DRAKE AND THE DRAGON - ON THE TRACK OF NEW GUINEA'S AWE-INSPIRING ARTRELLIA

Is New Guinea home to gigantic monitor lizards? (© Dr Karl Shuker)

The surname 'Drake' is derived from 'dragon'. Consequently, it is nothing if not appropriate that revealing a real-life dragon was one of the goals of 'Operation Drake'. This was a two-year-long international voyage of scientific discovery spanning 1978-1980, which was mounted by the Scientific Exploration Society and led by intrepid world explorer Lieutenant-Colonel (now Colonel) John Blashford-Snell, featuring a global team of Young Explorers (aged 17-24), and named in honour of the famous Elizabethan circumnavigator Sir Francis Drake. As for the sought-after dragon, this was the much-dreaded Papuan dragon or artrellia said to inhabit the jungles of New Guinea. But let us begin at the beginning of this modern-day search for a veritable medieval monster.

Since the end of the 19th Century, reports of gigantic, often tree-climbing reptiles have been emerging quite regularly from Papua New Guinea (PNG, but known prior to the end of World War II as Australian New Guinea). This is the country occupying the eastern half of New Guinea – a vast island mini-continent that boasts a land area of more than 300,000 square miles, and constitutes the world's second-largest island (only Greenland is larger). Said to be up to 30 ft, possibly even 40 ft, long (thereby far exceeding the length of even the biggest Komodo dragons – see later) and, in the case of mid-sized specimens, given to dropping down from overhanging branches onto unsuspecting creatures (and sometimes humans) walking by underneath, these 'dragons' are termed the artrellia by the New Guinea natives - who, understandably, live in considerable fear of these great beasts, and liken them to giant arboreal crocodiles or lizards. They have been given a number of local names, including the artrellia (also spelled variously as artrelia, atrela, otrelia, otrila, etc), the piako, and, in Neo-Melanesian Pidgin (Tok Pisin), the pukpuk bilong tri – a name that loosely translates as 'tree-climbing crocodile'. Many Westerners have also seen them.

Some monitors are very adept arboreally (Wikipedia copyright-free image)

During the three Archbold Expeditions of 1933-1939 to New Guinea, sent out by New York's American Museum of Natural History but financed and led by American zoologist and philanthropist Richard Archbold, the expedition members were consistently warned by their native helpers to beware of gigantic man-eating lizards that dwelt in the depths of this island's unexplored jungles.

In World War II, moreover, a number of British, American, Australian, and Japanese soldiers stationed in what would become PNG claimed to have spied huge lizards estimated at 15-20 ft long. Similarly, in 1960 David Marsh (at that time District Commissioner of Port Moresby, PNG's capital) stated that he had made two sightings of such reptiles during the early 1940s in western PNG. Also in 1960, two administration agricultural officers, Lindsay Green and Fred Kleckhan, succeeded in obtaining the skin and jawbone of a New Guinea 'dragon'; they had discovered these relics in a native village near Kairuku, 70 miles northwest of Port Moresby. Moreover, a report in Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper for 22 January 1960 quoted PNG Patrol Officer Ian Gibbons as stating:

Wherever I have gone in the coastal districts of the territory where wallabies are common, I have found natives who know of these dragons. In several places I had natives do drawings of the dragons. The drawings were amazingly similar and looked very much like a photograph of the Komodo dragon.

A Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, the world's largest lizard currently known by science to exist today © Dr Karl Shuker)

Most exciting of all, and at the same time that these above-noted reports from 1960 were being publicised, Rachel Cleland - the wife of the then-Administrator at Port Moresby – claimed that in August 1959 she had actually seen a living specimen in captivity in the remote Daru district, during a visit to a mission station near Balimo, and that she had been told by a missionary there that the local natives had seen some 20-ft-long specimens. As far as I am aware, however, no photographs of the captive specimen were taken, nor any record documented of its fate (and that of its remains if it died in captivity rather than being released back into the wild at some point).

In 1961, explorers David George and Robert Grant encountered a giant lizard in the Strachan Island District of southern PNG. According to their description, it stood almost 4 ft high, was grey in colour, with a 3-ft-long neck, and a total length estimated by them to be approximately 26 ft. Not surprisingly, they kept their distance from this leviathanesque lizard, watching no doubt with great relief when it disappeared into the surrounding jungle.

