by Darren Naish
From quoll-like dasyuromorph ancestors, a clade of big-bodied, amphibious predators - the thylacophocines - evolved. Their fossil record is somewhat scant.
We imagine the Bunyip Thylacophoca hirsuticus to be a fish- and crustacean eating, pouchless dasyurid marsupial, able to rest and move on land but mostly moving constantly through connected waterways where possible (and occasionally becoming seasonally trapped in large lakes). It does not occur in habitats already frequented by crocodiles. When on land, its dark, shaggy form and ability to stand upright enable it to mimic trees.
Large, highly mobile floppy ears are used as visual signals - Bunyips have acute eyesight and do not communicate via sound or scent - but these are folded flat against the head and neck when the animal is submerged. The comparatively long, trailing pelt of the Bunyip is oily and ordinarily traps a layer of air as do the also long-haired pelts of some other swimming mammals like desmans and some rodents. Forelimbs have provided the main propulsive force during swimming throughout Bunyip evolution and have become substantially enlarged while the hindlimbs and tail, though still present, are reduced and typically hidden from view within the shaggy pelage.
Healy, T. & Cropper, P. 1994. Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia. Ironbark (Chippendale, Australia).
Lillegraven, J. A. 1975. Biological considerations of the marsupial-placental dichotomy. Evolution 29, 707-722.
Zuiyo Maru Creature
A famous 'mystery carcass' creature that isn't really a mystery
Location: off the Pacific coast of New Zealand
Time: 1977
Zuiyo Maru: what the crew saw
On 25th April 1977, a Japanese fishing vessel called the Zuiyo Maru was working off the Pacific coast of New Zealand when it snagged the foul-smelling carcass of a large and bizarre sea creature. The carcass - about 10m long and hauled up from a depth of about 300m - was so peculiar in appearance that the crew took photographs before the captain decided to throw it back overboard (sketches were also made, but only after the carcass had been discarded). Its four large paddles, long neck and small head reminded them of a plesiosaur. Public and media interest in the carcass was substantial and a special symposium was held in September 1977 by the Tokyo University of Fisheries. Could it be what the crew suspected: the rotting remains of a creature thought long-extinct by scientists?
The Zuiyo Maru carcass as illustrated (with measurements) by a member of the crew. As intriguing as it appears, this drawing was not, unfortunately, drawn directly from the carcass.
It's 'case closed' on the Zuiyo Maru Creature
Sea monster history is full of accounts of weird, long-necked, vaguely lizard-shaped carcasses, sometimes kitted out with extra limbs and a furry coat. They prove on examination to be heavily decomposed Basking sharks. Given what we know about the decomposition pattern of sharks, it always seemed that the Zuiyo Maru carcass was merely another example of this sort of thing. Indeed, such an identification was confirmed by the existence of horny fibres termed ceratotrichia collected from the pectoral fins, found to be almost identical in chemical composition to those of basking sharks (Kimura et al. 1978).
In a series of collected papers that resulted from the 1977 Tokyo University of Fisheries meeting, most contributions concluded on the basis of comparative anatomy or tissue analysis that the carcass was indeed that of a large shark. However, one article argued that the carcass differed from known shark species in its fin configuration and thus perhaps represented a new shark species (Yasuda & Taki 1978). Another - titled 'Comparison of the unidentified animal with fossil animals' (Obata & Tomoda 1978) - concluded by noting that "General opinion favours identification as a shark", but went on to say that "a biologist who is inclined to the 'shark concept' told us that he had an impression, when he recently had an opportunity to see a large specimen of the basking shark, that the animal in question would not be basking shark" [sic] (Obata & Tomoda 1978, p. 54).
It's case closed on the Zuiyo Maru carcass - it really was a big shark (almost certainly a Basking shark), and the few suggestions to the contrary are inaccurate or too arm-wavy to be taken seriously.
