ShukerNature

Tim Morris's excellent reconstruction of the con rit as a giant marine crustacean, based upon my proposed identity for it in my 1995 book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (© Tim Morris)

When it debuted in his classic tome In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968), Dr Bernard Heuvelmans's bold classification of sea serpents into no less than nine well-defined types was widely hailed within the cryptozoological community as a milestone in cryptid research, and it is still widely referred to today. However, the validity of certain of those sea serpent types has subsequently been challenged by various other researchers, due to revelations that cast doubt upon or totally discredit those types' proposed taxonomic identities.

Perhaps the most controversial of Heuvelmans's nine sea serpent types is his many-finned sea serpent Cetioscolopendra aeliani, for which he nominated a living species of armoured, scaly archaeocete as its identity. Unfortunately, however, long before he had even categorised his types, palaeontologists had already revealed that scales found in association with certain specimens of fossil archaeocete (a primitive group of prehistoric cetaceans) did not originate from them (as had initially been assumed following their discovery, and which had inspired Heuvelmans's identification of the many-finned as an armoured, scaly archaeocete), but belonged instead to various other creatures. In other words, there are no verified specimens of armoured archaeocete in the fossil record, thereby greatly reducing the likelihood of any modern-day species existing.

But if many-finned sea serpents truly exist, what else could they be? In my 1995 book, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, I proposed a very different identity, one that I still consider plausible, but regarding which, sadly, certain incorrect claims have been made in various subsequent online and hard-copy sources of cryptozoological data. Consequently, I felt that it was high time to refute these erroneous claims once and for all, by revealing online precisely what I did propose regarding this sea serpent type's identity in my Prehistoric Survivors book. So here is the relevant section, quoted below in full:

Another mystery beast that has been linked to the concept of surviving eurypterids [the section of my book immediately preceding this one had presented various cryptids that had been proposed by some investigators as living eurypterids – sea scorpions] is the so-called 'sea millipede'. In 1883, the headless, putrefying carcass of a remarkable, armour-plated sea monster was found washed ashore at Hongay in Vietnam's Along Bay. It was observed by several local Annamites, including an 18-year-old youth called Tran Van Con, who actually touched the body. Thirty-eight years later, he recalled this incident to Dr A. Krempf, Director of Indochina's Oceanographic and Fisheries Service.

The carcase was 60 ft long and 3 ft wide, and was composed of numerous identical segments - so hard in texture that they rang like sheet metal when one of the locals hit them with a stick. Each segment was dark-brown dorsally, light-yellow ventrally, measured 2 ft long and 3 ft wide, and bore a pair of 2 ft 4 in lateral spines. The terminal segment bore two additional spines, directed backwards like a pair of spiny tails. The stench from the decomposing carcass was so intense that the locals soon towed it out to sea where it sank, and they referred to the creature itself as con rit - 'millipede'.

When contemplating this animal's possible identity in his book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968), Heuvelmans briefly considered and rejected the sea scorpions as a candidate, together with crustaceans - favouring instead a hypothetical, highly-specialized form of evolved armoured archaeocete, which he dubbed Cetioscolopendra aeliani ('Aelian's centipede whale'), the many-finned sea serpent. A number of sightings are on file describing elongate sea monsters seemingly bearing numerous lateral fins or projections, which the ancient writer Aelian referred to as marine centipedes. I agree entirely with Heuvelmans that the con rit is unrelated to the sea scorpions, but I also have grave doubts that it is an archaeocete.

As already noted, the concept of armoured archaeocetes is no longer in favour [I had included in an earlier section of my book the pertinent revelation that I refer to at the beginning of this ShukerNature post]; and in any case, even within his own selection of 'many-fins' Heuvelmans includes examples that simply cannot be mammalian. The most prominent of these is the 150-ft-long monster spied for about 30 minutes by a number of sailors on deck aboard HMS Narcissuson 21 May 1899, after the ship had rounded Algeria's CapeFalcon. In an interview concerning their sighting, a signal man made the following telling statement:

"The monster seemed to be propelled by an immense number of fins. You could see the fins propelling it along at about the same rate as the ship was going. The fins were on both sides, and appeared to be turning over and over. There were fins right down to the tail. Another curious thing was that it spouted up water like a whale, only the spouts were very small and came from various parts of the body."

Unless the numerous fins are in reality a pair of undulating lateral membranes extending the entire length of the creature's body - which does not seem likely from the above description - then the Narcissus sea serpent is neither a mammal nor any other form of vertebrate. Clearly, its fins were locomotory organs (creating by their propulsive movements the spouts of water noted by the signal man), not rigid spines like those reported from the carcass of the con rit. Consequently, my own feeling is that, in life, each pair of the con rit's spines had sheltered a pair of soft-bodied limbs beneath - but which, together with the remainder of this beast's soft tissues, had rotted away during decomposition, leaving behind only the hard dorsal cuticle. All of which is totally in accord with what one would expect from a crustacean: multiple locomotory limbs, hard dorsal armour that does not rot once the creature has died, and a soft body that very rapidly (and odiferously!) rots upon death.

The only major problem is the con rit's immense length - far beyond anything recorded so far by science from a known modern-day (or fossil) crustacean. It is well-known that the spiracular system of respiration utilized by insects (involving a vast internal ramification of minute breathing tubes) prevents them from attaining the gigantic proportions beloved by directors of science-fiction movies. However, crustaceans breathe via gills, and their bodies are buoyed by the surrounding water. Hence the evolution of a giant aquatic crustacean is not wholly beyond the realms of possibility and, to my mind, offers the only remotely feasible explanation to Vietnam's anomalous con rit or sea millipede.

Many years ago, in a report describing a new 3-ft-long species of Mixopterussea scorpion, Norwegian palaeontologist Professor Johan Kiaer recalled the thrill of its discovery:

"I shall never forget the moment when the first excellently preserved specimen of the new giant eurypterid was found. My workmen had lifted up a large slab, and when they turned it over, we suddenly saw the huge animal, with its marvelously shaped feet, stretched out in natural position. There was something so lifelike about it, gleaming darkly in the stone, that we almost expected to see it slowly rise from the bed where it had rested in peace for millions of years and crawl down to the lake that glittered close below us."

No doubt cryptozoologists share a similarly dramatic dream - to haul up a living eurypterid from the depths of the oceans or even from the muddy bottom of a large freshwater lake. And somewhere out there, perhaps there really are some post-Permian, present-day sea scorpions, indolently lurking in scientific anonymity. Based upon the evidence offered up so far, however, this prospect seems no more likely than the resurrection of Kiaer's fossilized specimen from its rocky bed of Silurian sandstone.

It is perfectly clear from my above account that 'sea millipede' and 'sea centipede' are merely colloquial, non-taxonomic names for this cryptid, and that the identity for the con rit that I proposed in my Prehistoric Survivors book was a crustacean - and NOT either a marine centipede (as wrongly claimed re my book in a number of websites), or a marine millipede (as wrongly claimed re my book in some other websites, as well as in an otherwise well-researched recent book – happily, its author has very kindly promised to include a correction in the book's forthcoming second volume).

To my mind, the con rit is one of the most fascinating if enigmatic marine cryptids on record, but with no modern-day sightings on file (at least not to my knowledge), whether it still does – or indeed ever did – exist remains as much a mystery today as the creature itself.

Red deer - not always strictly vegetarian

Originally uploaded onto YouTube on 16 May 2010, but currently going viral again, is a short wildlife video by Linda Ford from the USA that films in her own front yard the macabre scene of a subadult buck deer casually picking up a young bird off the ground with its teeth, chewing the helpless creature in its jaws, and then swallowing it, while the two parent birds flap desperately but impotently in the devouring deer's face. Click here to watch Linda's astonishing but genuine video on YouTube.

A bird-eating deer? Incredible – impossible, surely? – yet perfectly true. Nor is it a unique case. Back in 1997, I included a section on sinister, unexpected carnivores of the hoofed - and normally strictly herbivorous, vegetarian - variety in my book From Flying Toads To SnakesWith Wings. Here is what I wrote:

The Inner Hebrides are a group of islands situated off the western coast of Scotland. One of their southernmost members, Rhum, is home to more than 300 red deerCervus elaphus. On small islands like this, the vegetation is often deficient in minerals - minerals that are required by large herbivorous animals. Faced with this situation, deer normally resort to chewing their own shed antlers, or even old bones, in order to obtain the missing substances, including calcium and phosphorus. But on an island like Rhum, which is also home to large colonies of ground-nesting seabirds, there is a much more sinister method available to the deer for sustaining a balanced diet.

Quite simply, they decapitate the chicks of the seabirds, particularly those of an albatross-related species known as the Manx shearwater Puffinus puffinus - and thence obtain from the chicks' bones the minerals that they lack in their normal vegetarian diet.

Manx shearwater (left) plus sooty shearwater (right)

The researcher responsible for exposing this dark and previously unrealized secret in the history of Britain's largest and most noble species of native wild mammal is biologist Dr Robert Furness, from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. However, his deer disclosures, first formally documented in the Journal of Zoology (March 1988), were only the beginning. When he visited another group of Scottish islands, the Shetlands, he uncovered an even more amazing example of carnivores of the cryptic kind.

During the 1990s, Furness has been studying a herd of primitive sheep on the small Shetland island of Foula, the most westerly member of this group. These animals are direct descendants of sheep introduced here long ago by the Vikings, and in order to obtain adequate supplies of minerals - notably phosphorus - present in insufficient quantities within Foula's sparse vegetation, the sheep have evolved a merciless modus operandi that closely parallels the grisly dietary deviation exhibited by the red deer of Rhum. The Arctic tern Sterna paradisaea is an abundant seabird nesting on Foula - and the sheep prey upon their fledglings. Unlike the deer, however, they rarely amputate the heads of the young birds. Instead, they prefer to bite off their victims' wings and legs, often leaving the helpless fledglings still alive but lethally crippled. The sheep then procure the required minerals by chewing the bones in the birds' severed limbs.

As is so often true when investigating cases of anomalous animal behaviour, it transpired that the crofters who live on Foula have always known that this island's sheep were bird killers, but until the first-hand observations and studies by Furness vindicated them, their claims had been dismissed by science as nothing more than quaint folklore.

Arctic tern fledgling

Since I wrote the above account, many additional cases of what appears to be opportunistic but quite possibly natural (albeit hitherto little-realised) carnivorous behaviour among typically herbivorous mammalian species have been documented and formally confirmed - including white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus in North America eating songbirds and small mammals snared in mist nets, various domestic cows in India eating live chickens, a goose-eating rhinoceros, and even a rabbit-devouring deer (check YouTube for several videos featuring some such examples). But perhaps the most gruesome case of a flesh-eating herbivore ever recorded featured a captive elephant that killed and ate a human! And yes, I did document this grotesque event in my book:

Rather more mundane incidents, involving cattle and even hippopotamuses eating the bones of dead brethren to boost their dietary intake of minerals, have also been recorded over the years - but nothing, surely, can compare with the astounding, yet fully verified case of World War II's woman-eating elephant.

This dramatic episode was revealed by internationally renowned zoovet Dr David Taylor. During the final years of World War II, Germany was suffering from severe food shortages, and its zoo animals could not always be given the balanced diets that they had customarily received in peacetime. However, a male elephant in Berlin Zoo apparently succeeded in solving its mineral deficiency problems, albeit in a singularly horrific manner.

A lady called Bertha Walt, who worked at an office near to the zoo, made a habit of spending her lunchtime in the zoo and feeding the remains of her sandwiches to this elephant. One day, she learned upon her arrival at the elephant's enclosure that he was unwell. Saddened by her pachyderm friend's illness, Walt unhesitatingly volunteered to stay with him overnight, in order to nurse him and to provide reassuring company for him.

Given permission to do this, she duly spent the evening inside the elephant's enclosure - but when the animal's keeper arrived the next morning to take over, his unbelieving eyes registered a terrible sight. Walt was still there - or, to be more precise, parts of her were still there. The rest of her had been devoured by the elephant!

All of which assuredly gives a whole new depth of meaning to the popular old saying "All flesh is grass"

UPDATE - 19 February 2014

After reading my post today, retired zookeeper-manager David Pepper-Edwards informed me of a truly remarkable giraffe that displayed the decidedly grisly habit of stamping on sparrows and then eating them - not the kind of behaviour that one would normally associate with these typically gentle - and herbivorous - giants. Here are more details of this fascinating case, kindly made available to me by David for inclusion here - thanks, David!

"I am now a retired Zookeeper/Manager. Used to work at Auckland Zoo New Zealand and at Taronga Park Zoo Sydney, Australia. The giraffe in question was a male named "John" at Auckland Zoo during the 1960/70s. The sparrows would fly in and eat the seed in the oaten hay used as bedding in his night house. He would actually sort of stalk them (first you have to imagine a giraffe trying to stalk!) and then with a quick stamp he would flatten them with one of his fore hooves. Then eat them. He was quite good at it. The sparrows on the other hand never caught onto it."

Clearly, the phenomenon of carnivorous vegetarians in the ungulate world is more widespread than one might initially assume!

Close-up of the mystery parrot in Bartholomeus van Bassen's famous painting 'Renaissance Interior With Banqueters' (1618-1620) (this high-res image supplied to me courtesy of Michael Klauke, Associate Registrar for Collections at the North Carolina Museum of Art)

In various of my books, magazine articles, and ShukerNature blog posts, I have documented a number of mystery birds that have appeared in paintings by famous artists and which may conceivably represent lost species undescribed by science. In recent times, several additional examples have come to my attention, but perhaps the most significant of these is the following one, which may feature a hitherto-unrecognised depiction of a long-extinct bird officially known only from a single verbal description.

Bartholomeus van Bassen (1590-1652) was a celebrated Dutch architect and painter. Perhaps his most famous painting was 'Renaissance Interior With Banqueters' - an extremely detailed, sophisticated work of art that took from 1618 to 1620 to complete. Having said that, although I naturally cannot help but be highly impressed by its scale and by the architectural splendours and opulence that it depicts, the most fascinating aspect of it for me is an ostensibly insignificant bird perching upon a chair in this painting's bottom left-hand corner. Closer examination of this bird reveals it to be a parrot, but it does not appear to correspond with any species known to be living today. What could it be?

Bartholomeus van Bassen's famous painting 'Renaissance Interior With Banqueters' (1618-1620) (this high-res image supplied to me courtesy of Michael Klauke, Associate Registrar for Collections at the North Carolina Museum of Art)

Please click painting to view it in greatly-enlarged form.

