by Darren Naish
Big, gnarly scutes and giant, subtriangular ones along the dorsal midline of the carapace - just like those seen on a variety of known turtles - readily explain the great armour plates that Miller described. The 'broad collar' that Miller described was no 'collar' at all, but the flaring opening to the carapace typical of giant tortoises. Little known is that some giant, island-dwelling tortoises (including some of the Galapagos species and the recently extinct forms from the Mascarenes) are (or were) incredibly long-necked, sometimes with necks similar in length to their shells. These are high-browsing adaptations that allow these large herbivores to reach well up into foliage. We conclude that the Row, evolving in isolation in a land devoid of high-browsing herbivores, took this giraffe-like feeding adaptation to an extreme. It was a veritable super-necked tortoise, able to increase its reach even further by standing and even walking bipedally. As part of the intact New Guinean fauna of the Pleistocene, the Row towered over the contemporaneous herbivorous diprotodontian marsupials, its only competitors being the climbing tree-kangaroos.
Giraffachelys was one of the last remnants of a guild of New Guinean browsing herbivores. As shown here, it easily out-reached contemporaneous diprotodontid marsupials, its only competitors being the arboreal tree kangaroos. It could even enhance its vertical reach by tipping backwards into a vertical pose.
Miller's New Guinean giant, super-necked tortoise was surely one of the most remarkable members of its group to ever walk the Earth. Sadly, a lack of modern sightings show that it is surely extinct today. We urge people to look more kindly upon Miller's insightful writings, and suggest that the Row - Giraffachelys milleri - be named in his honour.
Heuvelmans, B. 1995. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Kegan Paul International, London.
Canvey Island Monster
Mystery British carcass-monster… a "fish with feet"
Location: Canvey Island, Essex, England
Time: 1953 and 1954
As is clear from the contents of this book (and from just about any book that discusses mystery animals), the weird, partially decomposed bodies of marine animals that have washed ashore on beaches throughout history have all too frequently been hilariously misinterpreted. Because these carcasses often turn up in remote locations, because they are large, smelly and disgusting, and because they are (truth be told) rarely cause for immediate action or alarm on the part of busy working scientists, they are frequently destroyed, buried or lost to the sea before experts actually get to look at them. And to be an 'expert' on weird animal carcasses you have to be an experienced biologist who knows a lot about the anatomy of diverse creatures and an expert on decomposition. Such people are actually few and far between.
Among many weird 'sea monster carcasses' is the bizarre Canvey Island Monster, the name given to a creature that washed ashore in England in 1953. It was about 80cm long and possessed bulging eyes, gills and large hindlimbs with five-toed feet. Forelimbs were absent. The name was also used for a second, larger specimen (1.2m long) discovered in 1954. Described as "fish with feet" in the local newspaper, these weird animals were imagined to be unique undersea bipeds, perhaps looking something like giant marine frogs with straight legs and no forelimbs.
The monster explained
In reality, there are enough clues here for us to know exactly what the carcasses were: they were specimens of Lophius piscatorius, a large anglerfish that occurs around the coasts of England as well as elsewhere in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. A surviving photo of the 1954 specimen confirms this identification. Lophius is huge, with big females reaching 2m in total. Lophius is famous for its intimidating appearance. The scaleless body is flattened and covered in tassels that aid camouflage, the mouth is enormous and as wide as the entire body, and the pectoral fins are much enlarged, wide, muscular organs that project outwards and backwards. Dorsal spines, a long lure on the head and sharp, pointed teeth complete its appearance. Common names that take account of these features include frogfish, fishing-frog, sea-devil, goosefish and wide-gab.
Lophius : freaky, ugly and unfamiliar to many.
The reason we're so interested in a thoroughly explained, discounted 'mystery animal' is that it serves as a nice example of how the carcass of a known animal can become transformed into a fantastic monster by uninformed parties. A big, familiar fish (one that even forms the basis for a commercial fishery in the Irish Sea) became morphed into a bipedal, marine frog-monster. It's not difficult to think that many outlandish 'monster carcasses' from throughout history evolved in similar fashion, it's just that the original descriptions aren't precise enough to allow identification in the same way, nor do photographs of these carcasses exist. Example: the incredible Orford Ness monster carcass reported in 1962. This was reportedly tadpole-shaped, 6m long, and equipped with two pairs of short flippers (Dinsdale 1966). Having said that, critical and sceptical analyses of sea monster carcasses have generally found that many can be explained if only people try hard enough (Roesch 1997, 1998a, b, 1999). When the carcasses can't be explained, it's usually because sufficient information wasn't recorded.
