MANIFESTING THE MULILO - A RAINBOW-SUMMONED HILL-DRAGON, OR A LOATHSOME BLACK SLUG-SNAKE?

 

Might the mulilo – if it exists – look something like this? (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Dream Lab)

In more than 40 years of cryptozoological researches and writings, I have been proud and privileged to introduce to the cryptozoological community and beyond a considerable number and notable diversity of cryptids whose details had been hitherto consigned to obscure, overlooked periodicals, books, and other passed-over publications. One such mystery beast is the mulilo, whose details I uncovered in a long-since-forgotten Empire Review article, but which I duly documented and discussed in one of my own books, From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings, first published in 1997, and which was the very first crypto-themed publication to include it.

 

My book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Today, conversely, numerous online websites have also documented this creature, but as far as I can tell their coverages are merely paraphrasings  of my book's original version, with no new, additional content  Yet my book is seldom referenced as their source, sadly.

Consequently, coupled with the regrettable fact that certain of these online paraphrased coverages are far from accurate iterations of mine anyway, I've decided to present on ShukerNature my book's original, concise account of the mysterious mulilo – so here it is.

Dream a dream of a mysterious dragon that only appears when a rainbow is resting upon the vivid, viridescent hillsides of Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo] and Zambia – a creature whose reality is widely accepted by many native people in these tropical African countries. One might expect such an Arcadian, picturesque scenario to inspire images of a bright, evanescent entity with sparkling opalescent scales, a proud noble head of classical profile, and sweeping, polychromatic butterfly wings – a golden, glittering creature of Faerie, of heady sunlit reverie.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth, because the image that these people do visualize when contemplating this creature is an evocation of much darker dreams. According to their belief, Central Africa's rainbow-summoned dragon, known as the mulilo, is a gigantic, coal-black, slug-like beast of loathsome form, almost 6 ft in length, over 1 ft in width, and leaving death in its wake – the deadly legacy of its poisonous breath.

 

Could the mulilo be a giant black slug? (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Grok X1)

One could certainly be forgiven for considering the mulilo to be nothing more than a fanciful folktale. Yet as reported in 1940 by W.L. Speight within an Empire Review article on African mystery beasts, a living, corporeal animal is apparently involved, because pieces of blackened flesh said to be from dead mulilos are worn by some natives as fertility charms.

There is no known species of slug that attains the size attributed to the mulilo; in any event, the bodies of slugs are relatively insubstantial, little more than slender gelatinous sacs - hardly the likeliest of materials to remain intact for utilization as charms. Perhaps, therefore, the blackened flesh is really from a slug-like snake, or even a serpentine salamander (like the sirens of North America).

Even so, the thorny question remains as to whether this corporeal creature is truly the mulilo, or whether its flesh is merely used by the natives to vindicate their belief in what is actually a non-existent, wholly mythical beast? If the flesh is from a mulilo (regardless of what species it may belong to), how do the natives obtain it?

 

Another giant black slug-inspired mulilo representation (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Grok X1)

According to Speight, they set a trap – building a secure cage, lined internally with sharp blades, and baited with a living cockerel. Then they simply wait each night, and listen. On the morning that no cock-crow is heard, the natives celebrate and journey joyfully to the cage – for they know that inside it they will find the mulilo, dead, impaled upon the blades during its capture of the cockerel.

Yet despite this apparently successful method of obtaining mulilo remains, the mulilo is as mysterious and unidentified today as it was when documented by Speight over half a century ago [almost a full century ago now]. Moreover, it does not even seem to have been reported again. Perhaps rainbows have been rare in Zaire and Zambia lately?

My view concerning the mulilo that I held back in the late 1990s remains unchanged today, almost 30 years later. Namely, that if it is indeed a real, flesh-and-blood entity, it is most likely to be some form of black-scaled snake, possibly a fairly thick-bodied or sturdy one, perhaps even a melanistic variety of a species already known to science.

Over the years I have documented a number of times with a variety of different examples that in the culture of many indigenous peoples from around the world, aberrant animal specimens, such as melanistic, albinistic, or extra-large individuals, for instance, are often categorised by them as being fundamentally (rather than merely superficially) distinct, wholly separate creatures from normal specimens of the same species, and are even given wholly separate names by them.

