by Darren Naish
A second spate of attacks occurred in 1937. Again, Hichens described the events that occurred. He was especially impressed with a wounded hunter - an experienced veteran who knew much about big cats and their ways - who assured him that his attacker was a Mngwa, and not a lion or leopard. Another interesting observation was made by a hunter named Patrick Bowen who tracked a Mngwa after it attacked a child at a small fishing village. Bowen reported that the tracks of the cat were like those of a leopard but far, far larger than expected for this species - the tracks were "as large as those of the largest lion"!
Several intriguing ideas have been put forward to explain the identity of the Mngwa. On occasion, writers have drawn attention to the possibility that the Mngwa might represent a surviving population of a cat species otherwise known only from the fossil record. Karl Shuker (1989) suggested the Pleistocene cat Panthera crassidens in this vein, and the idea has also been mooted that the Mngwa might represent a sort of African tiger (some African fossils have been suggested on occasion to be from tigers or ancient relatives of tigers). More intriguing is Bernard Heuvelmans's suggestion that the Mngwa is not really a big cat at all, but a gigantic variant of a cat that is ordinarily less than 1m long and less than 20 kg in weight: the African golden cat Profelis aurata! (Heuvelmans 1986).
The Mngwa explained?
Assuming that the attacks attributed to the Mngwa really occurred, it seems most likely that lions were to blame: that greyish hair discovered with the 1922 victim may well have simply been lion fur, not that of a giant mystery cat. As for the peculiar appearance and size of the Mngwa, it is well known that lions occasionally retain spots and subtle striping into adulthood. Especially relevant here is the fact that Tanzania and the surrounding countries are home to an especially distinctive group of lions that are extremely large, have a greyish ground colour and wholly or partly lack manes (Patterson 2004). These lions are best known from the Tsavo region of Kenya and are notorious for the spate of man-eating that occurred there during the 1890s.
Rather than invoking survivors from distant prehistory or gigantic forms of normally small species, it seems most prudent to assume that the Mngwa lore and accounts are based on confused, hasty and frightened encounters with enormous, greyish, man-eating lions.
The bit where we fan the flames of speculation
As described above, cryptozoologists have already produced a reasonable amount of speculation on the identity of the Mngwa. We decided to take Heuvelmans's idea from 1986 and run with it. As explained by Shuker (1989), possible support for the Golden Mega-Moggie Hypothesis comes from the substantial range of pelage variation present in the African golden cat, its surprisingly wide range (it was once thought mostly restricted to western Africa, but is known to present in the east and south as well), and its feisty, bloodthirsty demeanour. Even better, Hichens said that Mngwa had been heard purring on several occasions. Surely, here we find iron-clad and compelling support for the Mega-Moggie Hypothesis.
It turns out that our view of the African golden cat as a mid-sized species ignores the existence of a gigantic, macropredatory morph that evolved during the Pleistocene and persisted to the present in Tanzania. It manages to avoid competition with the lions and leopards of its habitat by… by… err, well, it just does, ok!
Heuvelmans, B. 1986. Annotated checklist of apparently unknown animals with which cryptozoology is concerned. Cryptozoology 5, 1-26.
Patterson, B. D. 2004. The Lions of Tsavo: Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious Man-Eaters. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Shuker, K. P. N. 1989. Mystery Cats of the World. Robert Hale, London.
Minhocão
Long-bodied, channel-digging South American serpentine thing
Location: Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua and elsewhere in South America
Time: mostly late 1800s and early 1900s
Super-snakes and burrowing behemoths
Throughout the 20th century and before, South American explorers, adventurers and naturalists told fantastic tales of encounters with gigantic snakes and other monstrous creatures in the depths of the Amazon. The best known and most oft-recounted of these stories is Major Percy Fawcett's of 1907. Fawcett claimed a close encounter with an anaconda 19m long which he shot dead, also claiming that some other mega-anacondas from the Amazon must have "altogether dwarf[ed] that shot by me!". Some choose to believe these stories but it is mostly thought today that they result from exaggeration or confusion, or are simply unreliable tall tales that suspiciously lack any and all supporting evidence.