Megafroglet: a case study in speculative evolution
Imagine that we never knew the actual identity behind the Canvey Island Monster. What might we think? Equipped with a massive, broad head, bulging eyes, and large hindlimbs and webbed feet, the Canvey Island Monster is presumably a giant marine frog that has retained the gill-breathing habit of tadpoles but has otherwise undergone partial metamorphosis. Frogs and toads (grouped together as anurans) are typically regarded as restricted to freshwater habitats and as unable to dwell in marine conditions. However, this is not wholly accurate. In fact, several anurans can tolerate brackish conditions and there are even species (including the Crab-eating frog Fejervarya cancrivora and Mongolian toad Pseudepidalea raddei) that have been seen swimming in the sea (Schmidt 1957).
We suggest that an ancient aquatic anuran from the Mediterranean region was forced to adapt to saline waters during the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the Miocene epoch. Trapped in one of the saline lakes of the drying Mediterranean, this proto-Canvey creature became a giant lurking predator, fully 'pre-adapted' to marine conditions, and with a body plan fundamentally constrained due to the unusual developmental pathway that anurans are locked into. It must have eked out a living in a special refugium, finally escaping into the Atlantic when the Mediterranean was breached during the Zanclean Flood 5.3 million years ago. The forelimbs withered away over time but a fully aquatic lifestyle allowed the creature to rely on enormous hindlimbs when locomoting across the lake and (later) sea floor. Its poorly ossified skeleton (even more reduced than the heavily reduced one ancestrally present in anurans) and great size mean that, once stranded on land, it collapses into a wide, flattened shape.
Remarkably similar creatures - the Froglets - dwell on the moon in the children's television series of the 1960s and 70s, The Clangers, and were clearly inspired by the reality of the Canvey Island Monster. Accordingly, we name this beast Megafroglet canveyensis and recognise it as one of the most remarkable of anurans that has ever evolved. Of course, what we say here is ridiculous nonsense. But it's actually pretty similar to some of the scenarios that cryptozoologists have invented in order to explain such imagined beasts as merbeings and the Con Rit.
Dinsdale, T. 1966. The Leviathans. Futura Publications, London.
Roesch, B. S. 1997. A review of alleged sea serpent carcasses worldwide (part one - 1648-1880). The Cryptozoology Review 2 (2), 6-27.
Roesch, B. S. 1998a. A review of alleged sea serpent carcasses worldwide (part two - 1881-1896). The Cryptozoology Review 2 (3), 25-35.
Roesch, B. S. 1998b. A review of alleged sea serpent carcasses worldwide (part three - 1897-1906). The Cryptozoology Review 3 (1), 27-31.
Roesch, B. S. 1999. A review of alleged sea serpent carcasses worldwide (part four - 1907-1924). The Cryptozoology Review 3 (3), 15-22.
Schmidt, K. P. 1957. Amphibians. In Hedgpeth, J. W. (ed) Treatise on Marine
Ecology and Paleoecology. Volume 1. Ecology. Geological Society of America Memoir 67, 1211-1212.
De Loys's Ape
Alleged 'ape' encountered on a doomed expedition
Location: a remote forested region on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, though with alleged evidence reported from across South America
Time: 1929
A South American 'ape'
Arguably one of the most fascinating episodes in cryptozoological history involves the alleged South American primate species Ameranthropoides loysi, proposed as a new species by anthropologist George Montandon in 1929. This large, allegedly new primate species is represented only by a single photograph, allegedly taken on the Colombian-Venezuelan border by Swiss geologist François De Loys in 1920. De Loys claimed that he and his party encountered two of these bipedal, erect-walking primates, shot one of them dead, and propped its body up on a wooden crate before taking the famous (and famously creepy) photograph so familiar from books on monsters and mysteries.
