Marozi]

So if we accept that Jones told us the truth (and we have no reason to think he did not btw) this pictures indeed show Trunko.

If this carcass he found was indeed the carcass which Ballance saw... However I think the plausibility for Trunko be a Globster is higher than be a living furred animal with trunk, lobster-like fluke and without eyes.