Journey Into The Stone Age by David M. Davies (© David M. Davies/Robert Hale Ltd – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

The trail of the artrellia was evidently growing ever warmer, and fresh findings continued to be made as the years rolled by. In his book Journey Into The Stone Age (1969), traveller David M. Davies recalled being shown by some primitive valley-inhabiting PNG natives an unusual native drawing on a cave wall, which appeared to depict a huge lizard running on its hind legs, and of which his native companions were evidently very afraid:

The rain continued to pour down, and we noticed some scratches on the walls, so we turned our attention to these. We could make out some crude drawings of birds which showed that these people, like the Papuans outside the valley, had a bird complex. But there was also a queer creature drawn very large on the wall. It seemed to represent a huge lizard which was running on its hind legs. I remembered the reports of [Jim] Taylor and [Ivan] Champion, early explorers in Australian New Guinea [see below], who had seen these lizards and described them as very large and living in trees. On one of the expeditions Champion spoke of a local man who had been killed by such a lizard, which had dropped on to him from a tree. John (one of the missionaries) said he had heard something about them from the New Guineans themselves, but had never met anyone who had seen one. As we pointed at the drawing our hosts drew back, the whites of their eyes flashing. It seemed to be the only thing of which they were afraid.

Sent forth by Lieutenant Governor Hubert Murray to do the honours for his Papuan administration, during the late 1920s North-West Patrol Officers Ivan Champion and Charles Karius found fame by becoming the first white explorers to traverse New Guinea across its widest point, crossing from the headwaters of the Fly River to the Sepik River. After being thwarted by a seemingly impenetrable mountain wall on their first attempt, they successfully achieved this impressive navigational feat on their second, which concluded in 1928. Champion published full details of their epic journey, what they encountered, and all manner of interesting native testimony in his book Across New Guinea From the Fly to the Sepik (1932). As for explorer Jim Taylor, he famously led expeditions into Australian New Guinea's Highlands during the 1930s.

Location of Fly River in PNG (© Roke/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

A major artrellia breakthrough occurred less than a decade after the 1969 publication of Davies's book when, in December 1978, news emerged concerning the successful filming three months earlier of a 2.8-m- (9-ft-) long New Guinea dragon by Jean Becker and Christian Meyer near the Fly River. Apparently, it was just one of a population of such creatures believed to exist in southern PNG, and which seemed to be monitor lizards. However, it was still not clear whether they constituted a new species.

That issue was finally resolved during the South Pacific phase of 'Operation Drake', via an expedition in December 1979/January 1980 to the PNG swamplands, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Blashford-Snell. As he subsequently documented in his book Mysteries: Encounters With the Unexplained (1983), he had heard numerous native stories of these enormous beasts, and was regaled with tales of their ferocity and the danger to anyone seeking to capture one of them. Notwithstanding this, he was so intrigued by these reports that he became determined to resolve this longstanding zoological mystery once and for all - by revealing conclusively both the reality and the zoological identity of New Guinea's fearsome dragon.

Lieutenant-Colonel Blashford-Snell (© Centre for Fortean Zoology)

Sadly, however, his expedition's attempts to achieve these goals consistently met with failure as the natives were very loathe to participate in the pursuit - until he resorted to an age-old but universally successful ploy. He bribed them! And sure enough, on 12 December 1979 in the coastal village of Masingara, west of Daru in PNG's Western Province, he was duly presented with a real-life artrellia, which had been shot by a villager but was still alive when brought back into camp. True, it was far from the 30-ft monster that the expedition team had been hoping for, measuring instead a mere 6 ft 1.5 in (which included a 4 ft-1.25-in tail). Nevertheless, the natives were still palpably nervous of this dying mini-dragon, and assured the team unhesitatingly that it was a genuine artrellia, albeit a very young one (on 11 January 1980 its formalin-preserved body was presented to PNG's National Museum in Port Moresby).

When it was examined by the team's zoologist, Ian Redmond (destined to become a world-renowned conservationist), he recognized its species straight away. It was a frequently arboreal lizard known zoologically as Varanus salvadorii, Salvadori's monitor (not to be confused - although it often is - with the similarly-named salvator monitor Varanus salvator). Moreover, he confirmed that this was indeed only a very young specimen - so to what size could fully-adult ones grow? Handsomely marked with black and gold spots, it was equipped with a fiery-colored flame-thrower facsimile for a tongue continually flicking in and out of its mouth in faithful homage to those conflagrating dragons of legend, and explaining Papuan native testimony that the artrellia breathes fire. Certainly, Salvadori's monitor is a visually impressive species and is known from fully-confirmed records to exceed 10 feet in total length quite regularly when adult, thereby making it the longest species of lizard alive today in the world.