The creature was supposedly very large (De Loys said 1.5m tall), tailless, and with a human-like tooth count. Combined with its erect form of habitual bipedality, it was - according to De Loys - wholly different from all known South American primates (or platyrrhines), and perhaps a convergently evolved South American 'ape'. The story has been discussed several times in the cryptozoology literature, most usefully by Heuvelmans (1995), Shuker (1991, 2008) and Urbani & Viloria (2009).
A sceptical look at De Loy's 'ape'
Montandon's naming of A. loysi and De Loy's alleged discovery of it were both treated with immediate scepticism across Europe (Keith 1929). The fact that no part of the specimen had been retained was one problem. De Loys argued that the remains had either been lost due to accident, or became destroyed due to mistreatment (the skull, for example, supposedly corroded away after being used as a salt container).
This all meant that none of the supposedly unique features of the animal could be checked or confirmed. The unusual tooth count could only be confirmed by a look at the skull (and this was lost), the lack of a tail couldn't be checked because the animal had only been photographed from the front, and the alleged large size of the animal was difficult to be confident about because the photographs did not include a human for scale. All in all, highly suspicious (there have even been claims that the photograph could not have been taken where De Loys said it had, due to discrepancies with the flora). And another problem comes from the fact that the creature featured in that famous photograph is not exactly enigmatic or truly unidentifiable: it looks exactly like the creature many people said it is… a White-fronted spider-monkey Ateles belzebuth.
More insidiously, it has been argued in recent years that Montandon endorsed and required the creation of a large, vaguely human-like South American primate because - as a supporter of the then seriously regarded 'hologenesis'' hypothesis - he needed a primate that could serve as an ancestor of South American humans. Hologenesis - widely regarded as racist today - was the school of thought proposing that the different racial groups of Homo sapiens did not share a single ancestry but descended independently from different branches of the primate tree. Montandon seemingly needed an ancestor for 'red' people (native Americans), and Ameranthropoides was used as a 'missing link' in their evolution.
This outrageous suggestion went mostly ignored until the 1990s when Loren Coleman and Michel Raynal drew attention to the possibility that Ameranthropoides had been specially 'invented' to fit this erroneous model of evolution (Coleman 1996, Coleman & Raynal 1996). Montandon was killed by the French Resistance in 1944, well known as an outspoken racist with strong 'ethno-racial' views (Coleman & Raynal 1996). Possible support for the idea that Ameranthropoides was an outright hoax comes from a letter penned in 1962 by Enrique Tejera, a friend of De Loys who, at one point, claimed to have seen a live Ameranthropoides. In the letter, Tejera denounced the hoax, saying that the animal photographed by De Loys was a deceased pet spider monkey that had been adopted in the jungle (Shuker 2008, Urbani & Viloria 2009).
Today, several cryptozoologists hold out hope that De Loys really did photograph something novel and special and they point to local legends of big, bipedal primates from northern South America, and to rumoured half-memories of additional photos of the 1920 carcass, as evidence that supports this view (Shuker 1991, 2008). We are confident, however, that De Loy's famous photo shows a dead spider monkey sat on a crate, the only remarkable aspect of this story being the audacity of those who thought that they could use a dead monkey to cheat the scientific world.
A world where Ameranthropoides is real
Let's now suppose for the purposes of this book that De Loy's ape is a real animal. Ameranthropoides is presumably a close relative of Protopithecus, an especially large fossil platyrrhine known to have inhabited Brazil during Pleistocene times (Hartwig & Cartelle 1996). Good bipedal abilities are present in various platyrrhines and Ameranthropoides represents an extreme member of the group: the largest, most short-tailed (in fact, it is tailless) and most bipedal platyrrhine ever to have evolved. Given that the large-bodied platyrrhines known to have evolved elsewhere in the group (spider monkeys, woolly monkeys and muriquis) have long, prehensile tails, the complete absence of a tail in Ameranthropoides indicates a lengthy history of terrestrial evolution, but we are unsure as to whether the enhanced bipedal abilities of this species evolved in the trees before the animal came down to the ground, or whether its ancestors came to the ground and only then became proficient bipeds.