Whenever an identification of a mystifying bird in a painting is attempted, it should always be borne in mind that artists have often included entirely fictitious examples in their works, simply to enhance their visual appeal. In this particular case, conversely, van Bassen's painting is so meticulously executed and so accurate in all other details, including those of other creatures included in it, that it seems highly unlikely that he would have added a made-up bird.

This fascinating case was first brought to my attention during spring 2012 ago by pet expert and fellow author David Alderton, with whom I have since corresponded in some detail concerning this mystery parrot. With regard to the possibility that it is an ornithological invention on van Bassen's part, David shares my own view that this is improbable:

"What I would say is that the other animals in the scene are very clearly recognisable. Based on its position in the painting, and its perch on rare/expensive material, this tends to suggest that this parrot is significant. It would have been rare and exotic of course - representing a flamboyant display of wealth in a very clear visual way, and I can't see it would have been a "fictional" bird."

So if we assume that the parrot represents a bona fide species, are there any that resemble it in some way?

On first glance, it recalls the Carolina parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis, a predominantly green-plumaged species with a bright yellow head marked with red. Once common in North America, it suffered greatly from habitat destruction, from being captured for the pet trade, and by being heavily persecuted due to its fondness for farmers' crops, until the last confirmed specimen died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. Closer observation, however, reveals a number of marked differences between this now-demised species and van Bassen's painted parrot.

John James Audubon's famous painting of Carolina parakeets (eastern subspecies)

The latter has golden-yellow underparts, whereas the Carolina parakeet's were green; it also has yellow lateral tail feathers whereas all of the Carolina's tail feathers were green; its wing primaries are red, not green like the Carolina's; the red markings on its head are more extensive than the Carolina's; and its relative proportions are very different from the Carolina's. Van Bassen's parrot has a much longer tail, a more powerful beak, and, judging scale from the chair upon which it is perched, a much larger overall body size. Indeed, in general appearance, the category of parrots that it most closely agrees with is the macaws.

Consequently, attempts to liken it to various small species of South American conure parakeet, such as the sun conure Aratinga solstitialis and the jenday conure A. jandaya, are not satisfactory either, unless of course the bird has been badly painted, with incorrect plumage and/or dimensions. For all of the reasons already discussed in relation to the prospect of its being a fictitious species, however, this notion seems untenable.

Two jenday conures (left and middle) and a sun conure (right) ((c) Chris Gladis/Wikipedia)

However closely one studies images of a painting, even close-up ones of a specific section of it, there can be no substitute for viewing the painting itself directly. Happily, David Alderton was able to do precisely this, when 'Renaissance Interior With Banqueters' was on display several years ago at the National Gallery in London. As a result, he noticed various features of the parrot not readily visible even in close-up images of it. These include the presence of a white brow line above its eye, and, of particular interest, the extensive amount of bare white facial skin – a feature that is characteristic of macaws. Usually this area is limited to the sides of the face around the eyes, and at the beak's base, but in van Bassen's bird it also extends onto the top of the head.

After viewing the bird directly in the painting, David wondered whether it may be a Cuban red macaw Ara tricolor, whose last confirmed wild specimen was shot in 1864, since when this species has been deemed to be extinct. However, in a short account of van Bassen's mystery parrot that he posted on his Pet Info Club website (http://www.petinfoclub.com/Collectibles/Painting_portrays_extinct_parrot.aspx), he conceded that the Cuban macaw's plumage exhibited certain noticeable differences from the latter's, which indeed it does. The most significant of these are the Cuban red macaw's blue wing primaries, its red cheeks, neck, and underparts, its red and blue tail feathers, and the much less extensive area of white facial skin. Exit the Cuban red macaw from further consideration.

Cuban red macaw (from Walter Rothschild's book Extinct Birds, 1907)

However, the Cuban red macaw is not the only extinct Caribbean macaw on record. Several additional species from a number of different West Indian islands – including Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Dominica, Hispaniola, and Martinique - have also been described and named (click here for a detailed ShukerNature article of mine investigating these mystery macaws). Yet whereas the Cuban is physically represented in various museums by a number of preserved specimens, these others are known only from eyewitness descriptions (plus some paintings based solely upon them, not directly upon living specimens). And some of those descriptions are so vague that ornithologists have dismissed certain of the Caribbean's 'lost' macaws as hypothetical species - originating from confusion with known parrots, or even based upon specimens of various South American species of macaw introduced into the West Indies as pets that may have subsequently escaped.

One of the most interesting of these Caribbean mystery macaws is the Dominican green and yellow macaw Ara atwoodi, named after traveller Thomas Atwood, whose History of the Island of Dominica (1791) contains the following informative account of it:

"The mackaw [sic] is of the parrot kind, but larger than the common parrot [this latter parrot actually constituting two separate but closely-related species of much smaller Amazon parrot], and makes a more disagreeable, harsh noise. They are in great plenty, as are also parrots in this island; have both of them a delightful green and yellow plumage, with a scarlet-coloured fleshy substance from the ears to the root of the bill, of which colour is likewise the chief feathers of the wings and tails. They breed on the tops of the highest trees, where they feed on the berries in great numbers together; and are easily discovered by their loud chattering noise, which at a distance resembles human voices. The mackaws cannot be taught to articulate words; but the parrots of this country may, by taking pains with them when caught young. The flesh of both is eat [sic = edible], but being very very fat, it wastes in roasting, and eats dry and insipid; for which reason, they are chiefly used to make soup of, which is accounted very nutritive."

It certainly must have been, because however plentiful these macaws were in Atwood's day, their numbers must have swiftly diminished thereafter, because his description is all that remains to suggest that they ever existed at all. No other reports of them, and no preserved specimens or paintings of living specimens, are known – unless...

A photoshop-created representation of the Dominican green and yellow macaw's possible appearance in life ((c) Rafael Silva do Nascimento)

There is no doubt that Atwood's description of the Dominican green and yellow macaw accords well with the parrot in van Bassen's painting - incorporating the precise configuration of its head's red colouration, its red wing feathers, and obviously its predominantly green and yellow plumage. True, Atwood did not mention any area of white on the Dominican macaws' faces, but it is worth noting that in some species of macaw this region turns red if the bird becomes excited, so perhaps he simply didn't observe any macaws when in a quiescent state, only when they were squawking animatedly while feeding.

Consequently, the only inconsistency in appearance between van Bassen's bird and Atwood's Dominican macaws is the mention of red tail feathers in his description, whereas the central tail feathers of van Bassen's parrot are green and the lateral ones are yellow. Perhaps, however, there was a slight degree of variation in the plumage colouration of the Dominican macaw (sexual dimorphism, for instance?) that could account for this discrepancy? In all other respects, the match is much closer than for any other species, living or extinct.

In 2011, a year beforeI made known to him the mystery parrot in van Bassen's painting, Brazilian bird artist Rafael Silva do Nascimento had prepared a beautiful painting of his, own reconstructing the likely appearance of the Dominican green and yellow macaw as based upon Atwood's description of it, which is reproduced here with Rafael's kind permission. As you can see, his macaw and van Bassen's parrot, prepared entirely independently of one another, accord very closely indeed, providing further confirmation of just how well Atwood's verbal description compares with van Bassen's painted bird.

Rafael Silva do Nascimento's painting of the Dominican green and yellow macaw ((c) Rafael Silva do Nascimento)

So could it be that the enigmatic parrot perched in this highly-renowned Dutch artist's early 17^th-Century painting was a living Dominican green and yellow macaw, brought back to Europe as an eyecatching pet by (or for) a wealthy Dutch citizen? During that period, all manner of rare and extremely exotic fauna were being transported here from every known corner of the globe, many of which had never before been seen in Europe. Consequently, a colourful macaw would be nothing special or unexpected on that score.

What would be very special, and extremely unexpected, conversely, is if the macaw species in question subsequently became extinct but its exquisite appearance was preserved under the very nose of every art-lover in an extremely famous, spectacular painting, yet without its identity or zoological significance being recognised – until now?

If true, this is a great tragedy. After all, to paraphrase a certain classic comedy sketch from the golden age of British television, it may be an ex-parrot, but it had lovely plumage.

I wish to offer my sincere thanks to David Alderton for bringing this extremely intriguing crypto-ornithological mystery to my attention and for kindly sharing his thoughts and information concerning it with me; to Michael Klauke, Associate Registrar for Collections at the North Carolina Museum of Art, for most generously making available to me some high-resolution and close-up images of van Bassen's painting and its mystifying parrot; to Rafael Silva do Nascimento for very kindly permitting me to include his Dominican macaw painting here and also for providing me with a copy of Atwood's original description of Dominica's macaws; and to all of my Facebook friends who offered opinions and suggestions regarding this painted bird's possible identity when I posted an enquiry regarding it on my FB Wall in April 2012.

Reconstructions of the likely appearance of the various extinct species of West Indian macaw that have been reported by various travellers and subsequently named by scientists ((c) Rafael Silva do Nascimento)

The first of two engravings of a medieval and highly mysterious stone worm contained within a late 17^th-Century book by Eberhard Werner Happel

There are a number of mysterious and controversial biblical creatures with potential relevance to cryptozoology, of which the most famous examples are undoubtedly Leviathan and Behemoth (click hereand here to see my ShukerNature investigations of them). Much less famous but no less remarkable than those two, however, is the small yet highly intriguing subject of this present ShukerNature post - the shamir.

Also spelled 'samir' or 'schamir', this is the Hebrew name given to a tiny worm-like creature referred to in certain Jewish holy books, including the Midrashim and the Talmud (particularly the Gemara – the component of the Talmud that consists of rabbinical analysis of, and commentary upon, an earlier work known as the Mishnah).

The shamir as depicted within the Rosslyn Missal (an Irish manuscript dating from the late 13^th or early 14^th Century)

According to Jewish tradition contained within these and other sources, the shamir was one of ten miraculous items created by God at twilight upon the Sixth Day of the Hexameron (the six days of Creation). Although it was only the size of a single grain of barley corn, the shamir was so incredibly powerful that merely its gaze was sufficient to cut through any material with ease, even through diamond itself, the hardest substance on Earth. Such a wondrous creature needed to be safeguarded, so God entrusted the shamir to the hoopoe (or woodcock or moorhen, depending upon which version of the legend is consulted), commanding this bird to protect the shamir from all harm.

In order to contain this mighty if minuscule worm, the hoopoe placed it among a quantity of barley corns, then wrapped them all up together in a woollen cloth, which in turn was placed inside a box fashioned from lead – the only material strong enough to contain the shamir effectively but without disintegrating from the intensity of its laser-like gaze. So here, safely and comfortably ensconced within its leaden domicile, which was retained by the hoopoe in the Garden of Eden, it passed through all the ages that followed.

Hand-coloured engraving of a hoopoe from 1840

Only once did the shamir emerge – during the time of Aaron and Moses, when God commanded the hoopoe to lend this worm to Him for the etching of the names of the 12 tribes of Israel upon the precious stones on 12 special priestly breastplates (the Hoshen), one breastplate for each of the tribes and each breastplate composed of a different stone. The task was a very difficult one, but when these stones were shown in turn to the shamir this astonishing creature accomplished it so expertly that not a single atom of precious stone was lost or destroyed.

After this, the shamir was placed back inside its lead casket, entrusted once more to the hoopoe's care, and there it remained, in undisturbed obscurity – until the time of King Solomon the Wise. Solomon wished to erect a glorious temple, but he was very mindful of God's instructions, laid down long ago to Moses, that no place of worship, not even an altar (let alone a temple), should be constructed using any tool made from iron - because iron was a substance of war, and that if anything related to war should ever touch a place of worship, it would be instantly and irrevocably defiled. But if Solomon could not use iron tools, how could the stones needed for constructing his temple be hewn?

An etching of the famous and much-exhibited model of Solomon's Temple created during the 1600s by Rabbi Jacob Jehudah Leon, which measured 80 ft in circumference and 13 ft high, and was based upon information contained within the Bible's Book of Kings, Book of Samuel, and Book of Chronicles

In an attempt to solve this riddle, Solomon enquired far and wide, and eventually he learnt about the incredible stone-searing shamir. Determined to utilise its extraordinary power, Solomon dispatched a servant to seek out this wonderful creature and bring it back to him. After a long search, the servant succeeded, and Solomon duly employed the shamir to cut the rocks required for building his celebrated temple – the FirstTemple in Jerusalem. But that is where the story ends abruptly – because after this magnificent edifice was completed, the shamir allegedly lost its power, then vanished, and has never been heard of again…or has it?

In his engrossing book Sacred Monsters (2nd edit., 2011), Rabbi Natan Slifkin wondered if the shamir might have been based upon a real but not particularly well known creature native to the Negev Desert - the rock-eating snail Euchondrus, represented there by three closely-related species, E. albulus, E. desertorum, and E. ramonensis. Less than half an inch long, these mini-molluscs eat lichens that grow beneath the surface of rocks, and use a toothed tongue-like organ known as the radula to rasp away the intervening rock with great ease and rapidity. However, if such snails were indeed the identity of the shamir, surely the holy books and scriptures would have alluded to their shells? Yet no mention of any such structure possessed by the shamir exists. Also, these sources state categorically that the shamir does not destroy any portion of the rocks or precious stones that it cuts through, unlike the activity of these snails.

Intriguingly, there is an alternative school of thought postulating that the shamir was not a living creature at all, but rather a mineral itself, specifically an exceptionally hard green stone, which could cut through all other substances. Yet this identification fails to explain how the stones needing to be cut could be by merely being shown to the shamir, i.e. without the shamir making any direct contact with the stones, using only its gaze to achieve its appointed task. As noted by Rabbi Slifkin, however, one maverick scientist proposed an extremely ingenious, and plausible, solution to this dilemma. Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) is best-remembered for his highly controversial theories of global catastrophic events producing profoundly revised datings of major events in ancient history, as propounded in bestselling books such as Worlds in Collision (1950) and Earth in Upheaval (1955). Turning his attention to the shamir enigma, Velikovsky suggested that perhaps it was a radioactive substance, which could certainly explain some of the most notable riddles encompassing it.

For instance: such a substance could produce its effects upon other substances merely by having them placed near (or shown) to it, not requiring direct contact with them. Also, what better container for a radioactive substance to be housed safely inside than a casket of lead, which would very effectively shield its potent effects? And as its radioactivity would diminish with time (i.e. its half-life), this could explain why the shamir's potency had ultimately faded away by the time that King Solomon's temple had been completed. If it were truly a living creature, however, the shamir's abilities could not be explained by any such theory.

