This week's biggest sensation on ye olde internets: a snapshot, originally posted by an independent blogger and passed on to New York gossip site Gawker, of the bloated carcass of an unidentifiable creature, washed up on the shore of Montauk, Long Island.

The fleshy, partially-decomposed beast looks like no animal I've ever seen; if anything, it could be a creepy animatronic version of a character deemed too scary to make the cut for the animated film The Land Before Time. Its existence is actually quite jarring, especially considering that, as Gawker noted, the Montauk Monster surfaced quite close to an animal research facility.

Speculation around... um... well, just what the f*** grotesque species the strange corpse might belong to has, as one might expect, run rampant.

Gawker sums up the theories:

* It's a viral marketing campaign for Cartoon Network: Officially denied.
* It's some other viral marketing: Only if that 22-year-old waiter is lying, as is the original discoverer when she goes on PlumTV tomorrow to talk about it. This would probably also mean our original tipster, who is now named in the New York piece, was probably in on the scheme and is thus lying.
* Gawker invented it: Someone mentioned this in the comments. Like we convinced all these people to go along with it? Just for some pageviews? That's wayyy too much work. It would be much easier to just have Blakeley do another mashup of TV news bloopers and so forth. Of course I can only speak definitively for myself.
* It's a turtle without the shell: Apparently this doesn't work because of the teeth. Or so say the comments!
* It's a dog that decomposed in the water: Still the most likely explanation. See especially the comments linked from Update 3 here.
* It can't be a dog because of the way it decomposed and/or because it has a "beak": The "beak" could be the result of cartilage worn away by the elements, no? And keep in mind that if a garbage bag or similar were placed over the dog before it went into the water, different parts of the body could decompose at different rates.
* It's a nutria: Interesting!
* You can't tell the size of the thing because the photo has no scale: Sorta true, but maybe this will help: The full resolution version of the photo makes it clear that the black dot-looking thing on the corpse's upper back is a mosquito. So this thing looks fairly small.

Or, uh, it's an evil daemon sent to give idiot humans vacationing in Montauk a heads-up about the imminent apocalypse.

(Okay, so I made that last one up.)

Any thoughts?

--Sarah Liss