[imagesource:facebook/Bobbi-lee Oates]

This planet is massive, and in one or two little nooks and crannies, there are people who believe that mermaids exist.

Who knows, in one of those nooks, there could very well be a mermaid combing her hair with a fork or spying on humans from the waves.

So when a strange-looking skeleton washes up on a beach, imaginations are easily stoked. To be fair, the skeletal remains of this creature that Bobbi-Lee Oates spotted on the beach in Keppel Sands, Queensland, Australia, look a lot like a mermaid.

Bobbie-Lee relayed via the Mirror how she saw the skull, which looked remarkably like a human’s and couldn’t help but stop to figure out if it really was.

Photos taken by Bobbi-Lee, and shared on the Facebook group specialising in marine biology, reveal a long body with its ribcage showing, but no discernible limbs, eyes, or ears. The strange mono-footed creature was also said to have an elongated jawline and “hair similar to the colour of a cow or kangaroo”, but with some missing in many places due to decomposition.

“It was exactly like a mermaid shape, but hairy, because it seemed to have a tail or limb of some sort.”

Mermaids could be furry, who knows?

Image: Facebook/Bobbi-lee Oates

She really ought to have taken better photographs, close-ups too, because now the mystery is alive and well on the internet, with locals chiming in with their hot takes about what this thing could be:

Image: Facebook

A dugong, by the way, is a species of manatee and their skeleton does seem to match what Bobbi-Lee found:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

A UK-based expert examined the photos and was able to narrow it down to a group of mammals that includes whales, orcas, dolphins and porpoises. Meanwhile, Rob Deaville, Project Manager for the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme at the Zoological Society of London, confirmed it’s “definitely” a “small cetacean” – the infraorder of aquatic mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

For Bobbi-Lee, it remains a mystery, confirming that “I still have not found out what it was. I was hoping someone would comment saying what it was, but the comments were all so different. And I wasn’t really sold on any of them – especially considering some they said are not even in our waters.”

Bobbie-Lee said they were excited because she thought they had discovered “a miracle new species”.

We’ll go with Lily Brown then, who commented, almost too assuredly, “shawty you just caught a mermaid”.

[source:mirror]