On Facebook, Paul Jones announced a gruesome find. “Today at Great Yarmouth we found what looks like a dead Mermaid washed up on the beach,” he wrote. 

Great Yarmouth is on the eastern coast of England, on the North Sea, across from the coast of the Netherlands. It’s not so far from Copenhagen, where Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid is memorialized in a statue—so perhaps it counts as traditional mermaid stomping grounds. 

This mermaid, though, is not doing so hot.

Is this a real mermaid? As the Daily Mail notes, “Mr Jones’s Facebook profile shows him to be a keen modeller - particularly of creepy figures. He is a member of the ‘Horror and Halloween DIY’ Facebook group.” So even if we were inclined to believe in mermaids, that weighs heavily against this one being real.

Still, those exposed intestines are an innovation in “real mermaid” finds. In that pantheon, recycled over and over again to create videos of mermaid sightings, plenty of the mermaids are desiccated or otherwise gross-looking. But there aren’t any examples of mermaid internal organs!  

The real question is: what should we name this specimen? The “Yarmouth mermaid” would be traditional, but we’re open to other suggestions.