Platyrrhines include some of the most intelligent and adaptable of all primates. Capuchins exhibit remarkable adaptability when it comes to tool-use and problem-solving in the wild and might be similar in intelligence to chimpanzees. In view of this, the especially big Ameranthropoides is probably also especially intelligent, perhaps routinely using tools and seeming almost human-like when foraging, using weapons, and breaking into foodstuffs. We can only hope that future field observations of this rare and enigmatic giant platyrrhine will provide valuable insight into its behaviour and lifestyle.
Coleman, L. 1996. Debunking a racist hoax. Fortean Times 90, 42.
Coleman, L. & Raynal, M. 1996. De Loys' photograph: a short tale of apes in green hell, spider monkeys, and Ameranthropoides loysi as tools of racism. The Anomalist 4 (Autumn), 84-93.
Hartwig, W. C. & Cartelle, C. 1996. A complete skeleton of the giant South American primate Protopithecus. Nature 381, 307-311.
Heuvelmans, B. 1995. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Kegan Paul International, London.
Keith, A. 1929. The alleged discovery of an anthropoid ape in South America. Man 29, 135-136.
Shuker, K. P. N. 1991. Extraordinary Animals Worldwide. Robert Hale, London.
Shuker, K. P. N. 2008. Extraordinary Animals Revisited. CFZ Press, Woolsery.
Urbani, B. & Viloria, A. L. 2009. Ameranthropoides loysi Montandon 1929: the History of a Primatological Fraud. Libros en Red, Buenos Aires.
Chupacabra
Terriying 'goat-sucker' of the Hispanic world
Location: Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Mexico, parts of the USA, Spain and Portugal
Time: mostly 1991-1996
Chupacabras: the lore
The Chupacabras (or Chupacabra) has become the great monster of our time, even though there has never been any clear idea of what it looks like, nor do accounts or stories referring to it describe the same sort of creature. In fact, the Chupacabras can be imagined as more of 'event' than a cryptid: some researchers have suggested that the Chupacabras phenomenon is a cultural event endorsed by Spanish-speaking people because they have come to regard it as an integral part of being Hispanic. Early accounts associated with the name Chupacabras (these accounts comes from Puerto Rico, and were mostly reported between 1991 and 1995) describe encounters with vaguely humanoid entities, with 'aliens' recalling the greys of the UFO abduction literature (though kitted out with spikes on the back), or with chimaeric winged, kangaroo-like creatures that can change colour. B
ipedal, gorilla-like and bat-like Chupacabras were reported, as was a creature described as "a giant falcon with a human face"! (Newton 2003). Accounts were reported from Guatemala in 1995 and 1996, and from Mexico, Florida, Arizona, Texas, California, Costa Rica and even Spain and Portugal from 1996 onwards.
More recently, people have taken to applying the term to weird, bluish-skinned, hairless members of the dog family observed in Texas. We know from film and recovered carcasses that these 'blue dogs' really exist, though exactly what they are and why they're hairless remains mysterious (genetic tests indicate that they are wolf x coyote hybrids). All of these accounts - those of the humanoid 'aliens', the kangaroo-type monsters, and the 'blue dogs' - have been associated with attacks on sheep, goats and other livestock that involve neck injuries and, apparently, draining of the blood.
Is there really a mystery here?
As is clear from these many disparate descriptions, there is no single Chupacabras creature that warrants explanation. The stories about humanoid entities are certainly or almost certainly fabrications. In fact, the most famous of them - the original 'humanoid Chupacabras' account (made by Puerto Rican inhabitant Madelyne Tolentino in 1995) - is very probably a hoax invented by Tolentino after she saw the terrible 1995 sci-fi movie Species (Radford 2011). As noted above, the 'blue dogs' are real but the use of the label Chupacabras for these animals seems incorrect, and they are nothing to do with the Chupacabras as originally envisioned.
With the 'humanoid aliens' and blue dogs' eliminated, what remains of the Chupacabras mystery? Not much: most of the livestock attacks attributed to the monster can more plausibly be linked to the activities of feral dogs and even wayward humans. A small number of weird accounts remain. Given that just about every single one describes a new sort of creature, we feel it most likely that all are hoaxes or mistakes that emerged as a consequence of hysteria and fear.