In any event, I had always assumed that this incredible entity was entirely mythical – until 28 November 2013, that is, when Facebook friend Robert Schneck very kindly brought to my attention an astonishing but hitherto exceedingly obscure mystery beast that seemed at least on first sight to be a veritable shamir of the Middle Ages. Robert revealed to me two engravings of bizarre-looking beasts known as vermes lapidum or stone worms, and which had appeared in a hefty German tome authored by Eberhard Werner Happel and entitled Relationes Curiosae, oder Denckwürdigkeiten der Welt, which was originally published in five volumes between 1683 and 1691.

Two engravings of alleged stone worms from Happel's Relationes Curiosae, oder Denckwürdigkeiten der Welt

According to Happel, the stone worms had originally been brought to public attention by a 17^th-Century monk called de la Voye, from a Normandy monastery, who in 1666 had written a letter to a Lord Auzout describing his remarkable discovery. One day, de la Voye had found some of these very small, decidedly odd-looking creatures moving about incessantly inside some holes of their own making in an old wall, much of whose rocky composition had allegedly been eaten away and converted into dust by the devouring nature of the worms. When he pulled out some of them and examined them under a magnifying glass, the monk observed that they were each the size of a single barley corn (the very same description, intriguingly, as used in the Jewish holy books for the shamir) and enclosed in a grey shell, as depicted in the first (labelled Fig. 1) of the two engravings presented above. As quoted by Happel in his book, the monk continued his account of the stone worms in his letter to Lord Azout as follows:

"…on the tip [of the worm's body] there is a hole, through which the excrements can be excreted. On the other end there is a larger hole, trough which the head can be protruded.

They are entirely black, the body shows various segments, near the head there are three legs, each has two joints, not dissimilar to these of a flea.

When they move their body is suspended in air, the mouth but is still oriented to the rock. The head is bulky, a bit smooth, similar in shape and colour to the shell of a snail...also the mouth is similar large, with four kinds of teeth disposed in cross like manner."

The second engraving (Fig. 2) presumably shows the stone worm in a more advanced state of development than in Fig. 1, as it is now equipped with three pairs of legs. However, both forms seem only to possess small, primitive, laterally-sited ocellus-like eyes (round and black, according to de la Voye), rather than large, compound eyes, thereby indicating that if the stone worm is an insect, as seems at least remotely possible, it is a larval form rather than an adult (larval insects do not possess compound eyes, only ocelli).

Tegenaria domestica, a common species of funnel-weaving spider

Conversely, some authors have sought to discount the stone worms as (very) fanciful representations of funnel-weaving spiders, three pairs of legs rather than four notwithstanding and the stone worms' reputed rock-devouring proclivities discounted as apocryphal. Perhaps the presence of multiple ocelli, a characteristic of many spiders (which never possess compound eyes like most adult insects do), influenced their choice of an arachnid identity for these creatures, as there seems little else that would have done so? Certainly, the heavily segmented abdomen of the creature in the second engraving, and the seemingly limbless, shelled form of the creature in the first one, present major problems in reconciling them with any spider.

To be honest, however, the creatures depicted in these two engravings are so bizarre that it is impossible to identify them confidently with any known animal form. If they were indeed real, and not a hoax perpetrated by de la Voye, we can only assume that these engravings are exceedingly fanciful representations, so much so that the worms' true morphology has been enshrouded in exaggeration or error.

As for their stone-devouring diet, this too is baffling in the extreme. Perhaps de la Joye saw these creatures amid the wall's crumbling masonry and wrongly presumed that they were responsible? Who can say? All that can be stated is that except for a couple of brief mentions in some early 18^th-Century dictionaries of natural science, the stone worm rapidly faded into total scientific oblivion shortly after Happel's book was published.

Happel's Relationes Curiosae, 1683

Could it be that, as a monk, de la Voye was well-read across a wide spectrum of religious tracts, was therefore familiar with the mythical shamir from Jewish holy books, and had mistakenly thought that the creatures that he had discovered were similar? In reality, however, even his stone worms' ostensible comparability to the shamir does not stand up to close scrutiny. For whereas the latter beast disintegrated and annihilated rocks using its formidable, basiliskian gaze, the stone worm actually devoured rocks and stones, at least according to de la Voye's testimony.

Almost 350 years have passed since de la Voye wrote his intriguing letter documenting the stone worms, but its subjects remain as mystifying and as unsatisfactorily 'explained' today as they were then. Unless the entire episode of their discovery was indeed a hoax and a nonsense, the stone worms must have been something – but what?

The second of two engravings of a medieval and highly mysterious stone worm contained within a late 17^th-Century book by Eberhard Werner Happel

Nessie and family ((c) Richard Svensson)

What do Cannock Chase, Renwick, Exmoor, Drummans, Falmouth Bay, and Bala Lake all have in common? If I added Loch Ness to the list, I'm sure that you'd guess much more readily. Yes indeed, they are all locations in Britain linked to sightings of mystery creatures. I recently wrote an online article for Enterprise Magazine, presenting ten of my favourite weird and (very) wonderful British crypto-locations, which can be accessed by clicking here.

Cockatrice (Friedrich Justin Bertuch)

So if you fancy travelling around the country in search of lake monsters and sea serpents, mermaids and master otters, owlmen, cockatrices, werewolves, alien big cats, and even a British bigfoot or two, now you know just where to go. Have fun!

Cornish owlman ((c) Richard Svensson)

Icy (on left, held by Senior Keeper Karen Davis) and Polar (on right, held by Education Officer Claire Peterson) - two golden-furred specimens of southern hairy-nosed wombat housed at ClelandWildlifePark, Adelaide (© Tricia Watkinson/Newspix/Rex Features)

Willy Wonka had his much sought-after Golden Tickets, but ClelandWildlifePark in Adelaide, South Australia, has something even rarer – golden wombats! The southern hairy-nosed wombat Lasiorhinus latifrons normally has black, brown, or grey fur. However, Icy and Polar both sport an astonishingly beautiful, bright golden pelage, as if King Midas from classical Greek mythology had gifted them with his gold-transforming touch.

These two bear-like but herbivorous marsupials are three-and-a-half years old, arriving at the park after having been found in the wild six months apart of each another and raised afterwards in a rescue centre. Their golden colouration, a phenomenon known as flavism, is the result of a mutant gene allele. Yet although aesthetically exquisite, it makes such wombats very visible in the wild and therefore highly vulnerable to predators. Consequently, very few specimens ever survive, and there is only one other golden wombat in captivity.

So Icy and Polar (although surely Goldie and Sunny might be more apt names for them?) are extremely special and highly-prized by the park, whose staff hope that they will breed when older (despite their shared golden hue, they are not related to one other).

Illustration from 1865 depicting two normal-coloured specimens of the southern hairy-nosed wombat (Joseph Wolf)

Of all of my 20 books, none has attracted such acclaim but also such controversy as In Search of Prehistoric Survivors. Next year will mark the 20^th anniversary of its original publication in 1995, and having received countless requests from readers over the years for its republication (after having been out of print for a number of years now), I am happy to say that following a protracted period of time doing the rounds of prospective publishers, it was accepted for publication just over a year ago, and I am working upon it with a view to its achieving a timely 2015 reappearance.

Having said that, I am still uncertain as to whether to prepare a straight reprint of the text but with additional illustrations (courtesy of the many wonderful ones that have become available to me since 1995), or whether to update it – and, if I do, how extensive that update should be. Mindful of the book's enormous scope of cryptids (the only major group not represented in it are the man-beasts, and that itself was only for reasons of limited space), a major update would see the book's size grow dramatically, to the point where it might simply be financially unviable to produce it. So I need to reflect further upon that. Nevertheless, after having received so many enquiries, I can definitely confirm that Prehistoric Survivors will be returning, so watch this space!

Meanwhile, and after having given the matter much thought, I feel that it may be instructive to reveal precisely how this particular book of mine came to be, because ever since it appeared in 1995 there has been a degree of confusion and controversy in some quarters as to where I stand in relation to its theme and contents. Consequently, I hope that the following explanation (which I have already outlined privately to various colleagues down through the years but have never bothered disclosing publicly before) elucidates all of this satisfactorily.

In many ways, this book is the most unusual of any of mine, inasmuch as its final, published form was not how I had originally conceived it at all. Let me explain. Following the publication in 1991 of my second book, Extraordinary Animals Worldwide, I was planning a major book on herpetological cryptids – everything from alleged living dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and plesiosaurs, to mystery lizards of many kinds, giant snakes and crowing serpents, chelonian cryptids of all shapes and sizes, anomalous amphibians, and even a major section devoted to the possible origin of and inspiration for the world's plethora of legendary dragons.

A synopsis of this proposed book did the rounds of publishers (during which time, incidentally, my third book, The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20^thCentury, was published, in late 1993), with Blandford Press being particularly interested in it (and ultimately publishing it two years later). Mindful, however, of the enormous worldwide popularity of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie Jurassic Park at that time (the first film had been released in 1993), they suggested a fundamental change to the contents and slant of my book. Instead of confining it to herpetological mystery beasts, they proposed that I should expand its range of subjects to that of cryptids spanning the entire zoological spectrum, but concentrate exclusively upon those that have been suggested at one time or another by cryptozoologists to constitute prehistoric survivors.

It was certainly a most intriguing brief, albeit very different from my original concept, and one that I therefore decided to accept, even though – and I must emphasise this unequivocally here - I did not personally consider it likely that all of those cryptids truly were prehistoric survivors. But my personal opinion was irrelevant as far as the book's brief was concerned. What was required was for me to present a dossier of reports and native traditions for each cryptid, and then assess them in the context of whichever prehistoric creature(s) it had been likened to in the cryptozoological literature (with theories not appertaining to prehistoric survival receiving only minimal treatment, as they were not the focus of this study). So that is precisely what I did. Consequently, out went most of the mystery lizards and amphibians as well as the snakes and also the dragons section, and in came putative mammalian methusalehs like chalicotheres, thylacoleonids, amphicyonids, and sabre-tooths, alleged lingering avians like teratorns and Sylviornis, the giant carnivorous shark megalodon, and even some reputed eurypterid survivors.

A stunning cover design prepared by cryptozoological artist William Rebsamen for a proposed updated, retitled edition of In Search of Prehistoric Survivors(© William Rebsamen)

During the years that have followed, the concept of prehistoric survivorship – or what British palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish refers to as the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm (PSP) - has received some harsh criticism from cryptozoological sceptics. And indeed, I am the first to concede that such survival becomes increasingly untenable the greater the span of time that exists between any modern-day cryptid and its most recent alleged fossil antecedents (i.e. its so-called ghost lineage, with the cryptid itself thereby constituting a Lazarus taxon). However, as my trilogy of books on new and rediscovered animals have disclosed time and again, some truly extraordinary, spectacular, and entirely unpredictable, unexpected zoological discoveries have been made in modern times.

And yes, these do indeed include some bona fide prehistoric survivors, taxa known only from fossils until living representatives were unveiled - e.g. the Chacoan peccary, mountain pygmy possum, Bulmer's fruit bat, kha-nyou, goblin shark, neoglyphean crustaceans, monoplacophoran molluscs, and of course the coelacanth. (And yes again, I am well aware that post-Mesozoic coelacanth fossils are now known, but these were only uncovered and recognised for what they were after the discovery in 1938 of the living Latimeria, when the unexpected resurrection of this ancient lineage of fishes no doubt acted as a significant spur to palaeontologists to seek post-Mesozoic coelacanth fossils that they now knew must exist if suitably preserved, and which would help to close up what could now be seen to be a very extensive and therefore anomalous ghost lineage for these fishes; so at its time of discovery, the modern-day coelacanth was definitely a valid prehistoric survivor.) Hence I remain reluctant to discount PSP out of hand.

Having said that, although I have often been accused of "believing" that a given cryptid is a particular type of prehistoric survivor, this is simply not true, for the simple reason that it is impossible to state definitely (although certain cryptozoologists habitually attempt to do so) what a given cryptid must be. Without tangible evidence to examine (and I am referring here to physical remains, not photographic evidence, which can be convincingly faked with alarming ease nowadays), all that can be done is pass a personal opinion as to how likely or unlikely a given identity appears to be. However, opinions are not facts, and should never be put forward, or be mistaken, as such. In short, therefore, I do not "believe" that any cryptid is any specific identity – I merely indicate what I personally consider to be likely (or unlikely) identities for it, nothing more.

Reviving this book has posed something of a dilemma for me, because doing so meant that its original brief (and also therefore my own misgivings regarding the plausibility of prehistoric survival for certain of its cryptids) would remain fundamental to its raison d'être. The only alternative would be for me to rewrite it completely, with an entirely altered slant, but the result of that would be not only a totally different but also a much more extensive book – so extensive, in fact, that (as with updating it even in its original form) I sincerely doubt whether it would be financially viable for any publisher to take on. Yet whatever one's own personal opinion may be concerning prehistoric survival in any capacity, the wealth of historical reports and cryptozoological coverage presented in its pages is such that it would be a tragedy for this book to remain out of print, especially when – as I have been made continually aware for many years – there is a very considerable demand among readers for it to reappear.

Consequently, now that I have outlined here how it came to be and why it is what it is, so that there can no longer be any confusion or contention regarding it, I am very happy to engage upon recalling back into existence what many people consider to be my finest cryptozoological volume. When complete, it may contain various updates and certainly some major new illustrations, but its basic context and content will otherwise remain unchanged.

Last, but definitely not least, I wish to thank most sincerely all of its numerous supporters for their kind words through all the intervening years, urging me to resurrect it - just like a veritable prehistoric survivor itself, in fact!

The eyecatching original cover design for In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, prepared by artist Kevin Maddison and featuring a very striking Queensland tiger or yarri (albeit one with enlarged canines like placental felids, rather than with enlarged incisors like thylacoleonids!), but which the publisher ultimately rejected in favour of the plesiosaur flipper cover – ah, well... (© Kevin Maddison)

Jardine's enigmatic 19^th-Century illustration of a putative speckle-coated jaguar

I was pleased to learn yesterday that the long-awaited paper that I obliquely alluded to in my book Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), providing an extensive morphometric analysis of two skulls from two different types of Peruvian mystery big cat, has finally been published (click here to access it). It is co-authored by British palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish, who also has a longstanding interest in cryptozoology. The two mystery cats whose skulls are featured in the analysis are what another of this paper's four co-authors, Peru-based zoologist Dr Peter J. Hocking (who also obtained the skulls), originally called the speckled tiger ('tiger' being a prevalent term throughout Latin America for the jaguar Panthera onca) but which is renamed the Anomalous jaguar in the paper, and what Hocking originally called the striped tiger but which is renamed the Peruvian tiger in the paper. Based upon the results of the analysis, in which both skulls were shown to fall within the documented range for the jaguar, the paper's authors conclude that these specimens were indeed jaguars, but ones that exhibited aberrant pelage markings.

