Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. He is the author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), Dragons: A Natural History (1995), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), The Unexplained (1996), From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (1997), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), The Hidden Powers of Animals (2001), The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003), Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013), The Menagerie of Marvels (2014), A Manifestation of Monsters (2015), Here's Nessie! (2016), and what is widely considered to be his cryptozoological magnum opus, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016) - plus, very excitingly, his first two long-awaited, much-requested ShukerNature blog books (2019, 2020).

Dr Karl Shuker's Official Website - http://www.karlshuker.com/index.htm

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Saturday 16 November 2019

THE SIX-LEGGED SEA SERPENT OF STRONSAY - STILL BASKING IN CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY?

Modern-day artistic representation of what the Stronsay beast might have looked like if it had literally resembled in life the eyewitness descriptions of it in death (© Tim Morris)

Down through the centuries, countless reports of mysterious sea ‘monsters’ have been reported, often grouped together within that infamously heterogeneous cryptozoological conglomerate popularly known collectively as the Great Sea Serpent. In most cases, such reports consist entirely of eyewitness sightings, unsubstantiated by anything tangible that can be directly examined afterwards by interested researchers. Occasionally, however, physical evidence IS obtained…

Perhaps the most famous of such cases occurred at Stronsay, one of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland. On 26 September 1808, farmer John Peace was fishing east of Rothiesholm Point when he saw what seemed to be the carcase of a whale, cast up onto the rocks, above which were flocks of circling seabirds. He rowed up to it in his boat and examined it, and found that it was a very peculiar-looking creature, which did not resemble anything known to him. At that same time, another farmer, George Sherar, was watching Peace from the shore, and was able to confirm all of this. About 10 days later, moreover, he was able to see it for himself, because it was washed ashore on Stronsay, lying on its belly just below the high tide mark.

When Sherar discovered it there, he measured it, and found it to be 55 ft long. At least two other eyewitnesses (the afore-mentioned Peace and carpenter Thomas Fotheringhame) also measured it, and they obtained the same result. It was very serpentine, almost eel-like in general build, but possessed a 15-ft neck, a small head, and a long mane running along its back to the end of its tail. Most bizarre of all, however, was that it seemed to have three pairs of legs, and each foot had five or six toes. Sherar salvaged some vertebrae and the skull of this extraordinary creature – duly dubbed the Stronsay beast.

From the Wernerian Natural History Society's memoirs for 1808-1810, published in 1811, a sketch of the Stronsay sea serpent based upon eyewitness George Sherar's description and agreed by Sherar to be "an exact resemblance" of what he saw (public domain)

Details of its discovery and description ultimately reached Patrick Neill, secretary of Edinburgh's Wernerian Natural History Society, and at a meeting of the society on 19 November 1808 Neill released some details on this subject. At the next meeting, on 14 January 1809, he gave the Stronsay beast a formal scientific name - Halsydrus pontoppidani *, 'Pontoppidan's water snake of the sea' (after Erik Pontoppidan, an 18th-Century Norwegian bishop who had collected many sea serpent reports).

Erik Pontoppidan (public domain)

At that same meeting, Scottish anatomist Dr John Barclay, who had examined some of the beast's remains in Orkney, presented a paper in which he described the vertebrae, skull, and one of the creature's legs. His paper, accompanied with detailed diagrams, was published in 1811, within the society's memoirs, and attracted a great deal of attention. The vertebrae were very striking, resembling cotton reels, and were cartilaginous, but with calcification that radiated from the centre of each vertebra in a star-like pattern. The leg was also cartilaginous, but was not a real, jointed leg at all; it was merely a fin.

Dr John Barclay, 1820 portrait (public domain)

To many people, these features meant little, but they meant a great deal to the eminent naturalist Sir Everard Home, who was working at that time upon an exhaustive study of the basking shark Cetorhinus maximus - the world's second largest species of shark, but generally harmless, living on plankton. When Home heard about the Stronsay beast, he felt sure that it must have been a shark. This is because the only creatures to have cartilaginous vertebrae are sharks and rays, and the only creatures to have cartilaginous vertebrae with star-shaped calcification are sharks. Furthermore, when he compared the Stronsay beast's vertebrae, skull, and other salvaged remains with the corresponding portions of a known specimen of basking shark, they matched very closely.

