On November 30, 1896, two boys riding bicycles along the beach of Anastasia Island, near St. Augustine, Florida, found a large object half-buried in the sand. The tide was out, and the mass was pale, rubbery, and roughly the size of a small house. The boys did not touch it and rode back to town to report what they had seen.

Word spread quickly, and residents came out to examine the object. Among them was Dr. DeWitt Webb, a local physician with a strong interest in natural science. Webb measured the portion of the mass that remained above the sand. He estimated it was 18 to 23 feet long and weighed several tons. He noted that the flesh was unusually tough, resembling rubber, and that thick stumps protruded from the body, which he initially thought might be the bases of large limbs.

Webb took photographs of the carcass and removed tissue samples for preservation. He then wrote to Addison Verrill, a professor at Yale University and a leading authority on cephalopods, the group that includes octopuses and squid. Verrill initially examined the descriptions and agreed with Webb’s suggestion that the remains might belong to a giant octopus. He gave the animal the name Octopus giganteus and speculated that its arms might have been anywhere from 75 to 100 feet long.

The claim drew public attention, and the press covered the story as evidence that a creature of significant size had washed ashore. However, Verrill later reconsidered. After reviewing further descriptions and photographs, he revised his conclusion and suggested the mass was more likely the decomposed head of a sperm whale. In his revised view, the stumps Webb had observed were torn remnants of the whale’s anatomy rather than limbs.

The carcass was eventually reclaimed by the sea, but Webb’s tissue samples and photographs survived. Decades later, researchers reopened the question. In 1971, an analysis of the preserved tissue found that its connective structure appeared more consistent with octopus than whale. In the 1980s, a chemical analysis found the tissue was high in collagen, which again pointed away from whale blubber and toward a different kind of animal.

Later studies in the 1990s and 2000s challenged those findings. Some scientists argued the collagen signature was not unusual and was consistent with the decomposed remains of a large warm-blooded animal, such as a whale that had lost its softer tissue to the sea. The scientific opinion has continued to shift between these two explanations without a definitive resolution.

No specimen of a giant octopus of the size proposed by Verrill has ever been found, before or since. No beak, no intact arm, and no verified example of such an animal has been recovered. The most commonly accepted explanation remains that the mass was the decomposed remains of a large whale. However, Webb’s original observation of what appeared to be limb-like stumps has never been fully accounted for.

The samples Webb collected are still in storage, and the question of what washed ashore on Anastasia Island in 1896 remains open. The physical evidence has been examined multiple times, with different researchers reaching different conclusions. The case continues to be a notable example of how difficult it can be to identify decomposed remains found on a shoreline.