A jaguar exhibiting normal pelage markings and colouration

I'll comment further re the Peruvian tiger in a future ShukerNature blog post, as I wish to concentrate in this present blog post upon the Anomalous jaguar, because my Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery book contains some additional information – and one fascinating 19^th-Century illustration – that may be of relevance to this speckled South American crypto-felid that has long fascinated me. Here are the relevant excerpts from my book:

In 1992, within the International Society of Cryptozoology's journal, Cryptozoology,Peruvian zoologist Dr Peter J. Hocking presented some previously unpublished evidence for the existence amid Peru's remote tropical forests of four different types of mystery cat, all possibly new to science…

Three Peruvian mystery cats – speckled tiger, striped tiger, and giant black panther/yana puma (© Peter Visccher/BBC Wildlife Magazine)

Even more intriguing [than the Peruvian giant black panther or yana puma, which was the first of the four to be documented by me in my book] is the 'speckled tiger' - claimed by locals to be as big as a jaguar (jaguars, incidentally, are popularly termed 'tigers' in South America), but with a larger head, and a unique pelage consisting of a grey background covered with solid black speckles. There is no known species of South American cat alive today that fits this description - so what could this mottled mystery cat from the montane tropical forests of Peru's Pascoprovince be?

A jaguar with a freak coat pattern and colouration is the most reasonable explanation, but this poses problems. The pelage of a complete albino jaguar (i.e. homozygous for the complete albino mutant allele of the Full Colour gene) would have white background colouration and normal but white rosettes visible only in certain lights, like watered silk; and even a chinchilla-reminiscent specimen (analogous or homologous to the white lions of Timbavati and/or the white tigers of Rewa) would have normal rosettes, probably grey or pale brown. So too would a leucistic specimen (see Chapter 3). Interestingly, on 19 January 2012, two white jaguar cubs with pale grey rosettes and normal green eyes were born to a typical rosetted father and a melanistic mother at Aschersleben Zoo, in Germany; the first white jaguars born in captivity as far as is known, they are most probably leucistic, as indicated by their normal eye colour and the pale, washed-out appearance of their coat.

The white jaguar cubs of Aschersleben Zoo, Germany (© Aschersleben Zoo)

Genetically, the presence of solid black speckles reported for Peru's 'speckled tiger' rather than well-formed rosettes is anomalous. The only comparable case is that of the speckled servaline morph of the serval Leptailurus serval (see Chapter 27), and a couple of servaline-like cheetahs that I have dubbed cheetalines (see Chapter 19).

Skin of normal blotched serval on left and speckled servaline on right (© Owen Burnham)

One other controversial cat reported from South Americathat is somewhat reminiscent of Peru’s speckled tiger is the cunarid din, mentioned by the Wapishana Indians of Guyana and Brazilto Stanley E. Brock. In Hunting in the Wilderness (1963), Brock describes this strange cat as follows:

The cunarid din is quite like the ticar din [normal jaguar], except that the ground colour is nearer white than orange or yellow. The Indians say that the white kind always attain a much larger size than the former, but this is doubtful as a fact. The spots are often finer on the fore quarters and spaced further apart, and there are noticeably fewer spots within the rosettes along the sides of the body, giving the skin a rather leopard-like appearance.

Stanley E. Brock's book, featuring a regular jaguar on the cover (© Stanley E. Brock/Robert Hale Limited)

Moreover, while browsing through a copy of Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine’s classic Natural History of the Felinae (1834) recently, I was startled to discover a colour plate of a very odd-looking jaguar - whose paler-than-normal coat lacked this species’ familiar, clearly-defined rosettes and instead was patterned entirely with a heterogeneous array of solid black speckles and blotches. According to the plate’s caption, this jaguar was a native of Paraguay. Consequently, always assuming of course that it had been depicted accurately, this suggests that speckled jaguars or jaguar-like cats have also occurred here in the past. Perhaps they may still do so today.

Jardine's enigmatic illustration opens this present ShukerNature blog post and is also presented again here:

Jardine's enigmatic 19^th-Century illustration of a putative speckle-coated jaguar

Yet another speckled mystery cat from South America is the shiashia-yawá, one of several crypto-felids said to inhabit Ecuador:

While visiting southern Ecuador's Morona-Santiago province in July 1999, Spanish cryptozoologist Angel Morant Forés learnt of several mystery cats said to inhabit this country’s Amazonian jungles. Upon his return home, he documented them in an online field report, entitled ‘An investigation into some unidentified Ecuadorian mammals’, which he uploaded in autumn 1999 onto French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal’s website, the Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology, where it is still accessible today (at http://cryptozoo.pagesperso-orange.fr/welcome.htm). These very intriguing crypto-felids include:

A white-coated cat with solid black spots known as the shiashia-yawá, recalling the cunarid din of Guyana and Brazil, and Peru’s speckled tiger, but smaller (said to be intermediate in size between a jaguar and an ocelot). Angel considers it possible that this felid is merely an albinistic jaguar, but as already discussed in relation to the speckled tiger, such an identity would not explain its solid black spots, which sound very different from the familiar rosettes of normal jaguars. [My book then continues with descriptions of six other Ecuadorian mystery cats.]

The Anomalous jaguar's speckled pelage may be due to the expression of a homologous, or at least an analogous, mutant gene allele to that which creates the speckled serval and/or speckled cheetah morphs.

For plenty of additional information concerning a wide diversity of South American mystery cats, be sure to check out my two mystery cat books – Mystery Cats of the World(1989) and Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery(2012).

A pair of anomalous speckle-coated 'tigers' depicted in a 1750s plate from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus

In yesterday's ShukerNature blog post (click here), I presented a selection of speckle-coated mystery big cats reported from various parts of South America. Now, less than a day later, I'm able to present a very unexpected but fascinating update to this subject.

As so often happens during my cryptozoological researches, while seeking something entirely different while browsing online this morning I came upon a remarkable engraving that may have some bearing upon the speckled mystery cat saga.

Albertus Seba (1665-1736), a Dutch pharmacist by trade but inflamed by an unquenchable passion for collecting zoological specimens, was so successful financially in his work that he was able to assemble not one but two truly spectacular, prodigious collections of unprecedented size and scope that gained international acclaim. Indeed, the first of these collections was so astonishing that in 1716 it was purchased in its entirety by no less a celebrated figure than the Russian tsar Peter the Great; the second was auctioned in 1752 in Amsterdam, and several prize specimens were purchased by what was then the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, founded by Peter the Great (but merging in 1841 with the Russian Academy to become the present-day Russian Academy of Sciences).

Portrait of Albertus Seba, by Jacobus Houbraken (1698-1780)

Perhaps Seba's most lasting claim to fame, however, is his magnificent four-volume Thesaurus (published 1734-1765). Its full, dual Dutch-Latin title is Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio – Naaukeurige beschryving van het schatryke kabinet der voornaamste seldzaamheden der natuur, which translates as 'Accurate description of the very rich thesaurus of the principal and rarest natural objects', and it is basically an exquisitely-illustrated catalogue of every zoological specimen that Seba had collected, containing 446 full-colour folio-sized copper plates. A copy of this wondrous work sold at auction a few years ago for the staggering sum of US $460,000, but a modern reprint, entitled Albert Seba Cabinet of Natural Curiosities and compiled by Irmgard Müsch, Jes Rust, and Rainer Willmann, was issued by Taschen in 2001, followed by further printings more recently. Purchased directly from Taschen, a hardback copy currently costs £125 (remarkably, however, it only costs £18.75 on Amazon!!).

Detailed scans of many if not all of the plates from Seba's Thesauruscan also be found online, and most of the animals depicted in them are portrayed very accurately, especially given the pre-scientific time period in which this publication was prepared. While browsing a collection of these sumptuous plates on the website Albion Prints website (www.albion-prints.com), I came upon a fascinating example, whose date was given as the 1750s, depicting a series of colour morphs of moles in the top section, but with the rest of the plate devoted to a pair of very remarkable-looking big cats. Here is that plate:

A pair of anomalous speckle-coated 'tigers' (and also a series of mole colour morphs) depicted in a 1750s plate from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus

According to the description given for the plate, these cats were tigers! I am not sure whether this identification is the original one given by Seba in his Thesaurus, or is simply one hazarded by the owner of the website containing the scans, but what I am sure of is that whatever these pale-furred, liberally spotted cats may be, they are certainly not the orange-furred, unequivocally -big cat that we all know as the tiger, unless...?

What if the term 'tiger' was being used here not in relation to Panthera tigris, but rather in its Latin American meaning, i.e. 'jaguar'? Yet these illustrated cats possess no trace of the jaguar's normal rosettes and they lack its fur's deep orange background colouration too, being patterned all over instead with an array of solid black dots or speckles upon a virtually white background - thereby greatly resembling the alleged appearance of Peru's speckled tiger aka Anomalous jaguar.

As one of the greatest zoological collectors of all time, if anyone were likely to obtain specimens of this most exotic, elusive form of South American crypto-cat, Seba would have to be a primary candidate for achieving such a feat.

The modern-day Taschen reprint of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus, entitled Albert Sebe Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (© Taschen)

Needless to say, I realise that this is all highly speculative. It may simply be that the two cats are very inaccurate representations of normal jaguars, or even leopards, such as the pale-coated Arabian leopard Panthera pardus nimr (their non-gracile body proportions and lack of teardrop facial markings argue strongly against their being cheetahs). Yet in view of how accurate other depictions of animals are in Seba's Thesaurus, this seems strange.

In any event, they are certainly tantalising enough in appearance to warrant inclusion in any coverage of speckled mystery cats, just in case they are relevant and any further investigation of them can be achieved. So if anyone reading this ShukerNature blog post should happen to own a modern-day Taschen reprint of Seba's Thesaurus, I would very greatly welcome any news of what identity was given in it for these two speckle-coated big cats. Thanks very much!

For plenty of additional information concerning a wide diversity of South American mystery cats, be sure to check out my two mystery cat books – Mystery Cats of the World (1989) and Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012)

Colour plate of the fraudulent striped tamandua from Buffon's Histoire Naturelle (1749-1788)

There are four recognised species of modern-day South American anteater – or vermilinguan, to be taxonomically precise (the unrelated aardvark, the pangolins, and the echidnas are all sometimes referred to colloquially as anteaters too – respectively, the African anteater, the scaly anteaters, and the spiny anteaters). These are: the giant anteater Myrmecophaga tridactyla; the pygmy or silky anteater Cyclopes didactylus; and somewhat midway in size between these two species, the northern tamandua Tamandua mexicana and the southern tamandua T. tetradactyla (these two were previously lumped together as a single species, the tamandua T. tetradactyla).

Each of the two tamandua species is itself split into four subspecies, and although the most familiar appearance in both species is one in which the animal possesses a black vest-like coat pattern over its torso, with the remainder of its body and also its head of paler colouration, there is much variation in both coat colour and pattern.

Beautiful painting of a tamandua by J.G. Keulemans from 1871

Variation notwithstanding, however, no tamandua had ever been reported before (or, indeed, has been since) that even remotely resembled a certain extraordinary specimen sent during the 1700s to the pre-eminent French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), for examination. What made it unique was that, totally eschewing the traditional 'black vest vs paler elsewhere' tamandua image noted above, this particular individual was very distinctively patterned all over its body, legs, tail, and even its long snout with bold, highly contrasting black and gold stripes!

Needless to say, Buffon was captivated by this veritable bumblebee in anteater form, and in 1763 he duly incorporated it as a major new species, the striped tamandua, in his monumental, 36-volume magnum opus, Histoire Naturelle (1749-1788) (NB - one of the southern tamandua's four subspecies is also referred to sometimes as the striped tamandua, but it bears no resemblance to the singular specimen documented here, so it should not be confused with this latter animal). He even commissioned a full-colour plate for his Histoire Naturelle, portraying his striped tamandua there in all its banded beauty, which is the image opening this present ShukerNature post, and to my knowledge the only depiction of this creature ever produced.

Portrait of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte deBuffon, by François-Hubert Drouais (1725-1775)

Tragically for Buffon's reputation, however, when the striped tamandua's holotype was examined by other zoologists after his death, it was discovered that he had been the victim of a cunning hoax. The creature was not a tamandua at all, but was instead a coati – a long-nosed relative of the raccoons, occurring in three recognised species – which had been deftly modified to resemble an anteater (even its teeth had been removed), and whose stripes were equally artificial. The perpetrator of this cruel practical joke was never identified, but once their hoax had been exposed, the now-fraudulent striped tamandua made a swift, unmourned exit from the natural history tomes, never to return.

A ring-tailed coati Nasua nasua from South America

Mom, wearing the beautiful protea-decorated coat that she purchased in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2008 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Today it is one year since, on Easter Monday (1 April) 2013, my dear mother, Mary Doreen Shuker, passed away, leaving me totally devastated at the loss of the most wonderful, loving person in my life. During the days, weeks, and months that have followed this traumatic event, I have sought to put into words just how much she has always meant to me, how profoundly influential she has been throughout my life, and how grief-stricken I remain by her passing. Here is a selection of what I have written and compiled.

Whatever good there may be in me came from you.

Thank you for blessing my life by being in it

as my mother.

You were, are, and always will be quite simply

the best person I shall ever know,

and I love you with all of my heart.

God bless you, little Mom,

please wait for me,

watch over me in this lonely existence of mine now,

and come for me when my time here is over.

Au revoir, Mom, until we meet again.

My tribute to Mom, posted on my Facebook wall on 1 April 2013 when announcing her passing; and it is also my Dedication to her in my book 'Mirabilis' (Anomalist Books: New York, 2013).

"Beauty was hers in all its brightness and she was determined to embrace every shape, line and color imbued in her spirit."

Quotation on the lid of the memory box (pictured here) that I bought for my Mom a few hours ago; it describes her perfectly - indeed, it could have been written specifically for her.

God bless you, little Mom - how I wish you were still here with me.

Posted on my Facebook wall on 8 April 2013.

God bless you, Mom.

Thank you for everything that has ever been good in my life.

How I wish that you were still here with me, fit and well,

ready to set off with me on our next adventure together.

I love you, little Mom, always.

The concluding words in my eulogy to Mom, which I read aloud at her funeral on 16 April 2013 (and which can be read in full online here on ShukerNature).

13 weeks ago this evening, my dear little Mom passed away -

a whole quarter-year has somehow gone by,

during which time I have found myself locked inside a strange and very sad new life.