Salvadori's monitor (public domain)

Worth noting here, incidentally, is that the title of the world's longest species of lizard is often, but erroneously, ascribed to a famous relative of Salvadori's monitor - the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, native to Komodo and a few other small Indonesian islands. In reality, however, the Komodo dragon is not the longest, because it rarely exceeds 10 ft - but it is the largest. The reason for this distinction is that whereas at least two-thirds of the total length of Salvadori's monitor consists of its very slender tail, the tail of the Komodo dragon only accounts for half of its total length - so the Komodo dragon is much sturdier and heavier than the more svelte, lightweight Salvadori's monitor.

Adding further support to this latter species being one and the same as the legendary artrellia, it has long been known that natives inhabiting the Fly River area of PNG commonly refer to Salvadori's monitor as the tree crocodile. It is the largest of the seven varanid species known to exist on New Guinea, and inhabits lowland forests as well as coastal mangrove swamps, but usually in fairly remote, largely inaccessible localities, making field studies of this impressive species difficult to undertake.

The Fly River (public domain)

Based upon the sizeable number of reports describing quite immense artrellias in New Guinea, it would seem that Salvadori's monitor can far exceed even the longest officially verified record for its species - that of 15 ft 7 in, recorded from a male specimen measured over 30 years ago by researcher Michael Pope. So far, however, no-one has captured a 30-ft or 40-ft artrellia (not even a 20-ft specimen, in fact), but sightings continue. In the more remote jungles and swamps of New Guinea (of which there are a very great many still in need of scientific investigation, not only in PNG but also in this vast island's western, Indonesian half - formerly known as Irian Jaya), which are little-frequented by native tribes and scarcely explored at all by Westerners, thereby constituting sanctuaries for larger forms of life, it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that extra-large artrellia specimens do indeed exist, undisturbed and free from human persecution.

During that same 'Operation Drake' expedition, Ian Redmond had a brief but direct face-to-face encounter with what may well have been a sizeable Salvadori's monitor. He was later interviewed on-screen concerning his experience for an episode of the very popular television series 'Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World' (first screened in 1980) that dealt with a wide range of mystery beasts from around the world (the episode in question was entitled 'Dragons, Dinosaurs and Giant Snakes'). Here is his verbatim account of that notable confrontation:

We were staking out water-holes, because the lizard has to come for water every day, and some of the water-holes are in a creek bed. So you're below the level of the forest floor, in a creek bed, by a pool. And one day, there were two of us, a few hundred yards apart - I was sitting by one pool, another chap by another pool. And I'd been sitting there for several hours, and nothing happening, it was about 10 o'clock in the morning. And I heard these footsteps. It's a forest floor, so there's lots of dry leaves on the floor. This is quiet, softly scrunching of dry leaves. Now, if you hear a lizard moving through the forest, it's a scurrying sound, it doesn't sound like footsteps. And I thought it must be either the other chap coming over - whether he was playing about and trying to sneak up on me, I didn't know. But it sounded very stealthy. So I was sitting down there, and I hear this coming up behind me. And obviously, you decide, at some point you've got to have a look. So, as they were getting closer, I thought: "Well, person or animal, I'm going to see what it is". So I slowly sat up and looked around. And about 10 ft away – my eyes were about on the level of the bank – about 10 ft away, there was a log, and just over the log was this great lizard head. Now, I couldn't see the whole body, but I could see that the head and shoulders were a lot lot bigger than the one which had been shot. So I went down for my camera again, and as I went down to get my camera the lizard moved away.

And here is the episode itself, currently uploaded and viewable on YouTube – Ian's interview begins at 13 min 30 sec into the video: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fanU9tzmvRs

I have known Ian for some years, and when I mentioned to him that I was preparing this article he very kindly sent me his unpublished field notes concerning the search by him and others during 'Operation Drake' for the artrellia, and he gave me full permission to cite anything from them in my article that I so wished – thank you very much, Ian! This has enabled me to incorporate a number of important details throughout this article that had not previously been publicly available, and I now have a specific date for Ian's famous sighting of the lizard head above the log – 16 December 1979. Moreover, in view of his sighting's great significance in the search for the artrellia, I feel that it would be very valuable and insightful to read Ian's account of it in his field notes for that date, especially as it includes some very interesting additional information not previously revealed, so here it is:

16th December 1979

10.00am:  Sitting in creek bed beside small pool.  Hear what sounds like the cautious step of a bare-foot human approaching from W (rear);  slowly raise my head above bank and see at approx. 8-10m [possibly meant 8-10 ft, which would then correspond with his TV interview's 10-ft statement, or vice-versa?] the head and shoulders of an ATRELA – it freezes, I reach down for my camera but it moves away (not hurried, at the same pace) out of sight but not far.  Nothing further heard – perhaps up tree?  Seemed bigger than 6ft 1.5in specimen – perhaps 8ft? total length.

