So, this huge mass of incredibly strange gelatinous stuff washes up on the shores of Chile, and oceanologists have no clue what the heck it is. From CNN.com:

The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.

“We’d never before seen such a strange specimen, We don’t know if it might be a giant squid that is missing some of its parts or maybe it’s a new species,” said Elsa Cabrera, director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago.

“Maybe it’s a new species?” I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The ocean is just plain weird. We’re busy spending quadrillions of dollars trying to find out if, like, a dozen microbes maybe once lived on Mars sometime in the ancient past. Meanwhile, the entire flippin’ ocean is filled with things that are the size of your front lawn and yet which no-one before has ever even seen.