I can never return to the past,

except in dreams,

and the future is as ever opaque.

And so I live life now a moment at a time,

and dream...

Posted on my Facebook wall on 1 July 2013

A hand-coloured photograph of Mom in her 20s during the 1940s (© Mary D. Shuker/Dr Karl Shuker)

I attended my Mom's Memorial Service tonight at church,

and I placed a candle for her on a table before me,

where its light gently flickered until the end of the service, after which, once I had left the church, it would be extinguished.

But the candle of love that my Mom had lit inside my heart on the day that I was born,

and which now burns there for her,

is infinitely brighter, warmer, and will never be extinguished.

And although the memorial service for my Mom in church is over now,

the memorial service for her that has been performing inside my mind every moment of every day since she passed away will never come to an end –

it will continue in perpetuity for the rest of my life.

God bless you Mom - I love you, always.

Posted on my Facebook wall on 21 July 2013 following my attendance of my Mom's Memorial Service earlier that evening.

One part of the show that really registered with me was the song

'They Live In You',

when the shaman-type mandrill Rafiki was telling the adult Simba that his father will always be a part of him,

will always live in him,

and that when he looks into the mirror of a forest pool,

he will see his father in his own reflection,

looking back at him.

I'd never thought of that before.

Also, several people have told me that I have my Mom's eyes,

different colour but same shape and depth;

and Mom often joked that I had her squat, pudgy nose,

and I do.

So now, whenever I look into a mirror,

I'll see Mom there in my reflection,

spiritually and physically,

looking back at me,

and I'll know that she is part of me,

is with me still,

forever.

Posted on my Facebook wall on 10 August 2013 after attending a performance of Disney's 'The Lion King' stage musical at the Birmingham Hippodrome that afternoon.

This evening marks exactly 26 weeks = 6 months = half a year since my mother, Mary Shuker, passed away, leaving behind an aching void inside my heart that I have papered over with memories but which can never be filled and will never heal. I recently came upon the following words while browsing online, which encapsulate so many of my own thoughts, feelings, truths, and beliefs. God bless you Mom, how I miss you and wish you were here with me still. With all my love:

Posted on my Facebook wall on 30 September 2013.

This morning, I visited the newly-completed gravestone of my mother, Mary Doreen Shuker (1921-2013), which has taken 6 months to prepare. Standing there in the solitude of the cemetery, it all still seemed so unreal, that the vibrant little lady always so full of life, of living, and of love was gone, her time in this world marked only by the stone and grave there before me, beautiful and elegant though they were, just like she had always been. Come the closing of December, I shall not grieve the passing of 2013, but I shall forever grieve the passing within it of my mother, whose light is gone from my world until that joyous day when we will be reunited forever.

From the introduction to my composition 'The Chained Gates' (click here to read it in full on my Star Steeds blog), written by me on 22 October 2013.

2013

I shall not mourn the passing of this year,

Nor shall I mourn its months of grief and strife.

All I shall mourn is that one person dear,

My mother, whom it stole out of my life.

God bless you, Little Mom - I love you always.

Happy New Year - may we be together again one day.

One of my framed photographs of Mom (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Composed by me and posted on my Facebook wall on 31 December 2013.

Happy Birthday in Heaven, Mom

- how I wish that I could share it with you.

God Bless.

Posted on my Facebook wall on my mother's birthday, 29 January 2014.

To my dear mother, Mary D. Shuker (1921-2013), whose lifelong interest in wildlife guided and encouraged my own from my earliest days. Thank you for filling my world with wonder, joy, and love for such a long and very happy time. How I miss you, and how I wish that you were still here with me today and always. God bless you, little Mom.

"The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom."

Henry Ward Beecher – Life Thoughts

My Dedication to my mother in my forthcoming book, 'The Menagerie of Marvels: A Third Compendium of Extraordinary Animals' (CFZ Press: Bideford, in press; due for publication in summer 2014).

Mom, wearing one of her favourite and most beautiful jumpers (© Dr Karl Shuker)

"Remembrance is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away."

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

The above quotation, chosen long ago by my mother, is inscribed upon the tombstone of the first of my family's two three-person grave plots. Here lie her parents (my Nan and Grandad), Gertrude and Ernest Timmins, and her first husband, Harold Hooper - who died aged only 30 as a result of serving in the armed forces during World War II.

How very true is that quotation, which must have been such a source of comfort to her in the face of her great losses, and which is now of equal comfort to me in the face of mine.

"God gave us memories so that we may have roses in December."

Adapted from a line in a rectorial address given by James M. Barrie on3 May 1922 at St Andrews University, Scotland.

The above quotation, also chosen long ago by my mother, is inscribed upon the tombstone of my family's second three-person grave plot, situated alongside the first one. Here is where my little brother André (who passed away in 1955) and my mother lie, and where, when it is my time, I too shall lie, reunited at last with my family and never to be parted from them again.

Time waits for no-one, for nothing, not even for grief. Tomorrow will be 52 Saturdays since Mom and I set off on what would be our last outing together, though mercifully we had no realisation of that at the time, and had a lovely afternoon. On Sunday it is Mother's Day this year, and it will also be 52 Sundays since Mom was taken ill late that evening. Monday will be 12 months to the day since she gently slipped away early that evening in hospital, with me beside her, holding her hand and telling her how much I loved her. And Tuesday will be 12 months to the date since that most traumatic of all events in my life happened - the event that I had always dreaded most throughout my entire time here on earth. So, wish me well during the next four very momentous days for me, as they revive all of those mixed memories, and bring to a close the worst year of my life - a year which, if I am honest, I may not have survived had it not been for the kind words and continuing support of so many friends here on Facebook. So thank you all - I am truly grateful.

Mom in our garden (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Above is a photo of Mom in happier times, wearing one of her beautiful, vibrant coats that she loved so much, epitomising her own lifelong love of Nature's wonders and beauty, and which she nurtured in me too from my earliest days. Thank you, little Mom, how I wish that you were still here.

Posted on my Facebook wall on 28 March 2014.

The card that I bought for Mom for Mother's Day this year, 30 March 2014, continuing a tradition that shall last for as long as I last.

Can it be just a year ago today since you passed from my life, my little Mom?

Sometimes it seems but a heartbeat away, other times a thousand lives, a thousand worlds, from where I am now.

People try to show sympathy and understanding when they learn that you have gone, but they have no concept of the true nature of my loss - the immeasurable breadth and limitless depth of the black chasm created in my life and within my heart by your passing. Yes, I have indeed lost my mother - a loss that in itself would be all but unbearable. But I have also lost my best friend, my ever-present housemate, my constant travelling companion, my most trusted confidante, my number one supporter, and my entire family. You were all of those persons, Mom, and so much more besides. Is it any wonder why I grieve without ending, why my life is now but a paltry, meaningless existence, a mere shadow of its former state, why I look only to the past for happiness and security now, and to the future with only loneliness and fear?

I never cried as a child, because I'd never give the school bully, the playground tormentor, the satisfaction of seeing my tears. Instead, I'd save them all, each one a precious pearl of emotion, only to be released in my darkest of all hours some day. Well that day and that hour finally came, a year ago today, the hour in which I lost you, Mom. The tears flowed, and have continued to flow ever since - every tear that I've ever saved throughout my life, torrents of tears that even now after a year of unbroken outpouring continue in unabated profusion, threatening to drown my very being in their salty, burning despair, or to carry me away, borne upon a veritable ocean of tears to who knows where.

. . .

This first year of being without you, of being alone in this world, knowing that wherever I look, whichever street I walk along, whatever shop I walk into, I shall never see you again, shall never hear your voice speaking to me again, shall never see your face in the crowd looking for mine again, has been the worst time of my life. Nothing else ever will, ever could, be as devastating, but I shall miss you always, all the days of my life.I now stand on the brink of entering my second year alone, and I can only pray that acceptance will at last be mine, that grief will lift and give me a measure of release, of peace, and that I shall be worthy of you, Mom, that I shall go on to achieve all that you have ever hoped and dreamed for me.

God bless you, little Mom. Please always stay beside me where you always used to be when here, please always give me hope and encouragement as you always used to do when here, and, above all else, please always love me as you always did when here. If you will do these, I will do the rest – this I promise you, Mom, with all my heart and with all my love, always.

Excerpts from my composition 'A Year Ago Today', which was uploaded in full here on my Star Steeds blog today, upon this first anniversary of my mother's passing.

Happy days: Setting off on another adventure together – Mom and I on our outward-bound Emirates flight to Dubai and the Far East, 2005 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Ventral and dorsal view of a Philippines colugo, plus an American false vampire bat (above), depicted in Plate 58 from the first volume of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus (1734)

Colugos must surely be among the most bizarre yet bewitching of all mammals. Native to the tropical forests of southeast Asia, most famous for the extensive gliding membrane (patagium) connecting their limbs, tail, and even the digits of their paws, and as big as a medium-sized possum or very large squirrel, the two modern-day species of colugo are the only surviving members of the mammalian order Dermoptera.

Photograph of a colugo at rest upon a tree trunk (public domain)

The larger and more familiar of these two species is the Philippines colugo Cynocephalus volans, which is endemic to this multi-island southeast Asian nation, and measures up to 17 in long. The second, smaller, and less familiar species is the Malayan or Sunda colugo Galeopterus variegatus, but this colugo has a much wider distribution - occurring in Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Singapore, peninsular Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.

Widely deemed from the findings of recent molecular phylogenetic studies to be the primates' closest living relatives, these extraordinary yet surprisingly little-known gliding mammals are also called caguans and cobegos, as well as flying lemurs - even though they glide rather than fly and are not lemurs!

Perhaps the most memorable description of a colugo that I've ever read appears in Bill Garnett's book Oddbods! (1984):

"Imagine a floppy shopping bag with an avocado sticking out sideways at the top; hang it by claws beneath a branch; put a huge round eye on the avocado - and cover the lot in a soft furry pelt, mottled fawn and grey. You've now got yourself a colugo."

19^th-Century engraving of a colugo gliding, revealing its extensive patagium

But what on earth (or in the air!), I hear you ask, do colugos have to do with flying cats? I'm very glad that you asked me that question!

Let me begin answering it by introducing the grotesque Asian bat-cat depicted in the eminent Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher's tome China Monumentis (1667). Kircher claimed that such creatures (which he referred to as flying cats - 'Catti Volantes' - in his Latin text) existed in the forested mountains of India's Kashmir Province, but that upon closer examination they merely proved to be bats, albeit ones as big as (if not bigger than) chickens or geese.

Athanasius Kircher’s bat-cat engraving

Zoologically speaking, however, the animal in this weird illustration does not resemble a bat, not least because the membranes of its wings are much more extensive than those of bats. Instead, it may conceivably have been an early attempt to portray a colugo, because the bat-cat's wings are actually pictured as a membrane extending from the forelegs to the hind legs and onto the tail, exactly mirroring the gliding membrane of colugos. But it could well be that as someone not trained in zoology, Kircher might simply have considered colugos to be bats anyway

Moreover, a distorted, secondhand (or more) account of a colugo may explain traveller Marco Polo's curious mention of a still-unidentified beast from the Far East known as a cat-a-mountain. This was said to be a predatory cat with the body of a leopard but also with a strange skin that stretched out when it hunted, enabling it to fly in pursuit of its prey.

A somewhat aggressive-looking colugo in an early engraving

A third potential case of cat-into-colugo reared its furry head in the 1990s, because that was when I uncovered the following intriguing but (at that time) previously-unpublicised report, entitled 'Flying Cat', which had been published in the volume for 1868 of a long-forgotten British journal entitled The Naturalist's Note Book:

"A nondescript animal, said to be a flying cat, and called by the Bhells pauca billee, has just been shot by Mr. Alexander Gibson, in the Punch Mehali [India]. The dried skin was exhibited at the last meeting of the Bombay Asiatic Society. It measured 18 inches in length, and was quite as broad when extended in the air. Mr. Gibson, who is well known as a member of the Asiatic Society and a contributor to its journal, believes the animal to be really a cat, and not a bat or a flying-fox [fruit bat], as some contend."

As I pondered in various articles and later in my book Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), could this extraordinary animal have been an early example of a winged cat (click here for more info re these bizarre yet totally bona fide felids, and here for a video of one such individual)? Or was it a large species of bat – or even a colugo?

More than 145 years have now passed by since this strange creature was reported in The Naturalist's Note Book, yet its taxonomic identity remains unclear – or does it? In fact, thanks to a wonderful tome that I acquired only very recently, I have finally solved the tenacious mystery of Gibson's flying cat.

My copy of Taschen's spectacular compendium of the illustration plates from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus (© Taschen)

Entitled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities and first published by Taschen in 2001 (mine is a 2011 reprint of it), the spectacular book in question that I purchased last month is a lavishly reproduced compendium of all of the glorious illustration plates from the four-volume magnum opus of Albertus Seba (1665-1736). An exceedingly wealthy Dutch businessman who was one of the most celebrated collectors of natural history specimens ever, Seba had amassed not one but two immense, internationally-renowned collections (click here to access a separate ShukerNature post containing additional details concerning Seba and his collections), and his four-volume tome, his Thesaurus as he entitled it, was basically a lavishly-illustrated catalogue of his collections' numerous specimens, containing more than 400 colour plates and published from 1734 to 1765.

Portrait of Albertus Seba, by Jacobus Houbraken (1698-1780)

Taschen's compendium of Seba's Thesaurus plates does not include any of his original accompanying text, which was written in both Latin and French and described each specimen in detail, but it does contains a lengthy introduction written by this compendium's German compilers. And it was tucked within this where, with great excitement and delight, I came upon an ostensibly inauspicious yet truly revelationary paragraph - a hitherto-cryptic nugget of knowledge that finally and fully elucidated the longstanding enigma of the flying cats. Contained within a section headed 'Curiosities and Special Attractions in the Thesaurus', this crucial paragraph reads as follows:

"A particular rarity in the Thesaurus are the so-called "Fliegende Katzen" (flying cats) and "Fliegende Hunde" (flying dogs) from tropical regions, although – contrary to what their names imply – they are not related to feline or canine species. Flughund (lit. flying dog) nevertheless remains the German designation for the fruit bat even today (in English it is also called a flying fox). Amongst the animals which Seba describes as "flying dogs" is a true fruit bat (Pteropus sp., I, 57, Figs. 1-2) and a tropical American false vampire bat (Vampyrum spectrum, I, 58, Fig. 1). Among the "flying cats" in the Thesaurus (I, 58, Figs. 2-3) we find the giant flying lemur of the Philippines (Cynocephalus volans), which together with another species forms a separate group of mammals."

