Jurassic Beach

I have made the executive decision to break my blog rules about posting brand new photos and today post a pair of photos that I took last Friday in Santa Barbara. There's something about the subject of these photos that have kept me and my tour guide for the day, Marketing Guru Mitch, discussing it all week long. We're hoping someone out there will help enlighten us as to what really is in those pictures, as we have absolutely no clue!

While there in lovely Santa Barbara on that aforementioned gloriously sunny afternoon, we noticed what looked like a battleship moored off the coastline. Despite the fact we were hungry and en route to a late lunch, we decided to stop and check it out. Turned out it was a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Reagan. Very cool looking, complete with fighter jet of sorts on the deck.

As cool as that was, it couldn't compare to what Mitch noticed next. We were walking back along the beach toward the car, visions of lunch in our heads, when he said, "Hey, there's something dead over there" and pointed slightly farther up the beach to our left.


Sure enough, a flock of gulls were squabbling over some sort of carcass. We moseyed on over there to get a better look, expecting to see the remains of someone's fishing bait or something boring like that. After shooing away the gulls, including a rather large motley looking brown-and-white one that was visibly perturbed by our intrusion, we instead encountered this bizarre, reptilian creature.


We studied for several moments, saying nothing. Neither of us were sure of what we were examining. "It kinda looks like an iguana," Mitch finally said, and he was right. The tail was very iguana-like, and the skin was smooth enough. But something wasn't quite right about it. Iguanas are herbivores, right?

Well...take a close look at this creature's jaw...and at the HUGE canine tooth jutting out of its skull. No iguana I've ever seen has choppers like that. This thing definitely was a MEAT eater. A true CARNIVORE. An alligator crossed my mind, but the body isn't right. It's more iguana like...but that tooth. That creepy large tooth.

We dubbed it the "Baby T-Rex," and alternately, "Baby Velocioraptor," took these pics of it and then decided it was time for lunch. I did look around us to see if could spot a lifeguard or someone official looking to whom we could point out our discovery, but no such luck.

Does anyone, anyone, out there at all have any clue what we were looking at there on the sands of Santa Barbara last Friday afternoon? We can't figure it out...despite various Google searches for such things as "coastal Southern California carnivorous reptile," and other related keywords?

In an email on this subject earlier today, Mitch and I continued to debate what it could be. I mentioned that I showed the photos to my neighbor, Sue, a native Southern Californian. She said she never saw any creature like that there in her life. Mitch has lived there for more than 20 years and hasn't either. Nothing seemed to fit into a nice, tidy herpetological category.

Needless to say, we're still curious. We're also fearing that we might have walked away from what possibly could have been the most famously notable prehistoric discover of the 21st century. To think...if we had been bold enough to scoop it the slightly smelly, decaying mass, blow off lunch and take it to a museum or something, one or both of us might have had a dinosaur named after us...because that's sure what it looks like. Doesn't it?