Whether it's a shrewdness of apes or a zeal of zebras, lots of animals have bizarre names when they cluster into crowds.

• Unknown Creatures In The Ocean

From social butterflies to solitary scavengers, virtually all animals gather into groups at some point in their lives. Safety in numbers is one reason for this, since a pack of prey is less vulnerable to attack by predators, but many animals also rely on collective wisdom to help them make better decisions. Some even blur the line between individual and group, while others limit their social time to mating season.

Whatever draws them together, something odd happens when creatures form crowds: They suddenly have bizarre, often silly names. These group nouns are rarely used, even by scientists, but they nonetheless represent our own species' collective creativity for linguistics — not to mention our deep-rooted affinity for nature.

FOREWARD -------------------- There have been thousands of sightings of creatures of Cryptozoology since recorded history. How can there be so many sightings ofthese creatures by people from every race and walk of life. The only answer can be, the creatures are real. If such creatures are real, then why have we never.

This list of weird animals includes the unknown, unexplained, unidentified – and just plain terrifying. The pictures of weird creatures found all over the planet (and the Internet) will make you squint and ask, 'What the hell is that?' Photos of them get circulated everywhere, from random no-name blogs to national and international news networks, giving everyone a chance to make their own quasi-educated (thanks to TV and movies) predictions regarding what scientists and Internet skeptics will find out.

What are the scariest creatures ever found? What weird animals actually exist? Have alien animals been found on Earth? Read up on both the hype and found reality of each of these animals and creatures, whatever they are. Have fun sleeping tonight.

Hype:
The story goes that local youths just found it, photographed it, then sold it to papers (yay, humanity!) Now, this happened near Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which brought up theories about the government doing weird experiments. Its dinosaur beak was pointed out along with the speculation that it could be a previously undiscovered prehistoric mammal.

Other possible identifications of the creature included a dog and a turtle without its shell (but turtles don't have teeth).

It's also apparently not a demon dog who only serves the great and powerful Zuul...

Reality:
Larry Penny, the East Hampton Natural Resources Director, along with other experts, confirmed it was nothing more than a decomposing raccoon carcass, which matched dental and skeletal points but was missing its upper jaw.

Since the case of the Montauk Monster was solved, other carcasses have been found in the same area. A website called montauk-monster.com is dedicated to following up on these cases with photographs and insists that the similarities between all of the beasts means they are coming from Plum Island. This means that if you ever go to Plum Island, if this is what the raccoons look like, you better watch your motherf*cking back when you run into their sharks, because in the rest of the world, raccoons look like this:

UPDATE:

It seems like another one has washed ashore, this time on the other side of the country. A deformed creature was found on the shore of Seal Beach, California. It has been noted that it looks a lot like the original Montauk Monster. Could it be another raccoon? Or something different?

The Hype:
On December 10, 2010 NBC 33 reported a picture that an anonymous hunter had found on his deer cam after coming back to his destroyed camp in Berwick, Louisiana. It was reported in news outlets around the world, illustrating the fact that if it's printed somewhere in 'letters,' local TV news will pick up news of the biblical apocalypse being here. The hunting picture shows a thin, gangly, fast-moving, seemingly nocturnal creature that can most likely swallow your soul with one backwards-sounding howl.

What's really the creepiest part of this whole thing is how powerful and mobile the creature looks.

Reality:
The mystery hasn't completely been solved, although many believe it is a photoshopped hoax.

Two different companies tried to exploit this by saying the creature is part of their viral marketing campaign. The first was a report for J.J. Abram's Super 8, released in June of 2011. Movieweb.com linked the creature to the film because in a video, Cameron Marie Saunders, who worked on Super 8, talks about running into a 'zombie' and having to cry in the scene. There was no further evidence that the creature was part of Super 8's viral marketing campaign.

Then Playstation claimed that the creature was a Grim from their Resistance 3 game and part of the marketing campaign. Insomniac Games posted an update to their Twitter that read 'Whoops...looks like one got out. If you see a Grim on the loose...please return to Insomniac Games,' which further convinced people that the truth had finally been revealed. This, of course, also isn't true because if Playstation/Insomniac Games had actually been behind this, they wouldn't have made the image so sad. I mean, the poor guy's missing a few eyes.