Originally discussed in connection with these giant snake stories are accounts referring to the Minhocão, a long-bodied animal said to be associated with deep water, marshes and river banks in Brazil. While sometimes said to be as much as 50m long and much like the super-anaconda referred to above, other accounts describe the Minhocão as wide as well as long, heavily armoured, and capable of churning up the ground, of diverting rivers and as having a pig-like snout and two mobile horns on its head. A Minhocão that supposedly got stuck in a crack in a rock had armadillo-like skin. The missing bark from a tree, witnessed near the town of Curitibanos in 1877, was attributed to the behaviour of a Minhocão, as were rumbling noises, earth tremors, overturned pine trees and disturbances in the water of a local pool (Heuvelmans 1995).
The Minhocão 'explained'
There have been a few efforts to rationalise this creature: to bring the accounts together and explain them as encounters with a new kind of large, cryptic creature. During the late 1800s, the German scientist Fritz Műller suggested that the Minhocão might be a gigantic lungfish, the 'horns' perhaps being a confused reference to the filament-like forefins of the South American lungfish Lepidosiren. Heuvelmans discussed the idea put forward by a Dr Budde that the creature is a modern-day glyptodont, but (as Heuvelmans observed) this is absurd because glyptodonts are herbivorous armadillo-like animals with a large, usually stiff carapace - hardly worm-like burrowers. Heuvelmans's own preferred explanation was no better: he thought the animal was a sort of long-bodied, armoured whale. He was inspired by erroneous suggestions that ancient Eocene whales like the enormous, long-bodied Basilosaurus had armour plates on their backs… one of several cases in his research where he was very much out-of-date, even for the time when he was writing (On the Track was first published in the 1950s).
Most recently, the burrowing habits, worm-like form and alleged carnivory of the Minhocão led Karl Shuker (1995) to suggest that it might be a gigantic caecilian. Caecilians are worm-like aquatic and burrowing amphibians, the biggest of which are about 1m long. Short, pale, extrusible tentacles on either side of the caecilian snout could plausibly be interpreted as 'horns' by a naive eyewitness. However, the notion of a gigantic caecilian several or many metres long is difficult to accept nor, as usual, are we really dealing with an especially robust or trustworthy set of eyewitness accounts in the first place. In other words, there probably is no unknown animal at the bottom of the Minhocão reports.
In fact, reading the several accounts of this creature provided in Heuvelmans's On the Track, it seems that descriptions of assorted creatures and landscape phenomena have been lumped together under the Minhocão heading (Heuvelmans 1995). Trenches and furrows encountered in the landscape might be nothing whatsoever to do with a giant, serpentine creature: they are more likely the result of ground subsidence, earthquakes, or perhaps the activities of other large animals, like cattle. Bark missing from a tree is hardly evidence for a giant, worm-like burrower, and the few reported eyewitness accounts attributed to the Minhocão are best attributed to anacondas and perhaps to big catfish and other known animals. It should also be noted that there are good reasons for thinking that limbless burrowers are mechanically unfeasible beyond a certain body size. Sadly, the notion of a gigantic caecilian, able to burst upwards from the sediment and grab an unwary cattle or human, is almost certainly an improbable one.
Stupendaconda!
The Minhocão is not a gigantic snake,
nor do the giant snake stories from the Amazon refer to the same entity as the thing that people have labelled the Minhocão. But, what the hell, we wanted to illustrate a gigantic anaconda anyway. Based on the extremely reliable and undoubtedly authentic accounts reported by Fawcett and others, we propose the existence of a veritable super-anaconda that we dub Stupendaconda portentificus, or the Stupendaconda. Its existence safely puts to rest the idea that gigantic size can only evolve in snakes when global temperatures are at an all-time high (Head et al. 2009). What does a snake this large eat? Whatever it wants. Stupendaconda evolved alongside diverse large rodents, crocodyliforms, turtles and snakes, all of which it preyed upon in the past. A substantial decline in the diversity of these animals during the Holocene has resulted in Stupendaconda becoming rarer than it ever was, and it was never an abundant animal to begin with.
One of the most mysterious things about giant anacondas is that juvenile specimens have never been discovered or reported, despite the fact that this is the only time in their lives when they might easily be killed, captured and retained for study. Why is this? The reason is remarkable and preposterous, and challenges much of what we know about snake biology.