Reconstructing the carcass beast
If, purely for the purposes of entertaining speculation, we side with the few creationists and cryptozoologists who pretend that the carcass actually represented a new, non-sharky large vertebrate animal, what might it have looked like when alive? For starters, if we don't interpret the Zuiyo Maru Creature as a rotting carcass, it must have been an oddly lumpy, tattered looking animal with a zombie-esque look - maybe it's a specialised benthic animal that mimics lumpy, muddy terrain on the seafloor, or maybe it deliberately mimics a rotting carcass in order to attract prey.
Long spines projecting off the front of the snout and underside of the neck (strangely, they project forwards, not backwards), and also off the trailing edges of the pectoral fins, could be defensive or sensory in function. Massive, diamond-shaped flippers suggest slow, flapping underwater flight while a robust, V-shaped arrangement of pectoral bones indicate that strong bracing of the chest region was needed. Another radically odd detail is that the ventral tip of the 'V-shaped' structure gives rise to a long, barbel-like structure on the animal's midline. This would have trailed beneath the body like a tentacle or wattle during swimming. Maybe it was a prehensile organ used in finding food or caressing partners during mating, maybe it exudes pheromones, or maybe it serves a role in visual display and evolved under sexual selection pressure.
The flexible neck was perhaps used to snap the head upwards or sideways, a rapid opening of the mouth creating suction and the engulfment of prey. Some observers (well, creationist ones: Goertzen 2001) argue that paired dorsal fins are present in the shoulder region. Surely, the Zuiyo Maru Creature - which would like to see named Zuiyomaruzoon necrosimulacrum - is one of the most bizarre and grotesque of the world's tetrapods...
We're not serious, of course, but every now and again a few cryptozoologists join creationists in rejecting the shark identification to argue that the creature was not a shark at all, but a modern-day marine reptile like a plesiosaur. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has joined sceptical zoologists in noting that this point of view makes cryptozoology look more naive and bizarre than it already does, since it flies in the face of a reasonable amount of compelling evidence.
Goertzen, J. 2001. New Zuiyo Maru cryptid observations: strong indications it was a marine tetrapod. Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal 38, 19-29.
Kimura, S., Fujii, K., Sato, H., Seta, S. & Kubota, M. 1978. The morphology and chemical composition of horny fiber from an unidentified creature captured off the coast of New Zealand. In Sasaki, T., Yasuda, F., Nasu, K. & Taki, Y. (eds) Collected Papers on the carcass of an unidentified animal trawled off New Zealand by the Zuiyo-maru. La Société franco-japonaise d'océanographie (Tokyo), pp. 67-74.
Obata, I. & Tomoda, Y. 1978. Comparison of the unidentified animal with fossil animals. In Sasaki, T., Yasuda, F., Nasu, K. & Taki, Y. (eds) Collected Papers on the carcass of an unidentified animal trawled off New Zealand by the Zuiyo-maru. La Société franco-japonaise d'océanographie (Tokyo), pp. 45-54.
Yasuda, F. & Taki, Y. 1978. Comparison of the unidentified animal with fishes. In Sasaki, T., Yasuda, F., Nasu, K. & Taki, Y. (eds) Collected Papers on the carcass of an unidentified animal trawled off New Zealand by the Zuiyo-maru. La Société franco-japonaise d'océanographie (Tokyo), pp. 61-62.
Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu
Congolese water monster with 'planks' on its back
Location: Likoula River region, Republic of Congo
Time: seemingly known from local lore collected in 1980
"The animal with planks growing out of its back"
If the interpretations of certain cryptozoologists are to be believed, the Congo region of Africa is a veritable hotbed of cryptid activity, and also a hotspot for the diversity of gigantic continental tetrapods. As if the supposedly sauropod-like Mokele-Mbembe and supposedly ceratop
sian-like Emela-Ntouka are not incredible enough, the region has also been said to be home to yet another large, swamp-dwelling, reptile-like animal: the bizarre Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu.
Like the Emela-Ntouka and some other Congolese cryptids, we predominantly know of Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu thanks to Roy Mackal's book A Living Dinosaur? In Search of the Mokele-Mbembe ; therein, Mackal described how he learnt of "the animal with planks growing out of its back", a large, amphibious creature, seen in the water with only its back protruding, and with green algae growing on its back and plates (Mackal 1987). Mackal was unable to find any other information on the creature. In fact, it doesn't seem that he was able to track down any witnesses at all: he only learnt of the idea that the creature might exist after an informant noted that a stegosaur illustration in a book resembled Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu.
