Bizarro many-limbed sea creature ... solved!
Most people have probably never seen anything as freaky as the creature a Singapore fisherman hauled out of the sea a couple of weeks ago.
He had no clue what it was, and neither did the first wave of Internet stories in recent days.
On five branches emanating from a central purple structure were dozens of waving, flailing groups of tentacle-like parts, as seen on the original video posted on Facebook by a "Jr. Saim." It looks almost like a mad scientist's surgical conjoining of a crowd of baby octopi, or an aerial view of a kind of zombie mosh pit.
"I thought it looked like an alien or some kind of mutant," fisherman Ong Han Boon told the Daily Mirror.
"When I pulled it out of the water I was completely flummoxed by what I was looking at," he said.
Apparently, the creature has been identified as a kind of starfish cousin called a basket star or basket starfish. The creature's in the phylum of echinoderms, which includes sea urchins.
See also:
Shrimp caught big enough to cover your grill
Family haunted by thousands of brown recluse spiders
Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com. Follow @petemucha on Twitter.