Round bend in creek bed, found firm clay pig wallow with tracks of large monitor, some complicated by overlying tracks of smaller one.   Fore-foot tracks were 8-9cm long (not clear palm of hand) and 4cm wide; heels of hind-foot very clear (imprint of scales visible) and were 24cm apart (between centre of left heel to centre of right heel).  Footprint minus toes was about 10.5cm by 5.5cm, and very clear length of outer toe to heel of left foot was 13cm.   If the ratio of outer toe/foot length to total length of the 6ft 1.5in is the same as for this individual, it would be approx. 302-345cm total length.

The pool and creek bed featured in Ian's sighting were located just outside the village of Tati, which was a two-and-a half-hour walk northeast of Masingara, where the 6-ft-1.5-in specimen had been shot four days earlier.

Close-up of the head of a Salvadori's monitor, revealing this species' characteristic bulbous snout (Wikipedia copyright-free image)

Local reports often claim that the artrellia will sometimes rise up onto its hind legs, and that in this position big specimens can stand 10 ft tall, looking positively dinosaurian in appearance. On 1 January 1980, Ian had been walking back to Masingara from the village of Giringorede with a native hunter named Buwae Gire. In the Giringorede dialect, the artrellia is known as the piako, and Gire informed Ian that an old man had actually sat on top of one such beast, having mistaken it for a fallen tree trunk until it moved and then abruptly reared up onto its hind legs. The piako didn't attack him, but not surprisingly he fled away in terror. In his field notes for that day, Ian recorded the following additional information given to him by Gire:

[The old man] estimated its length to be 12 paces (he [Gire] paced the length for me) – i.e. about 36 ft.

Biggest one seen by Buwae himself was about 16 feet (I measured the distance along the ground indicated by him). He sometimes eats smaller ones; they are quite common in the area – while walking he would expect to see one every hour or hour and a half.  They eat animals that they catch by jumping from a tree.  I asked if he had ever seen this, and he said yes. I asked him what the lizard caught on that occasion, and he replied, “One of my hunting dogs!” This had the ring of truth about it, and I saw no reason to doubt his observations.

As recorded by a number of herpetological observers and researchers down through the years, including John Netherton and David P. Badger in their book Lizards: A Natural History of Some Uncommon Creatures (2002), it is well known that some species of monitor – including Salvadori's – will indeed raise themselves up like this to scrutinize their surroundings. They can even briefly run bipedally too, on their hind legs alone, should the need arise. Such behaviour could also explain the cave drawing reported by David M. Davies.

Artistic representation of an au angi angi (© William M. Rebsamen)

Finally: Another mystery monitor reported from New Guinea but far less familiar, cryptozoologically speaking, than the artrellia is the au angi angi. Whereas the artrellia is said to be terrestrial and arboreal, the au angi angi is reputedly amphibious, a freshwater form inhabiting a number of swamps and rivers, and allegedly measuring up to 27 ft long, thereby indicating that there could be exceptionally large specimens of water monitor still awaiting verification on this mini-island continent too. Moreover, along the banks of New Guinea's Casurina coast is said to live a monstrous form of lizard larger than the Komodo dragon and known by the natives of that region as the cuscus (but not to be confused with the possum-related New Guinea – and Australian – marsupials of that same name).

Over the years, I've noted on a number of occasions that just like most things, mystery beasts have a tendency to go in and out of fashion. At present, the artrellia seems to be one that is very much out of fashion, inasmuch as it rarely rates a mention in surveys of mystery creatures even of passing interest to cryptozoologists, let alone ones that are actively being sought by them in the field. This may be due to the revelation by the 'Operation Drake' team that the artrellia belongs to a species already known to science, with the attendant implication that seeking it further is therefore no longer of cryptozoological –or even of mainstream zoological – interest.

Head and neck of an adult Salvadori's monitor – a veritable dragon of Papua? (copyright-free Wikipedia image)

Yet if native testimony is to be believed (and the capture of the young artrellia in December 1979  confirmed that such a creature did indeed exist and was not merely a myth), there are huge artrellia specimens still out there in the jungles and swamplands of New Guinea awaiting formal confirmation of their reality – a reality that may in turn affirm that the Komodo dragon is not the largest living species of lizard after all, that instead we should be handing over this longstanding record to some truly gargantuan Salvadori's monitors instead. That should be exciting enough, surely, to warrant new quests for such goliaths of the reptile world. Then again, that may perhaps equally explain at least some of the reluctance to go forth in search of them. After all, to seek veritable dragons, we need a literal St George, or at least a modern-day Sir Francis Drake, and such brave, determined heroes may well be as difficult to locate in today's unadventurous times as the dragons themselves!

