What Lurks in the Deep?

I grew up near the ocean and spent a lot of time on the beach as a child. After powerful winter storms, the remains of dead animals would often wash ashore, and I loved to drag these half-rotted, half-eaten blobs home with me, so I could get a better look – hurray, science!  Fins, skulls, fleshy bits of things tossed up from the briny deep… oh, my poor patient parents. In retrospect, our yard probably smelled pretty bad. Most were so decomposed that you were never certain what it had been in lif...