What is the Montauk Monster?!

My wife called me over to our computer the other night to show me pictures of this mysterious "monster" that supposedly washed ashore in New York. It's face is pointed like a bird, but it's body resembles a large hairless dog. In July of 2008, an article was written in The Independent, a local NY area publication, about the discovery of the creature by a woman and her three friends. An early speculation concluded that the creature was the mutated result of an experiment at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

On August 1,2008, Jeff Corwin appeared on Fox News and claimed that upon close inspection of the photograph, he feels sure the monster is merely a raccoon or dog that has decomposed slightly. Darren Naish, a British paleontologist, agreed that if real, the creature was a raccoon. Naish says that "claims that the limb proportions of the Montauk carcass are unlike those of raccoons are not correct", and on his blog he furnishes an illustration of an intact raccoon corpse drawn over the corpse in the photograph.

Second sighting
In a May 14, 2009 article on Newsday.com, Nicky Papers, a culinary school student from West Islip who runs the www.montauk-monster.com blog blog, said a couple from Southold contacted him after they saw the body on the Founders Landing Park shore last Wednesday. He and a friend drove there and saw a three-foot long animal corpse with a pointy snout and hooves lying in the surf."It smelled horrible," Papers said. "It's like nothing I've ever seen before. I don't think the pictures do it justice." Papers said the couple shoved the carcass with a stick into a white garbage bag and took it away. They later told him they'd put the carcass on ice at an undisclosed Southold location, Papers said.

PHOTO GALLERY COMPARISON OF "NEW" MONSTER VS. ORIGINAL SIGHTING

I think that decomposition is the key role in the mystery of whatever this creature was before it died. It most closely resembles a dog, which has a snout, and the hair would fall away when the skin dies. I use Snopes.com for debunking the many rumors or hoaxes that travel around the Internet whenever I receive a forwarded message. However, they can neither confirm or deny it's origin or whether it's an actual creature or not.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?