I wish to offer my very sincere thanks to Ian Redmond for sharing with me and permitting me to utilize for this article his field notes from the 'Operation Drake' PNG expedition as well as an unpublished paper incorporating them that he co-authored with the late Mark K. Bayless. Mark was an extremely knowledgeable herpetoculturist from California who was also a longstanding friend of mine, having swapped a considerable amount of cryptozoological information with me down through the years relating to herpetology, and whose untimely death in November 2006 at the age of only 46 devastated me. RIP Mark, you are greatly missed, and I am dedicating this ShukerNature blog article of mine to your memory.

POSTSCRIPT – 10 September 2020

Today I received the following fascinating email from Jordan Beck who as a missionary's son has lived and grown up among the tribal people in Indonesian New Guinea (the western half of New Guinea). Here is the very intriguing information contained in his email to me:

Hi I recently read you article Drake and the Dragon [a hard copy version of this online ShukerNature blog article] and I was really fascinated by it. I am a missionary kid in Papua Indonesia and I live in the lowland swamps. Our tribal people have stories of lizards that eat people, boars and cassowaries. When I showed them your article they all pointed to the Komodo Dragon and said that's the lizard that eats people. When I asked them if they had seen it they all said that they had and they said if you see them run. When I asked them how big they get they said roughly a size of 15-19 ft. When I showed them the Croc monitor [Salvadori's monitor] they said the large man eating lizard was black like the Komodo Dragon not spotted. On another account we were up river on a[n] adventure and on the beach I found 6 inches wide monitor foot prints in the sand [-] when I showed our guide he told us that those were the foot prints of the large man eating lizards and that we should keep a careful watch on the surrounding jungle.

Could it be that there is an extra-large version of Salvadori's monitor inhabiting this section of New Guinea that is not spotted? Such a lizard would superficially resemble the Komodo dragon, and therefore explain why the New Guinea tribal people questioned by Jordan selected photos of this latter non-native species as resembling the dreaded man-eating giant lizards claimed by them to exist here.

Alongside a life-sized Komodo dragon model (© Dr Karl Shuker)

FLORES HOBBITS AND THE GIANT STORK OF DOOM

Homo floresiensis vs Leptoptilos robustus (© Hodari Nundu/deviantart)

I am extremely fortunate to count among my friends and colleagues a number of extremely talented artists, and the pseudonymous 'Hodari Nundu' (aka 'Justin Case') is one of these very gifted persons, as immediately demonstrated by the particularly vibrant example of his artwork presented above (click it to enlarge it), which showcases two most remarkable island-confined species.

Where on Earth would you find all within the very selfsame location a unique, Alice-in-Wonderland-reminiscent assemblage of mega-rats and mini-humans, gargantuan lizards, dwarf elephants, and gigantic storks? Only on Flores – a small island in Indonesia's Lesser Sundas group that provides some classic examples of both island gigantism and insular dwarfism.

Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, it was home to: two extra-large species of giant rat, Papagomys armandvillei and P. theodorverhoeveni, the former of which still survives today (and indeed, according to some researchers the latter may do too); a dwarf subspecies of elephant-related stegodont proboscidean Stegodon florensis insularis, which died out around 12,000 years ago and is the youngest stegodont form on record from southeast Asia; the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, the world's largest living species of lizard, which still survives on Flores today (as well as on the neighbouring islands of Komodo, Rintja, and Padar) and undoubtedly preyed upon Flores's dwarf stegodonts; plus the two highly significant species featured in this ShukerNature article's opening illustration.

If it can't see me, it can't eat me, right? Wrong! Never under-estimate its very highly-developed sense of smell! Posing with a life-sized Komodo dragon model at Chester Zoo, England (© Dr Karl Shuker)

One of these is the now world-famous 'hobbit' – the informal nickname given to Flores Man Homo floresiensis. With its most complete recorded specimen estimated at approximately 18,000 years old, this controversial, diminutive species of hominid apparently stood little more than 3 ft tall, may be descended from Homo erectus, and is believed to represent another case of insular dwarfism. Its first scientifically-documented remains were discovered in September 2004 at Liang Bua Cave in western Flores.

Life-size replicas of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis skulls for comparison purposes (© Dr Karl Shuker)

And the other species, whose remains were also uncovered in that very same cave, may have been one of the Flores hobbits' deadliest antagonists. It is a marabou stork, but far bigger than any of today's trio of marabou species. Yet it remained undescribed by science until as recently as 2010. Formally dubbed Leptoptilos robustus, the giant stork of Flores stood approximately 6 ft tall and weighed up to 35 lb, due to its extremely heavy leg bones – on account of which it is likely to have been predominantly if not exclusively flightless.