Plate 58 is the illustration opening this present ShukerNature blog post, which does indeed portray the American false vampire Vampyrum spectrum (which happens to be the world's largest species of carnivorous bat) plus the ventral and dorsal view of a Philippines colugo. Below is the clearer version of this plate that appears in the Taschen compendium.

Ventral and dorsal view of a Philippines colugo, plus an American false vampire bat (above), depicted in Plate 58 as reproduced within the Taschen compendium of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus plates (© Taschen)

Spurred on by this vital insight, yesterday I tracked down and consulted online a pdf of the original Seba's Thesaurus, which not only contained the plates but also Seba's own descriptions of the specimens depicted in them. And sure enough, the colugo was referred to by Seba in his descriptions as Felis volans ('flying cat'), and the Chat qui volé ('cat that flies'), as revealed here:

The colugo-relevant Latin and French text from the original 1734 edition of Seba's Thesaurus, Vol. 1

So there it is – the mystery laid bare, a mystery no longer. Asia's so-called flying cats were indeed colugos - or flying lemurs, as they are still popularly referred to. Bearing in mind, however, that colugos have very dog-like heads (as indeed have some lemurs, hence 'flying lemur' as a name applied to colugos), it's something of a riddle how they ever came to be dubbed 'flying cats', but at least the suspected connection has now finally been verified.

Only one mysterious aspect of this case remains unsolved. Colugos are southeast Asian species; they are not native to anywhere in India - including the disputed Kashmir territory (remember Kircher's bat-cat?). Perhaps, therefore, the Gibson 'flying cat' was not actually shot in India after all, but had merely been preserved or exhibited there - with the claim that it had originally been shot there too merely being a journalistic error. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that an unusual animal has incited all manner of outlandish, error-ridden reporting by poorly-informed or overly-imaginative hacks.

Far less likely, but by no means impossible, and certainly much more intriguing, is the possibility that there were once (and maybe still are?) colugos belonging to one or other of the two known species– or perhaps even to an entirely-distinct third colugo species – inhabiting regions of Asia such as India and Kashmir that fall outside their currently-confirmed modern-day distribution range, but have remained undiscovered and undescribed by science. Who knows – those erstwhile 'flying cats' may still have the potential to surprise us after all.

19^th-Century engraving of a Philippines colugo

19^th-Century engraving of a praying mantis

The longest species of praying mantis currently known to science is the giant stick mantis Ischnomantis gigas. Brown in colour, enabling it to blend in with the bushes upon which it lives and lies in wait for unwary prey to approach, this mighty mantid is native to Senegal, southern Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, northern Nigeria, Cameroon, and Sudan. The longest specimen on record is an adult female collected in Kankiya, northern Nigeria, which measured a very impressive 17.2 cm long, and is now preserved in London's Natural History Museum.

Ischnomantis media, a smaller relative of I.gigas (public domain)

Africa is also home to the world's largest mantis species, the aptly-named mega-mantis Plistospilota guineensis, native to Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, and Ghana. Adult females grow up to 11 cm long, but are bulkier and heavier (weighing up to 10 g) than those of the giant stick mantis. They also have much larger wings; the wings of females belonging to the giant stick mantisI. gigas are so small that the females are rendered flightless.

But could there be even bigger species of mantid still awaiting formal scientific discovery and description? The reason why I ask this question is that a few years ago I had a first-hand encounter with a mysterious giant mantis, one that I was unable to identify and which has puzzled me ever since. So I am now documenting it here – as an online ShukerNature exclusive – in the hope that someone reading this post of mine may be able to offer a solution.

Mantids of many kinds (public domain)

In November 2008, my mother Mary D. Shuker and I spent four days at the private Shamwari Game Reserve, situated just outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa's Eastern Cape. On the last day of our stay there, just a few moments before the car arrived to take us and some other Shamwari guests back to the airport at Port Elizabeth, one of the safari guides walked over towards where we were all waiting, and squatting on the outstretched palm of his right hand was what I can only describe as an absolutely enormous praying mantis.

Brown in colour and very burly, this extraordinary specimen was so big that it was easily the length of his entire hand, and it was very much alive. Its 'praying' front limbs were moving slightly, and its head turned to look at us as we gazed at it in astonishment. As it made no attempt to fly away, however, I am assuming that it was flightless.

Frustratingly, my camera was packed away in one of my cases, so I couldn't take any photographs of this amazing insect. Nor could I question the guide about it, because at that same moment the car arrived to take us to the airport, so the guide walked off, still carrying the huge mantis on his hand.

19^th-Century engraving illustrating a selection of mantids

Needless to say, I have never forgotten that spectacular creature, and I have sought ever since to uncover its taxonomic identity, but I have been unable to reconcile it with any mantis species recorded from South Africa (or, indeed, from anywhere else for that matter!).

So what wasthis mystery mantis of truly monstrous dimensions? If anyone can provide an answer, I'd love to hear from you!

Mom (on right) with a fellow guest in front of Long Lee Manor, our place of residence while staying in Shamwari Private Game Reserve, South Africa, November 2008 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Close-up photo of China's one-legged mystery snake (© CEN/Europics) - click it to enlarge it

Some zoological photographs are so bizarre that long after they first hit the news headlines, they still continue to circulate online, like restless ghosts doomed to wander forever down the highways and byways of the worldwide web, resisting all attempts to expose them as hoaxes or explain them as grotesque yet nonetheless natural phenomena. One such image that seems to fall into the latter category is the example that opens this present ShukerNature blog post – namely, a supposed one-legged, claw-footed snake from China.

This anomalous serpent made its media debut as far back as mid-September 2009, since when it has been the online focus of various less than credible claims and all manner of decidedly credulous comments, but no rigorous, in-depth assessment. Consequently, I felt that it was high time that this sorry situation was rectified, so here is my own personal appraisal of this very curious case.

The story broke on 14 September 2009, with news reports worldwide presenting the now-(in)famous photograph reproduced above of a dead snake seemingly possessing a single small but perfectly-formed claw-footed leg, and providing the following scant details concerning it. One typical report appeared in the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper for that particular date, and provides the standard set of details reiterated in all other media accounts that I have seen. It stated that Mrs Duan (aka Dean) Qiongxiu, a 66-year-old woman from Suining in Southwest China, had woken up during the middle of the night, heard a scratching sound, turned on her bedroom's light, and then, in her quoted words, "saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw". She was so frightened by it that she grabbed one of her shoes and beat the unfortunate if uncanny serpent to death before preserving its battered carcase – measuring 16 in long and as thick as a human little finger - in a bottle of alcohol. It was subsequently forwarded to the Life Sciences Department at China's WestNormalUniversity in Nanchang. Snake expert Long Shuai was quoted as saying: "It is truly shocking but we won't know the cause until we've conducted an autopsy".

Those, then, are the facts of this case – such that they are. Not even the snake's species is identified. However, a popular identity nominated in various internet reptile forum/discussion groups is Dinodon rufozonatum, a colubrid with a wide distribution in East Asia, including China. It measures up to 28 in long, but is very slender, with brown background colouration marked with transverse crimson bands dorsally, pearl-coloured ventrally. It preys upon a wide range of small animals, including other snakes, lizards, small birds, fishes, and frogs, but is not believed to be venomous. This species certainly resembles the mystery snake in the photograph.

As for the results of the autopsy, more than four-and-a-half years later the world is apparently still waiting for them, because as far as I am aware, none have ever been made public. All that we do have, therefore, is supposition, and plenty of it, but nothing substantiated by corroborative evidence. So, based solely upon its appearance as portrayed within this photograph, how can the one-legged snake of China be explained?

Four plausible theories exist (i.e. discounting those claiming it to be an unnatural freak created in some secret laboratory, an alien entity, a radiation-induced mutant, or some paranormal aberration of occult origin).

Theory #1 is that it is a hoax. In other words, either the photograph is a fake image created by computerised photo-manipulation, or it is real but depicts a skilfully-manufactured model or comparable artifact. Despite much online research, I have found no evidence to support either of these possibilities, and none of the famous hoaxbusting websites has outed it either.

Theory #2 is that the creature is genuine and represents a striking, extreme example of atavism, i.e. the spontaneous development by an individual of a morphological feature possessed by far-distant ancestral forms or species but normally lost in their present-day descendants. I have many cases of atavism on file, covering a wide range of examples and species (click here for my ShukerNature blog post on atavistic extra toes in horses). Particularly pertinent to this case, however, are those featuring whales and other cetaceans exhibiting rudimentary external hind limbs – normally, cetaceans lack such limbs and even the pelvic girdle itself is very small. A comparable, but even more specialised situation occurs in snakes.

Millions of years ago, the ancestors of snakes possessed four well-formed legs and two limb girdles, but these became ever more reduced in form during ophidian evolution, so that modern-day snakes have entirely lost their forelimbs and pectoral girdle as well as – in most cases - their pelvic girdle and hind limbs. Famously, however, boas and pythons still possess a vestigial pelvic girdle and rudimentary external hind limbs. These latter limbs take the form of a pair of very small spur-like femur bones (known as pelvic or anal spurs) appressed to their body wall (on either side of the vent in males).

Could the claw-footed leg of China's unipodal serpent wonder therefore be an evolutionary, atavistic throwback to the snakes' distant antecedents? If so, a genetic mutation may have occurred during its embryonic development that somehow unlocked the still-preserved but normally-suppressed code in its DNA for creating a well-formed limb, foot, and clawed digits.

Although the various fully-verified cases of hind-limbed cetaceans demonstrate that such a concept is not beyond the realms of possibility, there are some serious problems to consider when attempting to apply this same scenario to China's legged snake. First and foremost is the anomalous limb's position. Far from being situated in the vicinity of where either the snake's pectoral girdle or its pelvic girdle would be if it too had been recalled into existence via atavism, the leg is located, very oddly, in the middle of the snake's body instead, seeming to emerge from somewhere in the rib-cage. Even in atavism, a recalled appendage normally arises in the anatomically correct location for it, not in some entirely incorrect position. Secondly, the foot's orientation is wrong too, as its sole is facing forward, towards the proximal end of the snake, instead of facing backward, like all animal feet do. Thirdly, the limb, feet, and clawed digits appear to be fully-developed, not rudimentary or at least incompletely formed, like hind limbs in whales and other examples of atavistic appendages normally are. Consequently, I consider it unlikely that the limb of China's legged snake is an atavistic appendage.

Theory #3 is that the leg does not belong to the snake, but rather is from some originally external source that the snake has swallowed, and has burst through its gut and body wall. This could have happened if, for instance, the snake had swallowed whole (as snakes generally do) a seized lizard or toad (both of which are animal types represented in China by species with limbs resembling the snake's ambiguous example), and the still-living victim had kicked out violently while trying to escape from the snake's gut.

Three features of the snake make this prospect a plausible one. Firstly, the region of the snake's body from which the leg is emerging is swollen both fore and aft, which would be consistent with the presence there of the snake victim's ingested body. Click here (and then scroll halfway down the page) to see a photo of a living specimen of D. rufozonatum pictured directly after having swallowed a frog - the size, shape, and position of the swelling inside the snake that is the ingested whole frog look identical to those of the swelling inside China's legged snake. Secondly, at the base of the leg is a swollen, pedicel-like region, which could conceivably be an oedematic swelling (explaining why it has the same markings as the body of the snake) and/or an accumulation of scar tissue resulting from healing of the hole in the snake's body wall that had been created when its victim kicked through it. Thirdly, the fact that the sole of the foot points forward is inconsistent with its being an atavistic limb of the snake but is wholly consistent with its being the foreleg of a prey victim that had been swallowed head-first, as is normal practice by snakes.

Incidentally, confirmed, comparable cases have been recorded from antelope-ingesting pythons whose victims' horns have pierced through their ophidian engulfers' gut and body wall.

Theory #4: There has been some online speculation as to whether such rupturing of the snake's body wall may actually have occurred only when the woman beat it to death (i.e. the leg was not present externally prior to this), and that her description of the snake as being legged beforehand was therefore mistaken or incorrectly reported. If this were correct, however, there would not be any presence of what appears to be scar tissue consistent with healing of the hole. Instead, all that would be present would be just a unhealed hole with the leg protruding directly through it and probably stained at its base with congealed blood that had leaked out through the hole. Yet no such blood is visible there in the photograph.

Obviously, an autopsy, or even a mere x-ray, of the snake's body would readily reveal whether its gut did indeed contain the body of a prey victim and also whether the mysterious leg belonged to that victim. Equally, if the leg was instead an appendage of the snake itself, an autopsy would expose this. So it is a great puzzle why the results of the autopsy – always assuming, of course, that one was ever conducted – seem never to have been publicly released. Riddles like this legged snake need a solution, and the solution needs to be aired, even it is as mundane as a snake whose engulfed prey victim proved to be not just alive but also kicking – and very emphatically so. Otherwise they are destined to appear and reappear in the freak shows of cyberspace ad infinitum, not to mention ad nauseam.

STOP PRESS

At the time of uploading this article of mine onto ShukerNature earlier today, I was only aware of one photograph depicting China's legged snake. Tonight, however, Facebook correspondent Andrew Webster drew my attention to a website (click here) containing two more , including this one, depicting the dead snake being held by a lady I assume to be Mrs Duan Qiongxiu:

Mrs Duan Qiongxiu(?) holding the dead legged snake (copyright holder unknown to me)

As noted by Andrew, viewed from this angle the limb appears to be that of a toad.

Speaking of which: Also well worthy of inclusion here is the following photograph (copyright owner unknown to me) of a South African night adder Causus sp. that has swallowed a toad which, in keeping with the defence mechanism of such creatures, evidently inflated itself when ingested, forcing two of its limbs through the snake's gut and body wall:

For more mysterious snakes, be sure to check out my book The Beasts That Hide From Man(Paraview: New York, 2003)

On Easter Monday 2013,
my dear mother, Mary Shuker, passed away.

So today, on Easter Monday 2014,
I am dedicating this ShukerNature blog post to her.

God bless you, little Mom -

I shall always love you, miss you,
and wish that you were here with me still.

Computer-created representation of a white eagle in mountain darkness

To misquote Oscar Wilde: To lose one white eagle may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.

