"Alien" washes up in New York

[molloch]

www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24105658-13762,00.html

THE photograhed remains of a mysterious "creature" washed up on a Long Island beach near New York has led to a frenzy of online speculation.

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things look wierd after they have been floating around in the sea a little while. the pic isn't good, but this is obviously some kind of carnivore. I'm guessing a lion? (actually, I'm almost certain its a snub faced dog, a pug cross something.)

[youcantry]

It's a dog - same as the Maine Mutant and any thousand other dead dogs on the planet.

[johannes]

> The Cretaceous-era Cynodont may be a link between
> mammals and reptiles

LOL. There were plenty of cynodonts around in the Cretaceous, but almost all of them were mammals, or at least mammaliforms. And there never was a link between eureptilians and mammals, because synapsids, the clade mammalian cynodonts, non-mammalian cynodonts and all other therapsids belong to, are actually older than eureptilians. Eureptilians are not the ancestors of synapsids, and while both are amniotes, their last common ancestor must have lived way back in the Carboniferous.

Of course, the pictured animal IS a cynodont. One of those Cenozoic mammalian cynodonts called canids, to be exact

> secret mutant breeding program

This animal is actually the product of a selective mutant breeding program. It is a very old program, going on for 10.000 - 15.000 years, but it is not very secret. The program is known under the name 'dog breeding'

[johannes]

Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology has blogged about the Montauk carcass, see here:
scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/08/the_montauk_monster.php
There are some new photographs in this post; they clearly show that the "dicynodont beak" is really just the naked bone of a carnivoran's muzzle.
Darren's conclusion is that it is a racoon (well, I still would say it's a dog, but I think it's clear from the photos that it is a carnivoran, and a canoid rather than a feloid).