A British man made a strange discovery on a beach in Liverpool Bay.
Can you imagine discovering a huge, unknown creature on the sand during your Sunday stroll? This is what happened very recently to this 72-year-old Briton, Stephen Davies, on a morning walk on the beach at New Brighton, at the mouth of Liverpool Bay, in the United Kingdom. “I was running on the beach and I was like ‘what is that?’ because it looked quite big,” he tells the columns of the local newspaper Liverpool Echo. Before his eyes: a carcass measuring about six meters, lying on the sand.
Inevitably, when the sea recedes and reveals the remains of such an imposing creature, the imagination ignites and fuels speculation. The origin and mysterious journey of such an animal through the depths of the ocean raises questions and questions flood in: what creature could it be? From what era? Does she have any other relatives still alive? What did she die of? Stephen Davis obviously asked these questions, calling his discovery a “New Brighton Nessie” (a reference to the Loch Ness monster) or a “giant alien”.
But if the idea of ??a new mystery to unravel may be attractive to many curious people looking for adventure, the true identity of this sea monster is ultimately much less fanciful. “I was talking to a fisherman who told me it was a basking shark, which I don’t think is very common around here. It could have been swept away by the tide. I’ve never seen anything something similar, before,” Stephen Davis tells the Liverpool Echo about his find. The basking shark is the second largest fish found in British waters. And despite its impressive size of almost six meters long, the animal washed up on New Brighton beach was in fact a young individual!
Huge – adult basking sharks can measure up to twelve meters long and weigh up to six tonnes – these sharks are however far from being the most dangerous. According to the British association Wildlife Trust, interviewed by the newspaper, this species is more often seen during the summer months and frequents the coasts of southwest England, Wales, the Isle of Man and from the west of Scotland.
“The basking shark may be huge, but we still know very little about this elusive giant. Satellite tracking has shown that it can migrate long distances in winter, with some appearing off the Azores and even on Earth -New. Fishermen have reported seeing them in mid-winter in the UK and they are sometimes found dead in winter after storms,” adds the Wildlife Trust.