As is well known, adult Stupendacondas are gigantic beasts, 20m long or more. Rather than giving birth to umpteen live babies (as is normal for the other, smaller anaconda species), females grow one gigantic, hyper-developed mega-baby, the birth length of which is about 7m. That is, larger than virtually all large specimens of the largest known non-Stupendaconda large snakes. As predicted for an animal that puts so much investment into the growth of its baby, there is a strong maternal bond between the mother and juvenile and they stay in close contact for decades. This explains why Fawcett and other explorers often found several super-snakes in close proximity. Unfortunately, this reproductive strategy makes these snakes slow to replace themselves and prone to extinction. Today, they may be teetering on the brink. It may already be too late. Indeed, Fawcett himself may have single-handedly contributed to the downfall of one of the world's most incredible serpents.
Head, J. J., Bloch, J. I., Hastings, A. K., Bourque, J. R., Cadena, E. A., Herrera, F. A., Polly, P. D. & Jaramillo, C. A. 2009. Giant boid snake from the Palaeocene neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures Nature 457, 715-717.
Heuvelmans, B. 1995. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Kegan Paul International, London.
Shuker, K. P. N. 1995. In Search of Prehistoric Survivors. Blandford, London.
Gambo
Alleged 'Mesozoic marine reptile' carcass found on a Gambian beach
Location: Bungalow Beach, Gambia
Time: 1983
Gambo's story
The supposedly reptilian, sea-monster cryptid now affectionately known as 'Gambo' is, like so many others, biologically plausible and appealing, if only it were real. The story goes that a young amateur naturalist called Owen Burnham was walking along Bungalow Beach in The Gambia in 1983 when he encountered the relatively fresh carcass of a 4m-long animal. It was a smooth-skinned, greyish or brownish, long-jawed, flippered reptile, lying on its belly. People arrived and removed the head to sell to tourists, the remainder of the body was buried where it lay, and Burnham wrote up his account for the letters page of the magazine BBC Wildlife, where it was published in 1986. Here it caught the attention of cryptozoological authors who later discussed the case at length (Bright 1989, Shuker 1986a, b, 1995). The fact that the body is supposedly buried at a specific location has resulted in several half-hearted attempts to excavate it, none of which have met any sort of success.
Burnham essentially described a short-necked, slender-tailed, long-jawed marine reptile sounding much like various of the short-necked polycotylid plesiosaurs known from the Cretaceous fossil record (short-necked plesiosaurs are typically referred to as pliosaurs, though note that some pliosaurs - polycotylids in particular - might be more closely related to long-necked plesiosaurs than they are to other pliosaurs). In fact, if the creature wasn't a short-necked plesiosaur, it's difficult to think what it could be… assuming, that is, that Burnham's description is accurate and trustworthy. Suggestions that the carcass might have been that of a manatee, dolphin or beaked whale have been made but don't really account for the features that Burnham described: none of these animals combine two pairs of flippers with long, multi-toothed jaws. Shuker (1986a, b, 1995) considered another Mesozoic marine reptile group - the metriorhynchids (a group of highly specialised, marine relatives of crocodiles) - as equally possible contenders for Gambo's identity.
Three Mesozoic marine reptile groups have - thanks to the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm so popular among cryptozoological literalists - frequently been 'theorised back to life': the four-flippered, short-tailed plesiosaurs, the long-skulled metriorhynchid crocodylomorphs, and those gigantic, sea-going lizards, the mosasaurs.
We should note that flippered, superficially crocodile-like sea beasts were already part of the cryptozoological canon prior to the publication of Burnham's account. These were termed 'marine saurians' by Heuvelmans (1968): he grouped various accounts together in this category, one of the most famous being the U28 story of 1915. This remarkable account describes how a u-boat's crew witnessed a gigantic quadrupedal sea reptile blasted high into the air by an underwater explosion erupting from the hull of the torpedoed British steamer the Iberian.
