This seems like a suitable post for a Sunday in 2020.

On a morning in February 1948, a local beachcomber was walking the beautiful white sand beach in Clearwater, FL, and was shocked to find large three-toed footprints in the sand coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. The tracks were large, 14 inches long and 11 inches wide, made a deep impression in the sand, and were widely spaced. Whatever made the tracks appeared to be heavy and very large. The tracks went on for close to two miles before returning to the water.

The tracks kept appearing on local beaches and created a considerable sensation. Ocala.com observed:

The Clearwater Monster was clever. The fiend left tracks, inflamed imaginations, then vanished. Just when people stopped thinking about him, he crept out of the surf again.

This time he knocked over a lifeguard stand and left hair or feathers or something unearthly on wooden pilings. He went on a rampage. The Clearwater Monster walked the beach at Indian Rocks. He visited the waterfront of Sarasota. He rounded the Pinellas peninsula, headed north, bypassed the St. Petersburg waterfront, and kept going until he found a place to leave tracks on the sand next to the Courtney Campbell Causeway.

He got the rampaging out of his system. He laid low for the next year. In 1949, the creature showed up about 100 miles north of Pinellas County. A beachcomber found tracks near the mouth of the Suwannee River.

VintageNews.com reports that its tracks were seen in towns between Clearwater and Sarasota, earning it the name “Old Three Toes”. During that time, several people claimed to have spotted the monster, for what else could it be? It was described as a large, bird-like thing or a large furry log with a head shaped like a hog’s.

Clearly, expert assistance was needed. Ivan T. Sanderson was called in to investigate.  Sanderson was a self-taught zoologist and science commentator for WNBC in New York as well as the science writer for the New York Herald Tribune. He popularized the terms cryptozoology. 

After a several week investigation, Sanderson opined that the tracks were “definitely not a hoax,” The tracks were so deep and wide that only something heavy and tall could have made them. He concluded that the tracks could only have been made by a 15′ tall giant penguin.

Flash forward 40 years. In 1988, Clearwater resident, Tony Signorini, admitted that he and a prankster friend, Al Williams, had left the mysterious tracks all those years ago. A reporter from the St.Pete Times went to Signorini’s auto shop to interview him, and, while she was there, he showed her a pair of very large, cast-iron feet with three toes.

Signorini and Williams began by making plaster casts of what they interpreted as dinosaur feet, but the plaster was too light to make much of an impression on the sand. So, they had the feet cast in iron at a local blacksmith shop.

They bolted the cast iron feet to a pair of high-top tennis shoes, then loaded them into a rowboat and went to shallow water not far from shore, where Signorini would put the dino-feet on and wade out of the water.

To make the tracks so far apart, Signorini would balance on one foot, swinging the opposite leg back and forth to work up the momentum to make a jump to the other foot. Since each of the metal objects weighed about 30 pounds, the feat took some time and some stamina.

 Al Williams, died in 1970 and Tony Signorini finally died in 2013, leaving the fabled feet to his son, Jeff.

Since Jeff inherited his father’s feet, he’s been approached by a couple of historical organizations who expressed their interest in displaying the oddball pieces of Florida history, but Jeff has resisted, noting his father wanted to keep the feet in the family. When he was wondering what to do with them, one of his nieces called dibs, so the family’s legacy will remain.

By the way, giant penguins did indeed exist but are believed to have become extinct between 37 to 60 million years ago.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.