Does This Whale Have Legs?

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Ever since humanity had access to the written word, to stories and tales from the imaginations of the greatest thinkers in history, humanity has completely agreed — we’d rather live in there rather than the real world! It doesn’t take much for the people of the Internet to lovingly embrace a fictional reality, and so it was when the Internet saw this photo of a beluga whale sporting something that looks like knees.

According to the Twitter feed @WeLiveToLearn, the beluga whale has a history of being mistaken for a mermaid due to its human-like knee shapes, showing that even back then people forgot that the key part of being a mermaid is you don’t have fins, you dummy! However, in this case, the shape in the whale’s body isn’t legs, but in fact blubber on the side of its body that happened to be in a leg-like shape when the photo in question was snapped.

Mashable ended up looking into the weird history of this viral video, and interviewed a few oceanographers along the way. Carey Richard of the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut told the website: “It was just a weird camera angle. The position of the camera is just such that they caught that blubber moving. I’ve never seen blubber looking like human anatomy”.

So, there you go folks. This is not a magic, beautiful mermaid. It’s a big goofy whale — the majestic creature that would cause us to weep if we saw it in real life.

The year is 2018 and we are disappointed that whales aren’t mermaids. Great.

What do you think of the photo? Let us know in the comments, or on Twitter at @WhatsTrending.

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