Even so, Smithsonian Institution palaeontologist Dr Hanneke J.M. Meijer and Dr Rokus A. Due from Jakarta's National Center for Archaeology, who jointly described its fossilised remains (dated at between 20,000 and 50,000 years old) in a Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society paper, believe that it was still theoretically capable of hunting and devouring juvenile hobbits. Having said that, there is presently no direct evidence confirming such activity; in the words of Dr Meijer as spoken during a 2010 interview with the UK's BBC television news service: "Whether or not this animal may have eaten hobbits is speculative: there is no evidence for that." Then again, as Dr Meijer also conceded in that same interview: "But can not be excluded either."

In European tradition, the stork brings newborn human babies to their parents - but in a major reversal of that benevolent role, Indonesia's giant stork of doom may conceivably have hunted down such babies (possibly even older infants too) and devoured them. Only on the topsy-turvy island of Flores!

Were the hobbits of Flores stalked by a stork? (© Inge van Noortwijk)

MY TOP TEN NEW AND REDISCOVERED ANIMALS OF MODERN TIMES

A young saola, depicted upon a postage stamp issued by Vietnam in 2000

It is widely known that many remarkable species of animal have become extinct or at least highly endangered in modern times. However, it is far less well known that during this same time period, a startling number of equally spectacular species have been newly discovered (having been previously unknown to science) or rediscovered (after having been written off as extinct by science). Here, then, in no particular order, is my personal Top Ten of our planet's most extraordinary and scientifically significant zoological arrivals and revivals of modern times – with my interest in cryptozoological philately providing the illustrations.

THE OKAPI

Discovered in 1901, the okapi remains one of the most famous and dramatic new animals to have been unveiled for over a century. Back in 1890, explorer Henry Morton Stanley noted that the Wambutti pygmies inhabiting the Ituri Forest in what is nowadays the Democratic Republic of Congo had informed him that they sometimes trapped in concealed pits a kind of 'forest donkey' known to them as the atti. When Ugandan governor Sir Harry Johnston learnt of this, he made enquiries, as a result of which some soldiers from the Congo gave him two strips of vividly striped skin from one such animal. Convinced that this elusive beast, which he learnt was actually known locally as the okapi, was an unknown forest zebra, he sent the skin strips to London's Zoological Society, where they could not be identified with any known species.

In 1901, Sir Harry succeeded in obtaining a complete okapi skin as well as two skulls, and he sent these to London's Natural History Museum, to await the experts' verdict on the okapi's zoological identity. To everyone's amazement, it proved not to be a zebra at all, but something far more extraordinary. It was a giraffe, but no ordinary one. A totally separate species from the familiar long-necked spotted giraffe of the savannahs, the okapi was a relatively short-necked, stripe-rumped species with purple-brown skin, which was adapted for an exclusively forest-dwelling lifestyle. Although similar species were known from the fossil record, it had been assumed that all of these short-necked giraffes had died out millions of years ago, but the okapi's sensational discovery emphatically disproved this. In honour of Sir Harry's successful investigations, the okapi was formally named Okapia johnstoni.

THE CONGO PEACOCK

The okapi wasn't the only modern-day zoological surprise revealed in the Ituri Forest. During a scientific expedition there in 1913, American Museum of Natural History ornithologist Dr James Chapin spied a native head-dress containing an unusual feather that he had never seen before. He was so intrigued that he purchased the head-dress, but after a long, vain attempt to identify the feather's mysterious species he finally placed this perplexing plume in his desk, but he never forgot it.

In 1936, during a visit to the Congo Museum at Tervueren, Belgium, Chapin spotted a pair of shabby, forgotten taxiderm birds on top of a dusty cabinet separated from the museum's principal collection - and was amazed but delighted to see that the female bird had wing quills identical to his mystifying feather. Investigating this fortuitous discovery, Chapin learnt that these birds' species inhabited the Ituri Forest, where it was known as the mbulu.

By mid-1937, he had acquired several fresh specimens of the mbulu for detailed examination, which revealed it to be a species of peacock hitherto unknown to science, and the only one native to Africa. Very primitive in appearance, it lacked the exquisite fan-like train typifying the familiar Asian peacocks. Chapin dubbed this remarkable new bird Afropavo congensis, the Congo peacock, and it is still deemed to be the most significant ornithological discovery of the past 100 years.

THE MOUNTAIN GORILLA

As far back as 1860, the explorer John Speke had collected native reports of a huge, man-eating hairy ogre that inhabited the Virunga Volcano range of mountains constituting the physical border between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda, but science dismissed such stories as mere superstition and folktales.