Sir Everard Home (public domain)

Yet the long-necked, six-legged, mane-bearing Stronsay beast looked nothing like a basking shark - so how could this drastic difference in appearance be resolved? In fact, it was quite simple.

Stronsay beast vertebrae, an engraving from Barclay's 1811 paper (public domain)

When basking shark carcases begin to decompose, the entire gill apparatus falls away, taking with it the shark's characteristic jaws, and leaving behind only its small cranium and its exposed backbone, which have the appearance of a small head and a long neck. The triangular dorsal fin also rots away, sometimes leaving behind the rays, which can look a little like a mane - especially when the fish's skin also decays, allowing the underlying muscle fibres and connective tissue to break up into hair-like growth.

Additionally, the end of the backbone only runs into the top fluke of the tail, which means that during decomposition the lower tail fluke falls off, leaving behind what looks like a long slender tail. The pectoral and sometimes the pelvic fins remain attached, but become distorted, so that they can (with a little imagination!) look like legs with feet and toes. The resulting deceptively plesiosaur-like carcase is popularly (and fittingly) dubbed a pseudo-plesiosaur.

Finally, male sharks have a pair of leg-like copulatory organs called claspers, which would yield a third pair of 'legs', as happened with the Stronsay beast. Suddenly, a male basking shark has become a hairy six-legged long-necked sea serpent!

How a basking shark carcase decomposes into a pseudo-plesiosaur (© Markus Bühler/Journal of Cryptozoology)

Over the years, almost all of the Stronsay beast's preserved remains have been lost or destroyed, but three vertebrae are retained in Edinburgh's Royal Museum of Scotland - the last remnants of Stronsay's world-famous hexapodal sea serpent. Its mystery, conversely, continues to the present day, and for very good reason. The longest conclusively-identified basking shark that has been accurately measured was a truly exceptional specimen caught in 1851 in Canada's Bay of Fundy; whereas the average length for its species is under 26 ft, this veritable monster was a mighty 40 ft 3 in. Yet even that is almost 15 ft less than the length claimed by eyewitnesses for the Stronsay beast. Even the largest scientifically-measured specimen of the world's biggest fish - the whale shark Rhincodon typus - was only(!) 41.5 ft long.

Accordingly, in 2008 archaeogeneticist Dr Yvonne Simpson, who had been studying the Stronsay beast's few preserved remains since 2001, was reported in various media interviews as stating that due to its size she wondered whether it may have been some other species of shark rather than a basking shark, and was hoping to conduct DNA tests upon some newly-recovered bone fragments from this contentious carcase that had been given to her by a private collector (Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2008). However, nothing further seems to have emerged regarding this potentially exciting prospect.

Some cryptozoologists have also questioned whether the 55-ft Stronsay beast really was a basking shark, speculating that it may have belonged to a still-unknown, giant relative. One of the world's largest known sharks, the formidable megamouth Megachasma pelagios, remained wholly unknown to humankind until 15 November 1976, when the first recorded specimen was accidentally hauled up from the sea near the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Consequently, the prospect of undiscovered species of extra-large shark still eluding scientific discovery in modern times is far from being as unlikely as one might otherwise assume.

Megamouth shark (© FLMNH Ichthyology/Wikipedia - CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)

Alternatively, might the Stronsay beast simply have been an exceptionally large specimen of basking shark after all? In a Facebook comment concerning this classic sea monster carcase posted on 16 October 2019, American cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard offered the following pertinent thoughts:

Of course there were more outsized fish in those days - before population explosions, pollution and aggressive, industrialized fishing took hold. Perhaps the Stronsay Beast represented one of the last monster-sized basking sharks? 

This is the possibility that I personally consider most reasonable.

