I’m agreeing with you–on land, yeah, an octopus is going to be a mass…and whale blubber could be mistaken for an octopus becaue of the amorphous shape.

My point, is that the carcass sat on the beach and was discovered by the boys, having sunk into the beach from its weight. The carcass had been on the beach who knows how long, having been picked over by sea critters and land critters, weather beaten and so on. From the pictures and even the drawings (drawings while supportive sometimes–I have my own skepticism, because the artist could be swayed by the prevailing thought at the time–even though the drawings look “octopus-ish” if the artist thought it was octopus before knowing, he/she could have drawn the blob resembling an octopus shape), it’s impossible to conclude that it was without a doubt whale blubber.

I’m merely going on the information that was deduced from testings–that it was indeed octopus tissue.

As for Okham’s razor – we have two analysis favouring the giant octopus and two in more recent years favouring whale blubber (including a discussion and at least a rejection of the conclusions of the other two btw). An unknown giant octopus for which existence we have no further real evidence… and whale blubber…

Naturally we can’t rule out with 100 percent such an giant octopus. So my bottom line is that the St. Augustine globster is strongly doubtable for this explanation and therefore at least worthless.

However, the tissue was tested and found to be octopus tissue–hence the reason the debate goes on. AT first, it was thought to be the remains of a whale, but it was the testing of the samples that changed people’s minds.

As for the mass, an octopus is basically a giant mass of muscle. The remains found on the beach were pretty spread out and flat–as shown in the above pics. Part of the problem with masses of tissue like that is that they’re so picked over from predators and the elements.

The bottom line for me–they were able to test the tissue back then, and if it came back octopus, then let’s call an apple an apple. Just because this particular apple happened to be about a hundred times the size, makes no difference. I’ll use Occham’s Razor (sp?) for my own benefit here.

The ocean is plenty deep and vast, and we have come no where near to finding all the critters down there…and there’s plenty of places for giant species to hide out–and until we find one, who knows what a giant octopus is and how it really relates to the octopus family. If there’s room down there for breeding populations of giant squid and collossal squid, then a giant octopus isn’t that far out there either. Giant squids were the stuff of legends too until we finally started catching them…