In 1902, however, a Belgian army officer called Captain Robert 'Oscar' von Beringe actually shot two of these hairy 'ogres', and sent them to Europe, where they were found to constitute a totally new form of gorilla - quite different from lowland versions, with a broader chest, longer, darker fur, and longer jaws with larger teeth. The mountain gorilla had finally been discovered, and is referred to scientifically as Gorilla beringei beringei.

Happily, we now know that far from being a man-eating ogre, it is actually one of the shyest and most gentle of creatures - as revealed via the studies of Dr George Schaller, and those of the late Dian Fossey (whose life was the subject of the film Gorillas in the Mist).

THE COELACANTH

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the small East London Museum in South Africa, often visited the nearby docks in search of unusual fishes to preserve as specimens for exhibition in the museum, but during a visit in December 1938 she spotted a fish unlike anything that she had ever seen before. Approximately 1.5 m long and steely-blue in colour, what made it so distinctive were its fins, as both the pectoral and the pelvic fins looked just like stubby legs, and, uniquely among all living fishes, its tail fin possessed three lobes instead of just two. Totally baffled by her strange unidentified find, Courtenay-Latimer arranged for it to be transported to the museum and preserved.

She also wrote a letter (containing a sketch of the fish) to a colleague who had assisted her in identifying fishes in the past – world-acclaimed South African ichthyologist Prof. J.L.B. Smith. When he opened it, he was astonished to see that her sketch closely resembled a coelacanth, belonging to an ancient lineage of fishes hitherto believed to have died out over 64 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs! He lost no time in visiting the East London Museum to see this amazing fish himself, and was able to confirm straight away that it was indeed a genuine, modern-day species of coelacanth.

When Prof. Smith formally documented this sensational zoological find, he named its species Latimeria chalumnae, in honour of its discoverer. After a gap of almost 14 years, more coelacanth specimens belonging to this same 'living fossil' species were found, in the waters around the Comoro Islands. And in 1997, a separate, second species of modern-day coelacanth was discovered in the seas around the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It was christened Latimeria menadoensis, and possessed brown scales instead of blue ones.

THE SAOLA

The most spectacular new species of large mammal to have been discovered in recent times is undoubtedly the saola or Vu Quang ox. While conducting field research in an unexplored forest-covered mountainous region of northern Vietnam called Vu Quang during 1992, American conservationist Dr John MacKinnon observed that various native hunters exhibited as trophies in their homes some very long, pointed horns that were unlike those of any species native to anywhere in Asia. Indeed, the only horns that they resembled were those of certain African and Arabian antelopes known as oryxes. When he asked the hunters what animal these mystifying horns came from, he was told that it was a very shy, rarely-seen ox-like creature referred to by them as the saola.

Further enquiries resulted in the procurement of a near-complete dead specimen, revealing the saola to be a dramatically new species that combined a bovine body with the long horns and slender legs of an antelope. It was formally named Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, emphasising its horns' deceptive similarity to an oryx's, but in reality the saola has no close relatives among other species. The size of a buffalo – the saola is the largest new mammal to have been discovered since the kouprey or Cambodian wild ox Bos sauveli in 1937.

This makes the saola's very belated scientific discovery even more remarkable. A few living specimens have subsequently been observed in the wild, and a few even captured and studied alive for short periods, but it remains little-known and very scarce.

THE KOMODO DRAGON

Komodo is a small island in Indonesia's Lesser Sundas chain, southeast of Java, and was once used as a convict island for prisoners. Pearl fishermen visiting Komodo were told by the prisoners that this island harboured a huge, ferocious species of land crocodile. Scientists, however, dismissed such claims as fantasy, until, in 1910, Major P.A. Ouwens, director of Java’s Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg, near Batavia (now Jakarta), became sufficiently intrigued by them to send a local amateur naturalist to Komodo in search of the truth. When he returned, he confirmed that such creatures really did exist, but they were not crocodiles. Instead, they constituted a giant species of monitor lizard, and as proof he had brought back the skin of one.

In 1912, this spectacular new species was formally described by Ouwens, who named it Varanus komodoensis, the Komodo dragon. It can grow up to 3 m long and weigh up to 70 kg, making it the world's largest lizard. Komodo dragons will kill and devour anything that they can catch – including other Komodo dragons, and humans!