In the annals of ornithology, only two types of white eagle have been reported – one in Europe, and one in North America. Both, however, are long vanished, not only from our planet but also from contemporary records. Indeed, even their erstwhile existence is known from only the most sparse and fragmentary details, and has been largely forgotten for centuries - until now. I first learned of these birds from their tantalisingly short entries in Extinct Birds (2012) by Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters, and was determined to find out more about them. Consequently, after having spent much time painstakingly tracing and collating it, I now have pleasure in documenting here the very scattered, disparate history of what appear to have once been a pair of real and extremely impressive but highly mysterious raptors, of unconfirmed taxonomic status, which were lost to the world before any physical trace of their former presence had been obtained for scientific examination.

The earliest documentation of the European white eagle appears to occur in the writings of the 13^th-Century German Dominican friar and Catholic bishop Albertus Magnus. His words were reiterated three centuries later in a couple of brief references in the year 1555. The first of these was by Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), who documented it on p. 199 of his Avium Natura(1555), the bird tome in his celebrated five-volume, 45,000-plus-page encyclopaedia Historiae Animalium (published 1551-1558). He referred to it as Aquila alba sive Cygne ('the white or swan eagle'), and Aquila albasubsequently became its official binomial name in taxonomic nomenclature. Similarly, French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517-1564) referred to this bird as the 'aigle toute blanche' ('all-white eagle') on p. 89 of his L'Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux (1555). Following Gesner's lead, Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) termed it Aquila alba seu cycnea on p. 231 of his Ornithologiae, hoc est de Avibus Historia (1599).

An illustration of the European white eagle from 1790

On p. 63 of his Onomasticon Zoicon: Plerorumque Animalium Differentias et Nomina Propria Pluribus Linguis Exponens (1668), Somerset-born natural history writer Walter Charleton (1619-1707) called it the white eagle. And it was Aquila alba to Poland's Reverend Gabriel Rzaczynski (1664-1737) on p. 299 of his tome Historia Naturalis Curiosa Regni Poloniae (1721), who also referred to it as Aquila Cygnea Aldrovandi in a subsequent publication of 1745 entitled Auctarium Historiae Naturalis Regni Poloniae Magnique Ducatus Lituaniae Annexarumque Provinciarum in Puncta. Five years later, Jacob T. Klein summarised it on p. 42 of his Historiae Avium Prodromus cum Praefatione de Ordine Animalium in Genere (1750). In 1760, French zoologist Mathurin J. Brisson (1723-1806) documented Aquila alba on p. 424 of his tome Ornithologia, sive Synopsis Methodica Sistens Avium Divisionem in Ordines, Sectiones, Genera, Species, Ipsarumque Varietates. Acclaimed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) also alluded to white eagles in his multi-volume magnum opus Histoire Naturelle (1749-1788).

English ornithologist John Latham (1740-1837) documented this raptor in three separate publications – calling it the white eagle on p. 36 of his famous treatise A General Synopsis of Birds(1781), applying to it the taxonomic binomial name Falco cygneus on p. 14 of his Index Ornithologicus (1790), and commenting upon what he believed its status to be in his General History of Birds (1822). Meanwhile, on p. 257 of his own version (published in 1788) of Linnaeus's pioneering taxonomic work Systema Naturae, German naturalist Johann F. Gmelin (1748-1804) had christened it Falco albus (but as the genus Falcowas subsequently limited to falcons, this was later reverted to Aquila albaby other writers). In 1809, English zoologist George Shaw (1751-1813) dubbed it Falco cygneus after Latham on p. 76 of the bird volume in his sixteen-volume series General Zoology (1809-1826).

And this seems to be the full (or at the very least the major) extent of the European white eagle's formal documentation in the scientific literature – but what did these various accounts actually say about it? Sadly, the answer to that question is…very little indeed. Moreover, as was typical back in those far-distant days, each work did little (if anything) more than simply regurgitate what had been published in the previous ones. So here is a summary of the sparse, salient details gathered from these sources.

Gesner's illustration of the golden eagle

Albertus Magnus stated that the European white eagle preys upon rabbits, hares, and sometimes fishes too, and that it inhabits the Alps, as well as the rocks bordering the Rhine, where, according to the Rev. Gabriel Rzaczynski, it builds its nests. Brisson stated that it is as large as the familiar golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos, but is entirely white - as white as snow. Rzaczynski noted that it has a 9-ft wingspan, and likened its white plumage to that of a swan. He also claimed that a specimen had been killed in Poland and its body shown to the country's monarch, John II Casimir Vasa ((but its subsequent fate is apparently unknown). Due to its fish-eating proclivities, Aldrovandi suggested that it may be more closely related to the osprey than to any eagle (but there are a number of eagle species famed for their piscivorous behaviour).

All of the European white eagle's early chroniclers presumed it to be a valid, distinct race in its own right. However, Buffon deemed all white eagles to be nothing more than varieties of the golden eagle. Conversely, although he included Buffon's opinion in his own coverage of the European white eagle within his 1781 publication, Latham decided to follow Brisson's stance in categorising it as a separate species – but by 1822 he had changed his mind, labelling it as merely a colour variety of the golden eagle after all.

Not that it mattered much by then anyway, except in a strictly academic sense, because sightings of the European white eagle were no longer being reported. Indeed, in his 1809 bird volume, Shaw had already noted that "it does not appear to be known to modern naturalists". Tragically, this pallid-plumed, winged prince of the alpine mountains had gone, forever. No records exist regarding the reason for its disappearance, but such a spectacular bird would unquestionably have been a major target for hunters, seeking to add its immaculate form to their trophies (a comparable fate befell the white tiger in India). If, as does seem likely, it existed as a discrete, self-perpetuating population of a distinct colour morph of the golden eagle, presumably either albinistic or (more probably) leucistic, and therefore the physical expression of a recessive mutant allele, it would not have been common to begin with, so would have been unable to withstand persecution for any notable length of time. Occasionally, a freak partially-white specimen of the golden eagle is reported today, usually in North America, but not from any self-perpetuating white population.

A partially-white (leucistic) golden eagle sighted in Colorado in July 2008

I am not aware of any preserved specimens of the European white eagle, and the present ShukerNature post is the most comprehensive documentation of this hitherto all-but-forgotten mystery bird ever written.

As for America's equivalent: This is – or was – the Louisiana white eagle Aquila candidus, also known as the conciliating eagle. It was originally documented by Antoine-Simon le Page du Pratz (1695?-1775) in his tome Histoire de la Louisiane (1758). Although born in Europe, this noted ethnographer, historian, and naturalist had lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734, where he had befriended the leaders of the Natchez nation there and had also learned their language. On p. 75 of his work, he referred to a white eagle that was smaller and rarer than the golden eagle, but more handsome, being almost entirely white – only the tips of its wings' quills were black. These quills were purchased at high prices by the Natchez people, who valued them greatly and apparently used them to compose the fan section of their symbol of peace, known as the calumet or pipe of peace (a very long reed ornamented with feathers).

On p. 197 of the second (bird) volume in his two-volume treatise Arctic Zoology (1785), documenting the mammals and birds of North America, Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) merely paraphrased Du Pratz's documentation of the Louisiana white eagle. So too did Latham in his 1781 tome. On p. 258 of his version of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, Gmelin accorded this raptor the taxonomic binomial name Falco candidus, whereas in 1809 George Shaw dubbed it Falco conciliator on p. 77 of the bird volume in his General Zoology.

Hand-coloured engraving from 1840 of an adult bald eagle

But what was this enigmatic bird, which, just like its European equivalent, has long since disappeared, both physically and figuratively? Its last notable mention was by English ornithologist Hugh E. Strickland (1811-1853), who included it in his posthumously-published book Ornithological Synonyms (1855). Here he listed its name as a synonym of the bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus, and questioned the accuracy of du Pratz's original account of it. Yet other zoological descriptions included by du Pratz in his book were accurate, so why shouldn’t his account of the Louisiana white eagle have been too? French naturalist Charles-Nicholas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751-1812) speculated that the Louisiana white eagle and the European white eagle were one and the same form, but du Pratz claimed that the former raptor was smaller than the golden eagle, whereas according to Brisson the European white eagle was the same size as the golden eagle. If these claims were correct, this indicates that the two white eagles were distinct from one another.

Worth noting is that a few confirmed specimens of white or mostly white bald eagle have been documented in modern times, but not a small, self-perpetuating population of them, which seems to have been true with the Louisiana white eagle. Certainly, Du Pratz did state that this latter raptor was rare; and in view of how valuable its feathers were, it may well have gone the same way as other birds whose handsome plumes attracted similarly unwelcome attention - such as the New Zealand huia (click here for more details) and the Hawaiian mamo, for instance.

Whatever the answer, the world is surely a poorer place without the sight of a magnificent white eagle soaring skyward among the lofty peaks of some stark mountain, like a pale feathered phantom whose mighty pinions bear it ever higher toward that great Empyrean above.

Nor are they the only mystery eagles on record. Remind me, another time, to recall for you the tiger eagle of Latvia, or the fierce eagle of Astrakhan, or the Macarran eagle of South America. And don't forget to click here for my extensive ShukerNature documentation of Washington's eagle – the most controversial lost eagle of all.

The burbot – does this unusual fish hold the key to the monsters of LakeLabynkyr?

Almost 9 miles long, 2.5 miles wide, and up to 260 ft deep in one particular section, LakeLabynkyr in far-eastern Russia's Yakutia (Sakha) Republic is not only a large but also a very remote body of icy-cold freshwater. It is not frequently visited by outsiders, but those hardy local hunters that have braved its location's inhospitable climate have sometimes returned home with stories of formidable aquatic monsters inhabiting its chilly depths - stories that date back as far as the 19^th Century but which have received increasing public and scientific attention since the 1950s.

Some tell of a dark-grey beast with an enormous mouth that has allegedly devoured their dogs when they have leapt into the lake to retrieve shot ducks. Others speak of a black, long-necked, snorting creature with a snake-like head that preys upon geese and reindeer. In my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), I noted that according to Anatoly Pankov, a chronicler of mysterious happenings in this part of the world, sometime during the 1950s one such creature supposedly raised its neck above the lake's surface in full view of a team of geologists and lunged upwards to snare a flying bird between its jaws while also being watched by a number of astonished reindeer hunters.

In 1962, Dr Sergei Klumov suggested that an unknown species of amphibian may exist here - a possibility also contemplated by Soviet geologist Dr Viktor Tverdokhlebov, who visited LakeLabynkyrduring Russia's Stalinist era. A relict reptile was an alternative candidate proffered by Tverdokhlebov, but he was unable to put either option to the test, as he did not report any sightings of monsters there. Nor did any team members from a Russian expedition that visited in 1963, or an Estonian team in 1964. Yet the legend of mystery beasts lurking beneath its water surface continues.

Modern reconstruction of Mastodonsaurus - a very big and notably large-mouthed amphibian from the Middle Triassic Period (public domain)

Thanks to the intriguing findings of a team that visited this mysterious lake last month, however, the true nature of its supposed monsters may be very different from the accounts and theories noted above, but no less interesting either.

The team in question was composed of divers from the Russian Geographic Society and the Diving Sport Federation of Russia. Their mission had three separate goals – to collect samples for formal scrutiny and analysis by scientists investigating the long-suspected possibility that an underwater link exists between LakeLabynkyrand the equally mysterious LakeVorota, almost 20 miles away; to break the world record for the deepest under-ice dive; and to look out for Labynkyr's fabled monsters. By the end of their visit, the team had accomplished both of their first two goals, and had also obtained some thought-provoking findings of great relevance to their third.

As documented by the Siberian Times on 21 April 2014, team member Lyudmila Emeliyanova, an Associate Professor of Biogeography, revealed that during a previous visit here (in 2009):

"It was our fourth or fifth day at the lake when our echo sounding device registered a huge object in the water under our boat.

"The object was very dense, of homogeneous structure, surely not a fish nor a shoal of fish, and it was above the bottom. I was very surprised but not scared and not shocked, after all we did not see this animal, we only registered a strange object in the water. But I can clearly say - at the moment, as a scientist, I cannot offer you any explanation of what this object might be."

And that was not all - further sonar readings of this same kind were subsequently recorded by her equipment:

"I can't say we literally found and touched something unusual there but we did register with our echo sounding device several seriously big underwater objects, bigger than a fish, bigger than even a group of fish."

In contrast, the largest life forms detected in the lake during this latest visit, and which were photographed by team member Alexander Gubin, were fishes up to 4 ft long that the team referred to as dogfishes – which is something of a mystery in itself.

Two photographs of 'dogfishes' encountered during the Russian team's visit to LakeLabynkyrin March 2014 (© Alexander Gubin/Siberian Times)

For whereas the term 'dogfish' is normally applied to various relatives of sharks, I was readily able to identify the fishes in Gubin's photographs as being something totally different.

Namely, a cod-related freshwater species known as the burbot Lota lota. So, could 'dogfish' be a colloquial name used in Russia for the burbot?

(Top) A burbot (© Achim R Schloeffel/Wikipedia); (Bottom) One of the Russian team's 'dogfishes' (© Alexander Gubin/Siberian Times)

Carnivorous by nature, this very distinctive species – the world's only freshwater gadiform - is known to attain a total length of up to 4 ft. However, larger specimens may conceivably exist in this large but little-disturbed lake.

Untroubled by any large-scale threat of predation by other animals or persecution by humans, and encouraged to attain an exceptionally large size by the lake's chilling temperature in the same way that fishes and invertebrates famously do in the freezing waters off Antarctica, perhaps undiscovered mega-burbots are the real monsters of Labynkyr.

For more information on Russian lake monsters, check out my book Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo(CFZ Press: Bideford, 2010).

Amphisbaenians and a tentacled caecilian illustrated in an engraving from 1811 – could the exploding 'worm' of Kalmykia be allied to one of these limbless herpetological forms?

A very curious type of vermiform mystery beast that may (or may not?) be allied to the notorious Mongolian death worm (click here,here,andhere for avariety of ShukerNature investigations concerning this much-dreaded Gobi-dwelling cryptid), but which is much less well known even in cryptozoological circles, has been reported from the steppes and desert dunes of Kalmykia. This is a region of Russiato the north of Chechnyaand Dagestan, and lies immediately to the west of Kazakhstan.

According to a letter of 6 January 1997 written to French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal by veteran Russian cryptozoologist Dr Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, this unidentified creature is referred to by the Kalmyks as the 'short grey snake'. Measuring 50 cm (20 in) long and 15-20 cm (6-8 in) in diameter, it has smooth grey skin, and is rounded at its anterior end, but terminates abruptly with a very short tail. So far, its local 'snake' appellation would seem to be appropriate, though it would be somewhat squat judging from its dimensions (visions of amphisbaenians, i.e. worm-lizards, or even those limbless worm-like amphibians known as caecilians also come to mind, but again their outline would be squat).

