The Montauk Monster

New York's celebrity-obsessed Hamptons summer season got even sillier this week when a strange-looking, very dead creature washed up on a beach in Montauk at the far eastern end of New York's Long Island.

On Tuesday afternoon, a photo was posted on Gawker, the Big Apple's reigning gossip blog, which treated the Montauk monster with characteristic respect: "Good Luck With Your Hell Demons."

The animal looks like a bloated, hairless dog, except that it's got an eagle-like beak, a prominent brow ridge and a curiously elongated front paw.

Speculation immediately arose that it might be a hitherto unknown marine mammal, a sea turtle without its shell, an artful Photoshop creation or — cue the "X-Files" theme — an escaped experiment from the government animal-disease research facility on Plum Island, just offshore from Montauk.

The animal is resting on sand in the photo, with no other indication of location or scale except for what appears to be a large fly on its back.

"I saw the monster," said another witness, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, to New York magazine. "I just came walking down the beach and everyone was looking at it. No one knew what it was. It kind of looked like a dog, but it had this crazy-looking beak. I mean, I would freak out if something like that popped up next to me in the water."

"They say an old guy came and carted it away," Navitski told New York magazine. "He said, 'I'm going to mount it on my wall.'"