This is what a 'grim' looks like:

Some say that it's the same creature from a popular night vision video that is to this day unexplained. It's supposedly a 'fallen angel' captured in the woods. Wait until 45 seconds for the creepy part. It would make sense that this is the same creature:

After that, two people on Reddit debated the very pixels in the picture, reaching no conclusion (by the way, these guys did more research than any of the 'news' stations that reported the picture put together.)

Captainpremise basically disproved the picture using one side of pixel analysis in this post. The strongest counterpoint was then given by the user atavus68 in this response, so really, it's all up in the air.

Hype:
On May 11, 2007 Mario Moreno Lopez (who is in no way related to AC Slater but is actually a farmer in Metepec, Mexico) found this creature in the steel trap he had put out for his rats, meaning that Mr. Lopez is used to some pretty serious f*cking rats.

He had to drown it three times in order to kill it (which really just means he only drowned it once, doesn't it?) The creature is tiny (the farmer described as being 70 cm. long) and has an elongated head, which led to the possibility of it being an alien baby with a high level of intelligence. Skeptics stayed closer to home, calling the creature a reptile or skinned squirrel monkey to explain its tail and spine, and large head and eyes.

Mario Moreno Lopez mysteriously died in a car fire (the fire was at an unusually high temperature for a normal fire) some time after having drowned the creature, leading UFO enthusiasts to believe that the alien baby's guardians had sought revenge against Lopez, which also begs the question: where the hell were they when it was stuck in a rat trap?

Supposedly, there have been many reports of UFO sightings and mysterious crop circles in Metepec, which could just mean the locals are superstitiously making up stories and producing images and carcasses that the Weekly World News would KILL for or that an actual alien baby was left behind.

Unknown Creatures In The Ocean

No loving little kids, no Reese's Pieces, just huge traps and slow, unsuccessful drowning.

Reality:
Mexican UFO specialist Jaime Maussan was the first to discover the story, buy the corpse off Moreno for $32,000 and say it was not a hoax, which further convinces skeptics that the so-called alien baby had been a scheme.The alien baby was investigated by History Channel's 'MonsterQuest.'

The Metepec creature has so far stumped scientists, who found that its teeth are not rooted like human teeth. To disprove the initial possibility that the creature was a skinned monkey, forensic scientists found that the creature still had a unique kind of tissue and had not been tampered with.

UPDATE: Looks like the weirdo who decided to take a dead squirrel-monkey, dress it in a bunch of random animal blood and say it was an alien baby finally came clean: it's fake. He passed himself off as a veterinary assistant named Angel Palacios Nunez in the news but really was Urso Moreno Ruiz, Mario Moreno's nephew and a taxidermist.

'I must say I didn’t claim it was real. That was Maussán who claimed it was real. He believed it. All the show was a hoax that got out of control, but after four years I’m happy to see one of my creations going around the world and through many scientists and tests and they still haven’t figured out what it is. I may have fooled science! LOL,' Ruiz said in an Internet forum.

This guy will probably never get laid again.

Hype:
Around September 17, 2009, four adolescents playing in Cerro Azul, Panama, claimed they saw the rubbery E.T. look-alike run out of a cave. According to them, it started chasing them, so they threw rocks at it until it was dead (yay humanity!) They then pushed its body into the water.

The UK tabloids called it Gollum (the creature from the Lord of the Rings) because it was living in a cave, while other papers just gave it the name 'The Blue Hill Horror' because that'll make a better original SyFy movie title than 'That Thing That Looks Like If E.T. and Gollum From Lord of the Rings Had a Baby Somehow.'

Reality:
Scientists found that the adolescents' tale was false because the sloth had been decomposing before that day. Its long decomposition in the river had removed its hair and given it its bloated and rubbery skin. It was a dead sloth, which now makes this sad instead of mysterious and awesome.