THE CHACOAN PECCARY

Until the mid-1970s, only two species of pig-like peccary were known to science, but during a visit in 1974 to the semi-arid Gran Chaco region of South America, overlapping Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia, American zoologist Dr Ralph Wetzel obtained skulls and other physical evidence testifying to the existence of a third, somewhat bigger species. What made this discovery even more significant, however, is that when these remains were studied, zoologists realised that their species was already known to science – but only as a fossil form hitherto assumed to have died out at the end of the Ice Ages 10,000 years ago. In reality, however, Wetzel's discovery showed that it had not died out at all, but its modern-day survival had not previously been realised by scientists, even though it was a familiar creature to the Chaco inhabitants. This resurrected species is nowadays known as the Chacoan peccary Catagonus wagneri.

In 2003, an even bigger peccary – the world's largest species – was discovered in Brazil; and in 2007, it was formally recognised and named Pecari maximus, the giant peccary. And back in 1904, the world's largest wild species of true pig, the aptly-named giant forest hog Hylochoerus meinertzhageni, was unveiled in Kenya.

THE MEGAMOUTH SHARK

On 15 November 1976, the crew of an American research vessel situated in the waters off the Hawaiian island of Oahu hauled up one of its anchors at the end of the day – and were astonished to discover that it had been partly swallowed by a huge and wholly-unfamiliar shark, which was hauled up with it as the anchor was wedged inside its exceptionally large mouth. The shark had choked to death, so its bulky 4.25-m-long body was taken to Hawaii's Kaneohe Laboratory for preservation. Following a very extensive study, in 1981 it was proclaimed as an entirely new species of shark, radically dissimilar from any previously recorded.

Formally named the megamouth shark Megachasma pelagios, it was so dramatically different, in fact, that it required the creation of a wholly new zoological family in order to accommodate it within the shark classification system. Since then, a sizeable number of additional specimens have been recorded in seas all around the world, making the late scientific discovery of such a large and distinctive species of fish all the more extraordinary, and confirming that the vast oceans undoubtedly hold many more zoological surprises in store.

THE TAKAHE

New Zealand is home to many species of unusual bird found nowhere else in the world, but one of the most beautiful, and elusive, is a multicoloured, flightless relative of coots and moorhens known as the takahe Porphyrio mantelli. Almost as big as a turkey and surviving only on the South Island, it was originally discovered in 1849, but was only rarely seen, and many years would often pass between successive sightings. After a sighting in 1898, however, no further confirmed reports of the takahe emerged for several decades, and zoologists eventually deemed that this time it must surely be extinct.

In November 1948, however, after learning from local Maoris of a mysterious lake not known to Europeans but around whose shores they claimed takahes could still be found, New Zealand physician Dr Geoffrey Orbell organised an expedition to this lake. On 20 November, while the team was searching there, and without any prior warning, just ahead of them a takahe unexpectedly stepped into view - and into history - as the first living specimen recorded for 50 years! Its species' rediscovery is one of the most significant in modern times, and the takahe is now fully protected.

THE DINGISO

In 1994, while visiting the hitherto scarcely-explored Sudirman mountains of Irian Jaya, the western, Indonesian half of New Guinea, Australian zoologist Dr Tim Flannery encountered a completely unfamiliar yet extremely distinctive species of tree kangaroo, whose eyecatching black and white fur made it look more like a panda! Moreover, in spite of its zoological status, this particular tree kangaroo preferred to spend much of its time on the ground, and was relatively tame, whistling loudly at anyone approaching it. It transpired that the native Moni tribe sharing its forest habitat revere this species as their own ancestor, and thus refrain from hunting it, explaining why it was unafraid of humans.

Known to them as the dingiso, it was totally new to science, and when officially documented and described, it was christened Dendrolagus mbaiso. This delightful panda-lookalike is the most dramatic new species of mammal to have been discovered in Australasia for many years.

And speaking of pandas: the giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca was itself only rediscovered in 1928 after having been written off as extinct for several decades after its original discovery by western science in 1868.

 Just over a century ago, zoologists were confidently predicting that all of the world's major animal forms had been found and catalogued. How wrong they were. Even today, very notable new species of animal are still being discovered, and species long believed extinct are still being rediscovered, as documented in my recent book The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals (Coachwhip Books: Landisville, 2012). This is why the conservation of existing wildlife habitats worldwide remains so imperative, in order to preserve biodiversity and avoid the horrifying prospect of remarkable animal species becoming extinct without their existence ever having been discovered. What a terrible tragedy that would be.

My sincere thanks to Pib Burns for kindly permitting me to include in my article a selection of postage stamp illustrations from his excellent cryptozoological philately site (together with illustrations of stamps from my own collection) - please click here to visit Pib's site and see more postage stamps depicting new, rediscovered, and still-undiscovered animals.

And for lots more information on every major new and rediscovered animal from 1900 to the present day, check out my recent book, The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals - the definitive book on all such creatures.