Huge Bone Of Mysterious Sea Creature On Beach Baffles Photographer

A San Francisco photographer stumbled upon the huge skeletal remains of a massive sea creature last week.

Elke Teichmann and her roommate were walking their dogs along the shoreline of Fort Funston in California when they found the remnants of the creature.

"My roommate and I were walking our dogs on the beach, observing all the driftwood that had washed up from the storm, when I saw something that caught my eye," Teichmann told SFGATE in an email. "From my vantage point, it looked like some large white item peeking through all of the scattered branches."

They approached the remains and took a few photos. Initially, she thought it was the remains of a whale vertebra. Later, Bay Area researchers confirmed the creature's true identity, the LA Times reported.

"That's a braincase of a modern gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus," confirmed Robert Boessenecker, a research associate at UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology.

These creatures have a distinctive skull that makes them easy to identify, Boessenecker told SFGATE.

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Boessenecker said it was a rare sight as by the late 17th or early 18th-century gray whales living in the western North Atlantic had already been sent to the brink of extinction.

Gray whales grow to a size of 42 to 49 feet in length and weigh up to 90,000 pounds, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Strange, bizarre-looking creatures and sometimes their remains keep washing up on shores.

In November, a man walking on a beach in Edinburgh, Scotland, discovered a bizarre-looking, fluorescent green sea creature.

When Mike Arnott spotted the strange alien-like creature in the sand along Portobello Beach, he initially thought it was a moss-covered pinecone, but later realized the creature was "alive," the Independent reported.

"I saw this fluorescent green thing with weird needles - I had no idea what it was. The bright green and gold colors drew me straight to it. I flipped it over and saw it had lots of tiny legs - I had never seen anything like it. It being an alien definitely crossed my mind - or I thought it might be something from way out in the deep sea," Arnott told Edinburgh Live.