 

Is the mulilo based upon an unusual melanistic variety of snake? (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Dream Lab)

So if the mulilo were indeed nothing more than an all-black form of a known snake species but deemed special by the locals on account of its unexpected colouration, this would not be in any way surprising.

In addition, certain snakes, especially large meat-eating constricting species such as the African pythons, are notorious for the foul stench of their breath. So if the mulilo is simply a melanistic version of one such species, this could plausibly explain native testimony (conceivably somewhat exaggerated or embellished if retold to the more ingenuous of Westerners?) relating to its allegedly poisonous exhalations.

 

A large and sturdy melanistic specimen of constricting snake might inspire superstitious fear among local people encountering it (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Magic Studio)

If only further details could be obtained. So if anyone reading this ShukerNature article is aware of any addition information appertaining to the mulili, I'd love to hear from you, so please comment below with your news – many thanks indeed!

Excerpted from my book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (Llewellyn: St Paul, 1997).

 

An intriguing image generated by Dream Lab, combining the serpentine scaly body of a melanistic snake with slug-like cephalic tentacles – the perfect mulilo? (created by Dr Karl Shuker using Dream Lab)

 

SHUKERNATURE IS #1 – CONFIRMING WHAT MY COUNTLESS LOYAL SHUKERNATURE FANS AND FOLLOWERS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN!

 

FeedSpot's official opening image to its listing of the 15 Best UK Nature Blogs in 2025 (© FeedSpot)

Ever since I launched it way back in January 2009, my ShukerNature blog has consistently received praise, plaudits, and even some awards, based upon its content, which has always been judged to be entertaining, interesting, eminently reliable, and extremely educational – and for which I am exceedingly grateful to everyone concerned, most especially its countless loyal fans and followers.

Now I am delighted to announce that my blog has garnered a further award. On 12 April 2025, as I was kindly informed this week by its founder and creators account manager Anuj Agarwal, the blog database website FeedSpot has awarded ShukerNature its premier, #1 position in the blogs section of its new listing of the 15 Best UK Nature Blogs and Websites in 2025!! Please click here to view the entire listing.

Nor is that all. ShukerNature also appears at #18 in FeedSpot's Best 90 Nature Blogs worldwide! Click here to view the entire listing.

My sincere thanks to Anuj, FeedSpot, and to all of you, my readers, for making this happen – I am truly grateful!!

The official Top UK Nature Blog medal awarded by FeedSpot to ShukerNature in April 2025 (© FeedSpot)

 

A DICYNODONT DEPICTION?

 

Life restoration of Dicynodon lacerticeps, a dicynodont from the Late Permian, South Africa (© ДиБгд-Wikipedia – CC BY 4.0 licence)

A farm named La Belle France, situated at Brackfontein Ridge in the Karoo region of South Africa's Free State Province, has long been known for the exquisite cave paintings on the wall of a cave in its grounds – and especially for one particular painting dubbed the Horned Serpent, which bears no resemblance to any known animal alive today. Its curved, elongate, spotted body has four paddle-like limbs and a small head but bearing a pair of very large downward-curving tusks, giving it a resemblance to the head of a walrus (it has actually been dubbed a jungle walrus in cryptozoological writings after its similarity to a jungle-inhabiting African mystery beast reported by an explorer). But there have never been walruses in this area, ever. So unless it is simply wholly imaginary, a spirit beast, what could this depicted creature represent?

Cryptozoologists have speculated whether it may have been some form of aquatic sabre-tooth tiger, an idea dating back at least as far as Bernard Heuvelmans's writings in his 1978 book Les Derniers Dragons d'Afrique, and which I have already documented in detail here on ShukerNature.