A third option is that the latter beast's size may have been measured inaccurately by its eyewitnesses – the option favoured by Home, who discounted the claimed 55-ft total length in favour of a more conservative yet still very impressive 36 ft. Yet if so, it seems very strange that three separate people measured it (one of whom, Thomas Fotheringhame, was a carpenter and therefore skilled in accurate measurement) and all obtained the same 55-ft total length for it. As is so often true with cryptozoological cases that date back quite considerably, it is likely that no conclusive answer will ever be obtained, so the controversy surrounding the Stronsay beast seems destined to persist indefinitely.

Having said that: during December 1941, history somewhat repeated itself in the Orkneys when a strange carcase, 25 ft long, was washed ashore at Scapa Flow. Its superficially prehistoric, plesiosaurian appearance was presumably sufficient for Provost J.G. Marwick, who had documented it in detail in a local newspaper account (Orkney Blast, 30 January 1942), to dub this enigma 'Scapasaurus'. Fortunately, a single vertebra from its remains was preserved and retained at London's Natural History Museum, which readily identified it as a basking shark.


* Taxonomic tail-note: Halsydrus pontoppidani Neill, 1809 is currently designated as a junior synonym of the basking shark's officially-recognised binomial name, Cetorhinus maximus Gunnerus, 1765.

Basking shark (public domain)




Thursday 7 November 2019

FINDING A FOSSIL NANDI BEAR? - OR, SIMBAKUBWA VS CHEMOSIT

Reconstruction of the likely appearance in life of Simbakubwa kutokaafrika (© Mauricio Anton/Ohio University/AFP/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)


Heavy breathing and a grunting noise heralded the brute’s emergence into the open of the runway. It had evidently heard them and was bent on making trouble. Scott had never imagined a beast so peculiar; in size, it was as big as a buffalo and stood fully that height at the shoulder: the hind-quarters sloped down like those of a hyena, and it had the hyena’s short, coarse hair, but here all similarity to that cowardly animal ceased. It had an enormous square head and short ears like those of a lion, a long snout with protruding incisors and a small, red-tinged eye. The creature moved like a large ape, its lengthy arms hanging down before it, the paws just touching the ground, and Scott was amazed to see that these paws were like an ape’s: prehensile, and equipped with thumb and fingers.…‘Ahi…i…e ! the Nandi Bear,’ gasped one of the boys, through chattering teeth.

          C.T. Stoneham – ‘The Bear of the Nandi’, in Killers and Their Prey


The above quote is from a short story of fiction, but its subject may be only too real. Also known variously as the chemosit, kerit, koddoelo, gadett, and khodumodumo, Africa's legendary Nandi bear must surely be one of the (if not THE) most formidable, ferocious mammalian cryptids ever documented, judging at least from the horrific experiences claimed by some of those persons who have allegedly encountered it at close range. Having said that, this infamously-aggressive, murderous monster has scarcely been reported for at least 60 years now, leading even the most optimistic mystery beast investigators to suspect that even if it were indeed real, it may have simply died out, quite probably as a result of its once-extensive, dense, rarely-penetrated Nandi and adjacent (once-contiguous) Kakamega Forest domain having been severely cut back and turned into farmland. Irrespective of its terrifying, ultra-dangerous nature, the loss of such a creature before its very existence had been confirmed and its taxonomic identity formally determined would be a profound zoological tragedy.

However, thanks to an ostensibly unrelated yet very significant (albeit extremely belated) palaeontological discovery made public just a short time ago, some decidedly chemosit-shaped shadows have begun to rise and thence flit tellingly through the collective cryptozoological consciousness.

One day in 2013, while conducting postgraduate research at Kenya's Nairobi Museum, palaeontologist Matthew Borths from Ohio University, USA, happened to open a cabinet drawer, and made a truly incredible discovery. Inside the drawer was an enormous fossil lower jawbone bearing some teeth, plus some individual teeth, a heel bone, and some distal toe bones. When enquiring about these mysterious remains, Borths learned that they had originally been collected as far back as 1978-1980 during various scientific excavations at an early Miocene-aged fossil bed named Meswa Bridge, in western Kenya, but had never been formally examined by anyone, lying forgotten and unstudied in that drawer for over 30 years instead. Moreover, he discovered that another Ohio University palaeontological researcher, Nancy Stevens, had also seen them in that same drawer and had puzzled over them when she too had been conducting research at Nairobi Museum.