A sceptical view
As just noted, various researchers have sought to explain the Gambo carcass as a misinterpreted, mangled dolphin or whale, perhaps a Shepherd's beaked whale Tasmacetus shepherdi. For this interpretation to work, the whale would somehow have to end up with two pairs of paddle-like limbs, lose its dorsal fin, and switch its muscular, fluked tail for a slender, more reptilian one without flukes. Burnham did note that one of the rear paddles had been torn off, perhaps showing that damage of some sort had affected the look of the carcass, and other witnesses (the other members of Burnham's family) did, apparently, think that the carcass was that of a dolphin (as, apparently, did the locals who removed its head). It's worth saying that a mutant dolphin with a decent pair of hindlimb flippers was captured in Japan in 2006. A four-flippered dolphin would need to lose its tail flukes and dorsal fin before it really resembled the Gambo carcass, but maybe this isn't such a bad explanation.
In the end, with just Burnham's account to go on, we can't go any further with the Gambo story: it's no more reliable and no more useful than the many similar anecdotes that have been published about other sea monsters, many of which are hoaxes or misinterpretations. That famous U28 account, for example, is almost certainly an outright fabrication. It exists in several distinctly different forms, features outlandish and impossible details (how does an undersea explosion blast a whale-sized monster so high into the air?), is unmentioned by its chief chronicler (Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner) in the detailed accounts he published elsewhere, originally featured an illustration that is almost certainly a redrawing of a stuffed, baby crocodile, is unmentioned in the otherwise highly detailed log, nor was a flailing marine saurian seen by any of the more than 60 Iberian survivors who watched the ship sink (Magin 1996, Dash 2009).
A (new) speculative look
Traditional cryptozoology labours extensively under what's become known as the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm (or PSP), the idea that cryptids are not only real but also represent the surviving descendants of groups otherwise known only from the fossil record. When confronted with accounts of creatures like Gambo, the majority of cryptozoologists have been persistently boring, interpreting these supposed creatures as surviving plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, Mesozoic crocodile relatives, or ancient archaeocete whales (Shuker 1995). We are not fans of the PSP: not only does it assume from the outset that cryptids represent new, valid species of large animal, it requires the fossil record to be an absolutely unreliable record of the history of life and (like other cryptozoological hypotheses about fossil animals) it is mostly based on anachronistic interpretations of the relevant creatures. The ple
siosaurs, mosasaurs and metriorhynchids of the cryptozoological literature, for example, are the versions of these creatures illustrated and imagined during the 1960s and earlier, not the creatures as we think they really look. For these reasons, we wanted to do something new with Gambo.
Gambo is not actually a reptile at all. Instead, it is a gigantic, fully aquatic, marine-adapted monotreme, the largest and most specialised member of a platypus lineage that originated in Zealandia during the Cretaceous and then adapted to marine conditions as this landmass was flooded and gradually drowned during the course of the Cenozoic. We name it Gambonessa burnhami, its elongate and highly tactile rostrum being one of several features that links it with platypuses (a monotreme group whose fossil record begins in the Cretaceous and includes South American taxa as well as Australasian ones). The platypus-like form of its rostrum was missed by the initial witnesses: partial decomposition had caused the leathery covering to slip off, and the numerous polyodont teeth - an elaboration of the condition present in earlier platypuses - created a superficially crocodile-like appearance to the jaws.
Unlike other monotremes, Gambonessa has evolved away from an egg-laying habit and hence does not need to spend time on land. It is a viviparous monotreme. As a consequence, it has been able to evolve giant size and also to do away with the claws and distinct digits that aquatic tetrapods need in order to locomote on land and dig burrows or nests. Its pelagic lifestyle has enabled it to move from the south-western Pacific into both the Indian and Atlantic oceans where sightings have been made, most famously the Ambon account of 1904 and the notorious U28 incident of 1915. A curious parallel with the stranding records of the also-elusive Megamouth shark Megachasma pelagios have been noted, since a Megamouth once also stranded on the Atlantic coast of Africa (Séret & Orstom 1995). This shows that is surely only a matter of time before Gambonessa specimens also turn up on the Brazilian coast, as Megamouths have (Amorim et al. 2000), and doubtless elsewhere. Gambonessa is also unusual among monotremes is that it has done away with fur, relying instead on insulative fat.