Scientists Puzzled By Blob on the Beach

Call it for the moment the blob, or the creature from the deep. An enigmatic lump of gelatinous flesh washed ashore on the coast of Chile is puzzling marine scientists.

"We have never seen such a strange creature before," said Elsa Cabrera, a marine biologist and director of the centre for cetacean conservation in Santiago. "We don't know if it might be a giant squid that is missing some of its parts, or maybe it is a new species."

The blob is a lump of decomposing grey flesh the size of a small bus. It measures at least 12 metres and lies on the southern Pacific beach like a large and disgusting blanket. It was first reported as a beached whale, but it was not a whale's skin: too big and without the correct texture or smell, according to Dr Cabrera.

Experts who went for a closer look pronounced the flesh as having once belonged to a marine invertebrate. The tissue seemed round, like a jellyfish, but leathery to touch. The world's oceans are still largely unexplored. Oceanographers complain that space scientists know the surface of Mars or Venus better than Earth scientists know their own planet. Creatures hitherto unknown to science still pop up at intervals along shores and estuaries. The Chinese in 1992 reported a mysterious river-borne creature that made for food, enveloped it and moved on. It turned out to be a carnivorous fungus called a slime mould. Normally these are tiny and hang around in compost heaps and rotting logs. This one was the size of a St Bernard dog and seemed to swim in the Shaanxi river.

But saltwater slime moulds are unlikely. The betting for the moment is that the blob will turn out to be the remains of a giant squid. The largest of these ever found was washed ashore in New Zealand more than 100 years ago. It measured 60ft from tip to tail, had eyes the size of hubcaps and weighed a tonne. Most specimens have been washed ashore, dead or dying, or found in the stomachs of sperm whales.