A boy finds a rare Lego octopus from a container that fell into the sea in 1997

A boy in the English county of Cornwall in Great Britain has made headlines with a strange passion for collecting art. For years, 13-year-old Leotauras Simulonskas has been searching for Lego pieces from a shipping container that fell overboard during a storm in 1997. Now he has discovered one of just 4,200 plastic octopuses that were on board the container. An amazing discovery, as British media reported on Saturday.

In total, the boy has now found nearly 800 Lego pieces, according to a report by the PA news agency. The container contains, among other things, 352,000 pairs of LEGO diving fins and 97,500 LEGO oxygen bottles. His father told the Palestinian Authority: “We have been searching for this octopus for two years.”

Tracey Williams, who is also an avid beachcomber and wrote a book about it, described the discovery as “the holy grail of this shipping container”.

Now Liutauras is looking for a Lego dragon

“I think people like to find a few Lego pieces when they clean the beach, and many see it as a reward for all the work they do to keep the beaches clean,” Williams said, according to PA. She also runs a social media project called “Lego Lost At Sea”, through which she wants, among other things, to draw attention to the pollution of the oceans with plastic parts. It inserts the reported discoveries onto a map that will become part of scientific work on the distribution of plastic from lost containers.

Liutauras Cemolonskas has already set his next goal: he wants to find one of the 33,941 Lego dragons that fell into the sea.

dpa