All discussions of the Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu published since 1987 have been based on what Mackal said. And because Mackal was only able to think that the creature might be a modern-day aquatic stegosaur, this is all that anyone has ever said it might be (though the suggestion that it might be the same as the Nguma-Monene has been mentioned). One would think that cryptozoologists like Mackal are unable to do anything other than interpret tales and anecdotes literally, to not consider the possibility that other animals or phenomena might represent alternative identifications.
Come on, cryptozoologists, surely you can do better than that?
In reality, an aquatic creature said to have 'planks' growing out of its back could be several things. The scutes on the upper surfaces of crocodiles can be unusually prominent in freak individuals, and the possibility that such a creature might be a giant turtle with a damaged shell (which, after all, can live for decades and decades) is also worth considering. There also cases from elsewhere in the world (North America) where people have mistaken large, gnarly tree branches - moving with the current and possessing big, regularly spaced woody nodes - as the backs of great water creatures. Our main point here is that we do not believe that cryptozoologists are doing a good job when they hear of "planks growing out of the back" and immediately respond with "Aha - - STEGOSAURUS!!", surely the least likely possibility.
Our viewpoint echoes that of other sceptical cryptozoological investigators. Charles Paxton and colleagues, for example have essentially encouraged the view that, when considering aquatic monster sightings, we need to consider as many options as possible (Paxton & Holland 2005, Paxton et al. 2005): jumping immediately onto a single dodgy interpretation, as Mackal and some other cryptozoologists have, is unlikely to prove useful.
The speculative part: a bigger, better bichir
We are tired, bored and frustrated with the idea that the vaguely reptilian monsters of the cryptozoological literature are consistently interpreted as survivors from the distant Mesozoic. These ideas always rely on an incorrect, anachronistic view of the creatures concerned, are inconsistent with our knowledge of evolution and the fossil record, and are - we argue - lazy and uninventive. Confronted with the Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, we were immediately reminded of the bichirs (the name is pronounced 'bikers'), an interesting group of fish not previously mentioned in connection with this cryptid (though we do have to note that a species of bichir was named Polypterus mokelembembe in 2006).
A modern bichir: the Congolese species Polypterus weeksi. These long-bodied fish possess a series of flag-like dorsal fins as well as muscular pectoral fins.
Bichirs, widely distributed in tropical Africa and reaching 1m in total length, possess numerous paired dorsal finlets that form two rows along the back and tail. In fact, the name 'dinosaur eel' is even used for these fish for this very reason (they are also called reedfish or ropefish). A large bichir swimming near the water surface could, we suggest, explain Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu accounts. This is hugely speculative, of course, and relies in part on the idea that people have misjudged the size, or seen bichirs much larger than the recorded maximum... the point is that it is far less speculative, and certainly far less absurd, than the idea of an aquatic, modern-day Stegosaurus. Please note that we are not saying that that the Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu is (a) real and (b) proof positive for the existence of a giant, undiscovered bichir. Rather, we are saying that cryptozoologists have done an extraordinarily bad job of coming up with alternative explanations for this alleged creature.
The bichir that we imagine as being behind Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu reports is a new, gigantic species - Mbielia mackali - that has taken large size, air-breathing habits and an elaboration of the spine-bearing dorsal finlets to an extreme. The mobile finlets, used throughout the group in social signalling, have become over-developed visual signals in this animal, their gigantic, plate-like form creating a striking vision when these are the only parts of the animal seen projecting from the water.
The unusually muscular pectoral fins of bichirs are reminiscent of the lobe-like fins of lungfish and fossil tetrapod ancestors. Mbielia belongs to a bichir lineage that has independently evolved its own, lobefin-like pectoral fins that allow movement on land; it also possesses the most elaborate lungs seen in the group and is fully able to breathe on land. Due to their size, large adults can do little more than haul out of the water and rest on sloping banks, but juveniles are able to disperse some distance away from the water bodies in which they were hatched. Gigantic size in bichirs is not wholly novel, since we know from Cretaceous fossils that extinct members of the group reached 3m in total length (Grandstaff et al. 2012) and hence were about similar in size and bulk to Mbielia.