However, it also has one characteristic that instantly sets it apart from any bona fide herpetological entity, squat or otherwise, and ostensibly places it among vermiforms of the invertebrate kind instead. For according to the Kalmyks, their so-called 'short grey snake' does not possess any bones.

Worms of many types - a chromolithograph from 1886

This would appear to be substantiated by their claim that if one of these beasts is struck hard in the middle of its back with a stick, it explodes - leaving behind a patch of slime or grease stretching more than a metre (3 ft) in diameter across the ground as the only evidence of its former existence. Although she is not absolutely certain (her original notes were destroyed during a burglary in her office), Dr Koffmann believes she was told that this animal is slow-moving, and moves in a worm-like manner. As to whether it is dangerous, however, some Kalmyksaffirm that it is, but others state that it is not.

No mention is given of any facial features (although Koffmann claims that a second, smaller variety also exists here, which has a clearly delineated mouth). In any event, Kalmykia's exploding 'worm' exhibits sufficient differences from the Mongolian death worm for me to see little reason for assuming that these two creatures share anything other than the dubious honour of being presently unrecognised and thus ignored by modern-day science.

Then again…

This ShukerNature post is exclusively excerpted from my book The Beasts That Hide From Man(2003), which contains the most comprehensive documentation of the Mongolian death worm (as featured on its front cover) ever published.

Late 1800s engraving of a pangolin

Also known as scaly anteaters, pangolins are native to Africa and Asia, and have been implicated in certain cryptozoological cases - most notably the veo reported from the small Indonesian island of Rinca, and the fraudulent gorgakh of India (click herefor my ShukerNature coverage of both of these animals). However, I am only aware of a single case in which a pangolin has featured in a report of a supposed living dinosaur – and here it is.

Although I've had this account on file for many years, I misplaced it a long time ago, and even though I've wanted to refer to it since then on a number of occasions in various of my publications, I could never do so, because I've never been able to find it again - until tonight, when, as so often happens, I came upon it unexpectedly. Having done so, however, I am now placing it on record here without delay, to ensure that I never lose track of it again!

Chinese pangolin depicted on a North Vietnam postage stamp issued in 1965

Published in the 18 February 1964 issue of the then-weekly British magazine Animals, it consists of a response by English zoologist Dr Maurice Burton to a letter from a reader that had been published in a previous issue and which had dealt with the possible existence of living dinosaurs and pterodactyls.

The reason why I couldn’t find this account in my files before is that I had forgotten that its first part dealt not with pangolins but instead with Burton's belief that a large and very distinctive African waterbird known as the shoebill Balaeniceps rex was being mistaken for pterodactyls when seen in flight – a plausible theory that I have documented in further detail within my bookIn Search of Prehistoric Survivors(1995).

Shoebill – a modern-day pterodactyl impersonator, depicted in a 1901 painting

Consequently, I had filed it away in a folder dealing with sightings of alleged living pterosaurs, which is not one, therefore, that I was ever likely to look through in search of a pangolin-related item.

Anyway: back to this rediscovered account's pangolin section. After identifying living African pterodactyls as shoebills, Burton then considered the prospect of living dinosaurs, and provided a delightful anecdote as a reason why one should not always take eyewitness accounts on face value.

A pangolin illustration from the 1830s

Over the years, I've collected a number of wonderfully-bizarre zoological misidentifications (my book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings, 1997, contains an entire chapter devoted to some of them; and a particularly surreal one, the Kintail 'capybara', is documented here on ShukerNature), but Burton's drolly-recalled example is definitely one of my favourites, which is another reason why I am so pleased to have finally found it again. Here is what he wrote:

"Several reports of dinosaurs, from places as far apart as Canada and Borneo, have been investigated – insofar as one can investigate the report of an eyewitness. In none of these cases were there any solid grounds for supposing the reports to be more substantial than the one from Malaya. There a witness reported having seen a dinosaur cross the road in the beams of his headlamps. He estimated it to be not less than 25 feet long.

"When taken round the galleries of the RafflesMuseum so that he could indicate the kind of animal he thought he had seen, he pointed without hesitation to a pangolin and agreed he had misjudged size and distance. The Malayan pangolin is less than 3 feet long."

The perils of pangolins upon accurate judgement when encountered unexpectedly! In so many cryptozoological cases, mystery beasts are very much in the eye of the beholder – but not always, which is why I remain fascinated by the subject.

To be fair, however, anyone not familiar with pangolins might well consider them reptilian based upon their scaly outward appearance, and their surprise at suddenly seeing such an exotic-looking animal might well lead them to exaggerate its size and distort its form when recalled at a later time - unless of course there really is an unknown, giant variety of pangolin existing incognito within the jungles of Malaysia…??

A living pangolin – not a living dinosaur! (public domain)

The spotted zebra of Zambia's Rukwa Valley (copyright owner unknown to me)

The fascinating - and genuine - photograph of a spotted zebra presented above appears commonly on the Net, but with no accompanying details (or at least no accurate ones, from what I have read so far). So it seemed high time that its interesting history and some relevant background information regarding it were made available online, especially as I originally documented this animal almost 15 years ago. So here they are:

Can there be anything in nature more paradoxical than a zebra with spots? Remarkably, however, spotted zebras have occasionally been reported.

Pictured in London's Daily Mirror newspaper on 3 January 1968, probably the most famous specimen of a spotted zebra was observed in a herd of normal plains zebras Equus quagga (aka burchelli) roaming northern Zambia's Rukwa Valley. As can readily be observed in that remarkable photograph, opening this present ShukerNature post, its body was distinctively decorated with rows of white spots and thin white dashes, instead of exhibiting the familiar plains zebra patterning of stripes seen below.

A normal plains zebra (Chapman's subspecies, E. q. chapmani), exhibiting some faint brown shadow stripes ((c) Dr Karl Shuker)

As commented upon in 1981 by Dr Jonathan B.L. Bard within a Journal of Theoretical Biology paper dealing with mammalian coat patterns, this eyecatching oddity offers proof for believing that zebras are black animals with white stripes, rather than white animals with black stripes. For as Bard noted:

"It is only possible to understand the pattern [of the spotted zebra] if the white stripes had failed to form properly and that therefore the 'default' colour is black. The role of the striping mechanism is thus to inhibit natural pigment formation rather than to stimulate it".

Embryological studies have since confirmed this, as documented in Horns, Tusks, and Flippers: The Evolution of Hoofed Mammals (2003), authored by D.R. Prothero and R.M. Schoch.

This ShukerNature post is excerpted and expanded from my book Mysteries of Planet Earth: An Encyclopedia of the Inexplicable (Carlton: London, 1999).

Within my collection of cryptozoology-themed novels are several whose plots centre upon the discovery of bigfoot (aka sasquatch). Some of these, such as Lee Murphy's Where Legends Roam, are excellent; certain others are less so. One that definitely falls within the former category is Eric Penz's debut novel, Cryptid.

Originally published almost a decade ago, it has received a succession of very favourable reviews, and was chosen as joint 'Top Cryptofiction Book of the Year' for 2005 (click here) by Loren Coleman for leading cryptozoological website Cryptomundo. Such accolades are greatly deserved, because Cryptid very successfully presents the reader with a compelling, well-written, well-researched storyline based upon the celebrated bigfoot studies of the late Prof. Grover Krantz, and featuring a fascinating, wholly original historical premise hinted at in its subtitle – The Lost Legacy of Lewis and Clark.

One of the most significant explorations in the post-Columbus history of North America, the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806 was the very first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the USA. It departed in May 1804 from St Louis on the Mississippi, making its way westward through the continental divide to the Pacific coast. To quote from Wikipedia's entry for this historic venture:

"The expedition was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, consisting of a select group of U.S. Army volunteers under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and his close friend Second Lieutenant William Clark. Their perilous journey lasted from May 1804 to September 1806. The primary objective was to explore and map the newly acquired territory, find a practical route across the Western half of the continent, and establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.

"The campaign's secondary objectives were scientific and economic: to study the area's plants, animal life, and geography, and establish trade with local Indian tribes. With maps, sketches and journals in hand, the expedition returned to St. Louis to report their findings to Jefferson."

Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark (public domain)

What has intrigued Eric so much about this epic journey of discovery is the still-unexplained series of major gaps in the expedition journal written by Lewis. One such gap alone spanned 14 May 1804 to 7 April 1805, another spanned 26 August 1805 to 1 January 1806. What happened – moreover, what might have been discovered - during those very considerable, unrecorded periods of the expedition? And what might have been vigorously suppressed throughout history ever since then? As noted in its blurb, these tantalising thoughts are what gave birth to Cryptid:

"Something haunts the woods of Olympic National Park, a nightmare in hiding. Its existence has been kept secret by a conspiracy that stretches back to President Thomas Jefferson and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The truth that we have not been alone on this earth would have forever been lost except that some species just won’t die.

"Dr Samantha Russell has spent her career seeking for truth in the only way she knows how, on her hands and knees, painstakingly digging it up from the crust of the earth. When the truth arrives by way of FedEx, she cannot help but see it as nothing more than another scientific hoax, especially considering the source. Dr Jon Ostman has practically been excommunicated by the scientific community for his interest in such subjects as the American Sasquatch.

"Suffering from her father's tragic sense of curiosity, though, Sam can't resist the question begged by the bones contained in the wooden crate. How could they be bones and not fossils since Gigantopithecus had been extinct for 125,000 years?

"Driven to know the answer, Sam delays going to her father on his deathbed and instead pursues Jon to a remote corner of Washington state where he is about to make the greatest discovery involving the origins of the human species, a discovery Lewis and Clark may have already made two hundred years earlier. However, Sam is not the only one pursuing Jon, for one of our nation's first secrets is still being kept by all means necessary.

"And if they do survive the centuries-old conspiracy, they will not only rewrite American history, but they will prove that we are not the only intelligent, bipedal primate to survive extinction."

Yet in spite of the original success of Cryptid, Eric always felt that it was not quite 'him', and so, to remedy this situation, he decided to publish in ebook form a special Author's Edition. Here is Eric's own account of how this newest incarnation of his bigfoot novel came about, as quoted from the official Cryptidwebsite (click here), which is packed with additional information regarding both the novel and bigfoot itself:

"If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’m sure your father subscribed to this advice much like my own. This sage advice could perhaps apply to me releasing an Author’s Edition of my debut novel, Cryptid. The book was well received by both reader and critic. Sales were and still are admirable for a first novel. So then why bother with a new edition?

"Good question. And I’m not sure I have an equally good answer. All I can say is that in the years since Cryptidwas published I’ve lived with a nagging concern. The book as originally published was just not quite me. Like a picture hanging on the wall askew enough to place a sliver in your mind until you leveled it that fraction of a degree, I’ve had a sliver for Cryptid. And with the new brave world of ebook publishing, putting out a new edition is now feasible. So why a new edition? In short, because I now can. It’s time to pluck the sliver free.

"More specifically, the story was simply not complete. As the subtitle implies, this story involves Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The story begins with their amazing adventure. And yet, these two American heroes do not appear on screen. It’s time to fix that. I’ve included with this edition a new first chapter that was not included in the previous edition. This chapter stars both Lewis and Clark, though perhaps not quite as history might envision them.

"And so, I proudly present to you the Author’s Edition of Cryptid:The Lost Legacy of Lewis & Clark. Like many Director’s Cut versions of movies, this edition is the story as I believe it to be best told. It is now more me. That is not to say it is perfect. Quite the contrary. It is still a first novel, complete with all the quirks and imperfections that accompany an author’s early work. I wouldn’t change those for anything. That would be like removing a birth mark from your first born son. There are changes I could make, but I will save those for the film version.

"Without further ado, I present to you my first born son as I envisioned him to be. Enjoy the hunt.

"Two centuries in the making, Cryptid is the final chapter of the Lewis & Clark story. As with any good tale, the best secrets have been kept until the end."

The Author's Edition of Cryptid in ebook form can be purchased here on Amazon and at all other good bookstores – but this is still not all, because Eric has now announced exciting plans to produce a short film based upon his novel.

To publicise this latest endeavour, he has prepared a theatrical film trailer and some shorts, which received their debut screening on 22 April. But if you weren't there, worry not, because here are the necessary links, kindly provided to me by Eric, for you to view all of them online right now:

Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPHyVKu6B7E

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVw1WdHEfX8

Cave Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMvKD0PxKIQ

Hunt Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7MxdjxHFR4

Anthology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nD8a7h3Aak

Making Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLNnEuUem8U

Cryptidhas indeed returned, and the forthcoming film treatment will certainly ensure that it keeps on running - just like its hairy bipedal subjects, in fact!

CONTEMPLATING THE CON RIT

BIRD-EATING DEER AND FLESH-EATING SHEEP – A GRUESOME SELECTION OF UNEXPECTED HOOFED CARNIVORES

DOMINICA'S DEAD PARROT - A PERFECT PICTURE OF MYSTERY?

THE SHAMIR AND THE STONE WORM

TEN OF MY FAVOURITE CRYPTOZOOLOGY-LINKED LOCATIONS IN BRITAIN

MIDAS MARSUPIALS - THE GOLDEN WONDER OF GOLDEN WOMBATS

IN SEARCH OF PREHISTORIC SURVIVORS - HOW IT CAME TO BE, AND WILL BE AGAIN (CRITICS NOTWITHSTANDING!)

ANOMALOUS JAGUARS AND OTHER SPECKLED MYSTERY CATS FROM SOUTH AMERICA

ALBERTUS SEBA AND A PAIR OF SPECKLE-COATED MYSTERY BIG CATS FROM THE 1750S

THE STRIPED ANTEATER THAT MADE A BUFFOON OUT OF BUFFON

REMEMBERING MY MOTHER

WHEN FLYING CATS WERE FLYING LEMURS

DID I SEE AN UNDISCOVERED SPECIES OF GIANT PRAYING MANTIS IN SOUTH AFRICA?

WRONG-FOOTING A ONE-LEGGED MYSTERY SNAKE FROM CHINA

WHITHER THE LOST WHITE EAGLES OF EUROPE AND AMERICA?

SOME FISHY FINDINGS REGARDING THE MONSTERS OF RUSSIA'S LAKE LABYNKYR

AN EXPLOSIVE ENIGMA FROM KALMYKIA – THE 'OTHER' MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM?

THE PERILS OF PANGOLINS WHEN ENCOUNTERING LIVING DINOSAURS…?

STRIPE ME - A SPOTTED ZEBRA!

CRYPTID HAS RETURNED! - ONE OF THE BEST BIGFOOT NOVELS IS NOW EVEN BETTER, AND BIGGER!