 

The 'Horned Serpent' petroglyph (public domain)

However, a wholly new and very convincing identity has now been proposed, in a thought-provoking PLoS ONE paper authored by Dr Julien Benoit, from the Evolutionary Studies Institute and School of Geosciences, at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg (click here to access it, and here to access a popular-format article regarding it in The Conversation). The cave paintings were produced by the San people, formerly known as the Bushmen of the East, indigenous hunter-gatherers who no longer inhabit this particular region, but were well aware of the wildlife around them and were accomplished artists, portraying such creatures in their cave paintings. The San left this area in 1835, which therefore means that this is the latest date by which the Horned Serpent painting could have been produced by them. However, it may have been made much earlier, because the San had lived here for thousands of years, and in this very same area are countless fossils that may well provide the answer to the mystery of the Horned Serpent's zoological identity, as Benoit has proposed.

The fossils are mostly of ancient reptiles known as dicynodonts, which became extinct here around 250 million years ago, during the Upper Permian Period. The principal species is Dicynodon lacerticeps, averaging 4 ft in total length, whose squat body and four fairly stout limbs render it relatively undistinguished in appearance – except, that is, for its single pair of very sizeable, downward-curving, tusk-like teeth. Benoit had previously discovered that the San people inhabiting Lesotho, which neighbours South Africa's Free State, had incorporated depictions of fossil dinosaur footprints into their cave paintings there, so he has now proposed that the South African Karoo's Horned Serpent was their attempt to reconstruct, like veritable proto-palaeontologists, the appearance in life of the long-extinct dicynodonts, because its tusked head does bear a distinct resemblance to fossil dicynodont skulls and teeth present in this same area.

 

A fossil Dicynodon skull (© Ghedoghedo/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

Put another way, it is certainly a most notable coincidence that a mysterious tusked beast should be depicted by indigenous artists in the same region where fossil skulls and teeth of a distinctively tusked species are commonly found. But that is not all. To quote Benoit:

The body of the tusked animal from La Belle France [Horned Serpent], as painted by the San, is strangely flexed like a banana, a pose that is commonly encountered on fossil skeletons and is called the "death pose" by palaeontologists. Its body is also covered with spots, not unlike the mummified dicynodonts found in the area whose skin is covered with bumps.

It seems likely, therefore, that the longstanding mystery concerning what the Horned Serpent cave painting represents, and whose existence was first brought to widespread attention almost a century ago, in 1930, is now finally solved - or is it?

 

The Horned Serpent petroglyph seen in situ,  alongside petroglyphs of certain other mysterious, unidentifiable creatures (public domain)

For the Horned Serpent is not the only mysterious, ostensibly unidentified beast portrayed in this series of petroglyphs - in fact, there are several others depicted alongside it, all of which remain resolutely unexplained by the dicynodont identification.

This leads me to wonder whether these illustrated mystery beasts are nothing more than wholly fabulous creatures of the imagination - San equivalents to Western unicorns, centaurs, dragons, and the like, perhaps?

 

Two of the nowadays palaeontologically-inaccurate but still historically-significant life-sized dicynodont sculptures created during the early 1850s by English sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins for display at southeast London's Crystal Palace Park and which, along with many other sculptures of prehistoric fauna prepared by him, can still be seen today at Dinosaur Court in Crystal Palace Park (© Ben Sutherland/Wikipedia – CC BY 2.0 licence)

 

NB - an extensive documentation of their history and also that of the cryptozoological jungle walrus linked to the Horned Serpent petroglyph can be found in my book ShukerNature  Book 3: Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, Jungle Walruses, and Other Belated Blog Beasts

 

Full wraparpund cover of my book ShukerNature  Book 3: Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, Jungle Walruses, and Other Belated Blog Beasts

 

 

THE TANTALISING TWO-TONGUES IDENTIFIED AFTER ALMOST A CENTURY?

 

A representation of what a two-tongues may have looked like based solely upon the original report's verbal description of this mystery mammal, created by me using Magic Studio

Just over a year ago, in my Alien Zoo column for the British monthly magazine Fortean Times, I introduced readers to a cryptozoological conundrum that had been puzzling me ever since I first encountered it during the 1990s, and which dated back a further six decades, to a 1930s news report from the periodical Modern Wonder.