Skeleton of Hyaenodon horridus, a North American species of hyaenodontid (public domain)

After Barths contacted her, they lost no time in researching these remains comprehensively, and revealed that they belonged to a hitherto-undescribed but quite enormous species of primitive mammalian creodont carnivore known as a hyaenodontid. The hyaenodontid lineage's most recent fossils are around 5-6 million years old (those of the giant new species were some 22 million years old), after which they apparently became extinct. Using three different methods of size estimate, Borths and Stevens obtained estimated total body masses for this very belatedly-recognised species of 280 kg, 1308 kg, and 1554 kg, plus a total length estimated at up to 2.5 m and a height of up to 0.75 m. If the creature had attained the upper estimates of mass, length, and height, it would have been at least as big as the polar bear, today's largest terrestrial mammalian carnivore, but rather less than that if it had only attained the lowest estimates (something not mentioned in media reports).

In a 17 April 2019 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper, they formally named this giant hyaenodontid Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, which is Swahili for 'big lion from Africa'. For although entirely unrelated to it, this huge beast would definitely have been an apex predator in its time, just like the lion is today. All in all, therefore, an exceedingly interesting and significant palaeontological find - but what bearing (if any) does it have upon cryptozoology? Let's rephrase that question as: don't you just love totally random, meaningless coincidences?

Kisumu County in western Kenya contains Meswa Bridge, the site where the long-overlooked remains of a monstrously-huge fossil mammalian carnivore were discovered; and Kisumu County just so happens to be situated immediately below western Kenya's Nandi County, which contains the dense, once-contiguous Nandi Forest where a monstrously-huge mystery mammalian carnivore dubbed the Nandi bear has been reported many times. But what is, or was, the Nandi bear? (Alleged sightings during the past 70 years have been far fewer than back in the early 20th Century, leading to speculation that even if it were real, it may now have died out.)

Maps revealing the very close proximity of western Kenya's Kisumu County (left) and Nandi County (right); maps created by me from Wikipedia maps - please click to enlarge them (public domain)

In fact, this ferocious, greatly-feared cryptid has been described in so many different ways by eyewitnesses down through the years that some cryptozoologists, including Dr Bernard Heuvelmans and myself, have opined in our respective works that the Nandi bear is almost certainly a non-existent composite. That is to say, it has been 'created' via the erroneous lumping together by native traditions and Western investigators alike of sightings of several very different animals, known and unknown.

These may include such disparate species as hyaenas, baboons, large male ratels, and aardvarks. According to some peoples' views, additionally, one or more prehistoric survivors may also be involved, like the giant short-faced hyaena Pachycrocuta brevirostris, the African bear Agriotheriium africanum, the giant baboon Dinopithecus ingens, and/or maybe one of those bizarre claw-footed ungulates known as chalicotheres.

All of these latter creatures were still in existence in Africa as recently as the Pleistocene (2.5 million to 11.7 thousand years ago), as confirmed by fossil finds. (See my book Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors for an extensive documentation of the Nandi bear and its preponderance of proposed identities.)


Should a surviving hyaenodontid (not necessarily Simbakubwa itself, but potentially a reclusive modern-day descendant, one whose morphology and gait may have changed somewhat during the 22 million years of evolution occurring from Simbakubwa's time into modern times) now also be added to this list? Who can say?

Everything about the Nandi bear is highly speculative and fiendishly complicated, but my cryptozoological antennae definitely began twitching when I saw how unexpectedly close to one another were the fossil bed where Simbakubwa's remains were found and the Nandi Forest where the Nandi bear was traditionally reported. Like I said earlier, don't you just love totally random, meaningless coincidences??

Just for the record, I have modified my personal opinion recently as to the most likely identity of the Nandi bear, thanks to a truly remarkable and exceedingly exciting but previously obscure report hitherto unknown to me that I only lately obtained, and which I am now very actively investigating. More news concerning this will appear here on ShukerNature if and when I have it. Meanwhile, for previous ShukerNature accounts appertaining to the Nandi bear, please click here, here, here, here, and here.

Size comparison of Simbakubwa and human (© Mauricio Anton/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)