The "Montauk Monster"

If you haven't seen the story, there is a photo of a supposed monster that washed up on a beach somewhere. The really weird thing a bout this is that it is unbelievably easy to demonstrate that this is a fake. If you take the original image from Gawker, zoom in on it using something like Photoshop, you can see any number of places where the image is clearly constructed. Here are two examples:

Here is a zoomed in image of the area around the monster's neck. There is a hard edge at the left of the neck. Such edges are almost never present in real photographs, especially in situations like this where there is a smooth transition from one surface to another.

The second shows two areas of the monster. The section on the left is from the body, the one on the right is from the head. Notice that the image from the head looks blurrier than the one on the body. That's because the image of the body was taken with a higher resolution camera than was the one from the head. No camera can do that.

Finally, I think the author of this picture left us a message. Take a look at this zoomed in image of the "hand" of the monster:

I think it's flipping us off!