In December 2024, moreover, I also documented it on ShukerNature (click here to read my blog article) The report, dated 27 May 1939, claimed that some mysterious beasts had been captured by a photographer in the jungles of Malaya (now Malaysia) and had been shown to some officials in Manila, capital of the Philippines, but that no-one had been able to identify them.

They were each said to be quadrupedal and to weigh approximately 200 lb, to possess a raccoon-like head (masked?), a furry mole-like pelage (dense and/or dark?), a pair of owl-like eyes (very large and indicating a nocturnal lifestyle?), an odd dentition combining human-like teeth with cat-like teeth, a fondness for bananas, and – by far their most bizarre feature – each animal possessed two tongues! (Hence I have dubbed their mystifying species the two-tongues.)

 

Native to Malaysia and Indonesia, a Sunda slow loris Nycticebus coucang – note the distinctive black mask-like markins encircling its extremely large eyes and its very dense fur (© David Haring. Duke Lemur Center. North Carolina/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

I'd speculated in AZ and on ShukerNature that were it not for their substantial weight and, needless to say, their extraordinary twin-tongued condition, these cryptids might conceivably have been Malaysian tarsiers, as those very small and single-tongued but decidedly goblinesque creatures always arouse considerable curiosity from observers unfamiliar with them.

Having documented this mystifying case in various of my writings without eliciting any opinions from readers as to what these animals may be, I now hoped that AZ and ShuikerNature aficionados might prove more forthcoming. And sure enough, at long last I have received a suggestion, made by two different ShukerNature readers wholly independently of each other, that may finally have solved this tantalising riddle.

One reader gave his name as Lars Dietz, the other chose to remain anonymous, but both brought to my attention in December 2024 the fascinating fact that lorises – those big-eyed, nocturnal, densely-furred, fruit-eating, Asian relatives of Africa's pottos and bushbabies, as well as Madagascar's lemurs – possess a veritable second tongue, the sublingua. Consisting of a relatively large, muscular tongue-like structure positioned beneath the primary tongue, and also possessed by the lorises' above-named African and Madagascan relatives, and by the tarsiers too, it lacks taste buds, its function instead being to keep clean another dental characteristic of such creatures, the toothcomb, which is used in oral grooming. Outwardly, however, the sublingua does look like a second genuine tongue.

 

In this close-up photograph of a slow loris's face, its pale, pointed sublingua can be clearly seen projecting out of its mouth beneath its longer, pink-coloured primary tongue (© David Haring. Duke Lemur Center. North Carolina/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

Consequently, it is easy to understand how a loris – or a tarsier – may have been described as a two-tongued creature by anyone with no previous experience of it. Having said that: as lorises and tarsiers exist in the Philippines as well as in Malaysia it seems strange that they would not have been recognised by officials there.

Also, of course, there is the not inconsiderable matter of the two-tongues' claimed weight of 200 lb to explain, which is far greater than that of lorises and tarsiers – unless the report had been garbled during its documentation in Modern Wonder, with the animals' true weight having been 200 g, not 200 lb. This would compare well with that of lorises and also that of the heaviest tarsiers.

In view of the sublingua's evident anatomical relevance to this crypto-case (not to mention the black mask-like circles of fur encircling the extremely large eyes of slow lorises, plus their bodies' very dense fur), I feel that some such confusion between the metric and imperial systems of weights may well have occurred, thereby causing the true taxonomic identity of the two-tongues as either lorises (most probably) or tarsiers to become obscured.

 

Tarsiers are nothing if not goblinesque, even otherworldly, in appearance, especially to anyone unfamiliar with these curious yet harmless creatures (© LDC Inc Foundation/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence / (© Pieere Fidenci/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

Moreover, perhaps the officials who saw these creatures simply weren't well-versed in their country's native fauna anyway. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that this situation has been true!

My sincere thanks to those two ShukerNature readers for steering me in what I feel sure is the right direction in resolving this curious cryptozoological puzzle after almost a century.

And be sure to click here to read my previous ShukerNature article on this subject.

 

Another of my most probably now-obsolete (but still visually-engaging) two-tongues reconstructions, based solely upon the Modern Wonders report's verbal description of these creatures, and created by me using Magic Studio