Grandstaff, B. S., Smith, J. B., Lamanna, M. C., Lacovara, K. J. & Abdel-Ghani, M. S. 2012. Bawitius, gen. nov., a giant polypterid (Osteichthyes, Actinopterygii) from the Upper Cretaceous Bahariya Formation of Egypt. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 32, 17-26.
Mackal, R. P. 1987. A Living Dinosaur? In Search of the Mokele-Mbembe. E. J. Brill, Leiden.
Paxton, C. G. M. & Holland, R. 2005. Was Steenstrup right? A new interpretation of the 16th century sea monk of the Øresund. Steenstrupia 28, 39-47.
Paxton, C. G. M., Knatterud, E. & Hedley, S. L. 2004. Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a "most dreadful monster" seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734. Archives of Natural History 32, 1-9.
Long-necked Seal
Pelagic, plesiosaur-pretending preposterous pinniped
Location: seas and coastlines worldwide, but with some of the best accounts coming from the shores of the UK
Time: mostly reported since 1846, with the best accounts dating to 1913 and 1919
Bernard's surreal seal
A popular tradition within cryptozoology has been the classification and categorisation of mystery animal reports. People collect sightings, group together the ones that seemingly have features in common, give names (sometime quirky, sometimes misleading names) to the creatures they think they've identified, and then set about allocating these apparently identified creatures to a specific group while also making claims about its evolution and biology. If we imagine that a robust, well-documented and detailed set of mystery animal reports existed in the first place, the concept that accounts might be sortable into sets would be reasonable. Alas, the initial problem with this approach is that the mystery animal reports that people typically analyse are the very opposite of robust, well-documented and detailed. They are, all too frequently, vague, flimsy and untrustworthy, so much so that the entire endeavour cannot be considered trustworthy or repeatable.
One of the best examples of this phenomenon comes from the world of sea monster research. Bernard Heuvelmans - the pioneering cryptozoologist mentioned on so many occasions in this book - proposed that the sea monster accounts of the world could be divided into nine sets, each of which represented a distinct, undiscovered species with its own specific morphological, behavioural and ecological characteristics (Heuvelmans 1968). While his method and logic appear sound, examination of the reports that form the basis for each of his sea monster 'species' shows that they often share only the vagues
t of similarities, possess features that make them sound far more like the members of other 'species' than Heuvelmans admitted, and were sometimes slotted into a particular 'species' for erroneous reasons (because, for example, they came from a geographical region that Heuvelmans already regarded as typical for a given species).
Furthermore, especially detailed sea monster accounts frequently don't fit into his scheme at all, showing that the more information you have, the less reliable his classification scheme becomes! For these reasons, the entire 9-fold sea serpent classification advocated by Heuvelmans (1968) - and followed and tweaked over the years by other cryptozoologists - cannot be considered reliable or repeatable (Magin 1996).
Several accounts led Heuvelmans to advocate the existence of a gigantic pinniped, a member of the same group of carnivorous mammals that includes seals, sea lions and walruses. Heuvelmans dubbed this beast (typically 7-19m long but sometimes 30m long or more) the Long-necked sea-serpent and even gave it a scientific name: Megalotaria longicollis. It was described as having a proportionally small, dog-like or even camel-like head, tiny eyes, paired tubes or horns on the top of its head, a highly flexible, long, cylindrical neck, a massive, smooth-skinned, dark brown body, a dorsal ridge of some sort (perhaps accentuated by hair), and four large flippers (Heuvelmans 1968). Its peculiar appearance compared to other pinnipeds has led some researchers to dub it the 'surreal seal' (Cornes 2001). Several cryptozoological authors later expanded and elaborated on the supposed existence of Megalotaria (Costello 1974, Coleman & Huyghe 2003) and it has even been noted that a creature described as a 'long-necked seal' was reported in the literature by Parsons (1751) (Woodley et al. 2008).