One of the earliest mystery beast reports emanating from the Americas came from the pen of French pastor and explorer Jean Lerius (aka Jean de Lery), writing about the notable encounter in his very informative, highly influential book History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America (1578), which formally documented a wide range of South American animals for the first time by a European. He was in the company of Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, who in 1555 had unsuccessfully attempted to establish a French Protestant colony on an island in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Approximately two years later, in or
round 1557, Lerius and two other members of the company were trekking through a
forest in the interior of Brazil with some local Tupinamba Indian guides but
armed only with swords or bows and arrows when, while passing through a deep
valley there, they abruptly encountered at a distance of only thirty paces or
so a very large reptilian creature of extremely distinctive appearance,
squatting on top of a hill in the heat of noon, with one of its forefeet
raised. Lerius described it as a lizard bigger than the body of a man,
measuring 5-6 ft long, yet its most eyecatching feature was not its size but
rather its extraordinary tegument. For according to Lerius, this unfamiliar
animal was entirely covered in rough white scales that resembled oyster shells
(and presumably, therefore, were opalescent, or nacreous, i.e. resembling
mother of pearl?).
The astonished, petrified group of men and this albino-like reptilian apparition stared at one another for around 15 minutes, all remaining totally immobile despite being directly exposed to the extreme heat of the mid-day sun, until the creature suddenly let forth a very loud groaning sound before turning away and swiftly vanishing from sight through the foliage covering the hill. Needless to say, the men made no attempt to follow the monster, making their way instead along their original course, leading them far away from that hill and its dreadful denizen.
The fact that this sizeable lizard was resting on top of a hill during the extreme mid-day heat clearly suggests that like lizards so often do, it was sunbathing, absorbing the sun's radiant heat for thermoregulatory purposes. This is because lizards are ectothermic, i.e. poikilotherms, which are unable to regulate their body temperature via internal homoiothermic mechanisms in the manner that endothermic mammals and birds do.
What is far less clear, conversely, is this reptile's precise taxonomic identity, as no lizard of that size and pallid appearance is known from Brazil or, indeed, from anywhere else, today. Might it have been albinistic, as I tentatively labelled it a little earlier here, or possibly leucistic? Leucistic American alligators Alligator mississipiensis with shiny white scales but black eyes are well known, for example, as are other reptile specimens of similar form, as well as true albino specimens with pink eyes. Perhaps it was a leucistic or an albinistic iguana, whose size had been over-estimated by an evidently shocked Lerius. Or might Lerius have been incorrect in labeling it a lizard – could it have actually been a white alligator?
I know of no other reports alluding to this singularly distinctive reptile, so the riddle of what it was seems destined to remain forever unsolved – like so many others in the fascinating if frustrating chronicles of cryptozoology.
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