Location: Unnamed Mediterranean Shore | Estimated Layers: Multi-millennia

Along a sun-bleached coastal excavation site, paleontologists uncover a fossil unlike any previously recorded—a vertebrate with humanlike ribcage structure, a long tapering fin spine, and symmetrical flipper bones. Carved into compressed sedimentary layers, the imprint suggests a prehistoric being neither wholly marine nor terrestrial.

Shell fragments and fossilized sea flora encase the fossil’s curves like offerings, hinting at a deep-sea burial or shoreline stranding long forgotten. Yet official silence looms large. Critics argue pareidolia and misidentification. But the symmetry, the scale, the unmistakable vertebral design—it whispers of intelligence, of design, of legend.

What if myth is memory fossilized in the collective unconscious? Could this be proof of a species that danced between waves and wind—then vanished beneath tides and taboo? Or will science, once again, dismiss the impossible before daring to dream?