Here’s a book that may be of interest to Exploding Whale aficionados:  The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance  by  Theodore Carter . For those of you that may be unfamiliar with the term, a “sea blob” — also known as a “ globster ” — is an “unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water.” The title of the book refers to a  highly publicized event in 2003  where one such “organic mass” washed up on the coast of Chile. Biologists were unable to readily determine what the “blob” was, and the world had to wait nearly a year before DNA testing revealed it to be the remains of a sperm whale.  Many such events  have occurred over the decades with the remains often misidentified as sea monsters, giant octopuses, or modern-day plesiosaurs. Carter has apparently worked the Chilean sea blob into a collection of short stories, which his publisher describes as follows: Much as Theodore Cart...

Ichthyosaurs were giant marine reptiles that existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. This was, in case you weren’t sure,  before  the Internet. But still, one wonders — if the interweb were around during the Jurassic period, do you think there would have been an Exploding Ichthyosaur website? Recently, a group of scientists published a paper that could help answer that question. I received an email from one of the Swiss researchers: Subject: a new publication about “exploding whales” Date: February 4, 2012 10:28:01 AM PST Hi there, yesterday our paper about “exploding whales” was published: “Float, explode or sink: postmortem fate of lung-breathing marine vertebrates” Best regards from Switzerland It’s not the first time the Exploding Whale has been the inspiration for an academic pursuit. Fellow University of Puget Sound alumnus Chris van Vechten’s senior thesis,  “Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shore...