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