The sea is a magical and largely unknown world, full of potential dangers and amazing secrets. From time to time, the tides bring strange objects or unusual samples of marine life to our shores for examination. Many of these gifts are indescribable, but we do our best, giving them names like “aliens,” “blobs,” or “monsters.” Here are some of these things found on the seashore, according to the site “listverse”:

Living Earrings

A Queensland Museum information officer once pointed to the discovery of disc-shaped bodies made of calcium carbonate, found in large numbers on the tropical Queensland beaches of Australia, including Airlie Beach on the Whitsunday Coast. Strangely, the discs have holes in their centers, are covered with small holes, contain many internal chambers, and look like shells. Even stranger, these discs were once living organisms known as “Marginopora foraminifera,” mostly marine. However, some live in fresh water or moist soil but their shape does not resemble any marine creature and is very frightening.

Giant Scrap Piece

The descriptive phrase that comes to mind when seeing pictures of the mysterious object left by the ocean on Seabrook Island, South Carolina in 2018 is “scrap piece,” as it is cylindrical, weighs about 90 kilograms, somewhat conical, with a round center, and appears to be made of concrete or thick stone. Lauren Rost, executive director of the Marine Mammal Network in Lowcountry, who was among the first to arrive at the site, claimed the object was not metallic and was probably made of concrete with a “smooth” texture. It also seemed not to have stayed in the water long due to the absence of barnacles and other marine organisms, which puzzled many whether it came from the sea or fell from space.

The Muriwai Monster

It was huge, densely hairy, and adorned with barnacle shells. It also looked savage, as its name “Muriwai Monster” suggests. The monster was named after Auckland Beach in New Zealand, where the waves washed it ashore. It was discovered by Melissa Doubleday, a local resident, who thought it might be a whale carcass. She posted pictures on Facebook hoping to “gather some ideas about what it was.” Some believed it was a “braided sea monster,” a “Christmas tree on the beach,” or a “time capsule shaped like a spaceship.” The truth was that the object was floating wood. This was just one of several other strange-looking objects that floated on New Zealand beaches, which, like Australian beaches, seem to attract strange floating ocean debris.