PROJECT

Turns out phoca rosmarus (and the Wikipedia page, which is not available in English) is an outdated classification for the odobenus rosmarus walrus from 1758.
Also, maybe all of us should fill out the Form. We might get different clues that we have to combine somehow.

 

ok
THE CIRCLES OF HELL HAVE OPENED
Register your identity: sentient lump
How will you cope: random acts of violence
Do you fear death: nope.
You accept fate: ☑


also i tried putting phoca rosmarus into morse
.--. .... --- -.-. .- / .-. --- ... -- .- .-. ..- ...

 

Very well.

THE CIRCLES OF HELL HAVE OPENED
Register your identity: TrapinchO
How will you cope: There is no reason to cope. I shall walk through the gates of Hell itself and back.
Do you fear death: no.
You accept fate: ☑

________________________________

What does the differ viewer yield? By "Nothing is hidden in the hex code", does it mean it is same as the original or that you didn't find a cipher you could identify?

 

It is different from the original in the sense that they are of different quality (weirdly, the source is lower quality than the clue, but they may have come from a common source) but otherwise a diff viewer (which shows pixels that are different between the two images) yields nothing. I looked in the binary data of the image, looking for some kind of ASCII message, but found nothing. There may be a cipher here somewhere I don't know of, or, as sentient lump suggested, it may have to do with where the image is from.

 

Did it yield anything ascii-ish? (not a coherent message, just symbols)

 

I don't understand ANY of this.

 

I mean, there were ASCII symbols, because I was looking with UTF-8 encoding:

I think we've exhausted anything in the image itself.

 

Geez ur smart

 

so, where does the image come from? you said it was from a wiki page, what page is it?


another thing worth mentioning is that it is a picture of a walrus, and there are only two extant species of walrus in the world. i'm not sure how that's relevant, but it feels like it could be.

 

I originally found it on some outdated page in another language about a walrus, but it's also on the one about the family Odobenidae, from which the walrus comes.
Wait a second...
From there I got a higher-quality copy of the image, which matches perfectly with what we were given, so that's out. However, the original image was 64 kilobytes, and the new one weighs a shocking 850 kilobytes, despite being the exact same size. Somewhere in the middle of the file, The puzzle has a sequence of hex code that's just incrementing numbers. It starts like this:

Code:

0000 0001 0002 0003 0004 0006 0007 0008
0009 000b 000c 000d 000e 0010 0011 0012
0013 0015 0016 0017 0018 001a 001b 001c
001d 001e 0020 0021 0022 0023 0025 0026
0027 0028 002a 002b 002c 002d 002f 0030
0031 0032 0034 0035 0036 0037 0038 003a
003b 003c 003d 003f 0040

You get the idea, but a sharp eye will notice some of the numbers are missing: in this sample, 5, a, f, 14, 19, 1f, 24, 29, 2e, 33, 39, and 3e.
We can't possibly sort through every number, but maybe they form some kind of pattern - perhaps Morse code.

(EDIT: that was actually part of the original image, i got confused. must be some weird jpeg thing)

 

Upon further inspection, something strange:
the image we were given, despite having the jpg extension, is actually a png. It seems to work as both, but there's still no difference.

 

this is just a stab in the dark, but maybe could put it into binary? and then either assume 0=dot and 1=dash or vice versa?

i doubt that's really it though this is just a wild guess

(edit) just tried it, it doesn't work

 

Nothing has been the same since that one thing happened in 2013

 

Ok so Epic_Chonker has a new profile pic, it’s hard to read but there’s absolutely text in there

 

welp. bye then guys, it was fun trying to solve puzzles and stuff w/ you.

 

Bets on this being a clue?

 

Yeah, but as for what I don’t know
Might just be a cool lore moment

 

oh not again