Artistic representation of a
devil monkey – is North America home to an undiscovered species of macropod, or
macropod-like mystery beast? (© William M. Rebsamen)
For
the cryptozoologist, the most perplexing of all American phantom kangaroo
reports (click here
and here
to read a selection of these as documented in Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part
ShukerNature article) must surely be those attributed to the Jersey devil. For
although several accounts concerning the latter mystery beast allude to
creatures bearing a superficial similarity to genuine macropods, such beasts
additionally possess certain features that are anything but characteristic of
Australia's most famous denizens. Such features include a tendency to emit
bloodcurdling screams, as well as possessing hooves, horns, and wings.
SHRIEKS AND SCREAMS
The
things with wings and the horrors with horns plus hooves evidently have nothing
to do with kangaroos, phantom or otherwise, and therefore can be omitted from
further discussion here forthwith. The remainder, conversely, appear to differ
from typical macropods only with respect to their spine-chilling shrieks. In
actual fact, America possesses certain known creatures famed for their ability to
produce these very same sounds.
The
two most notable species are the great horned owl Bubo virginianus and
the puma Puma concolor. As it happens, although hunters and trackers had
frequently reported personal observations of pumas producing these remarkably
loud and eerie sounds, they were generally disbelieved by scientists – until
official observations of such activity were recorded from various zoo
specimens, as documented by C.A.W. Guggisberg in his comprehensive book Wild
Cats of the World (1975) and subsequently expanded upon by me in my own,
first book Mystery Cats of the World (1989).
Puma (top) and great horned owl (bottom) (public domain /
Patrick Coin/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.5 licence)
Thus
it is probable that at least some reports of poorly-observed screaming critters
can be explained in this way. Such a solution cannot, however, be applied to those
reports in which the witness has distinctly observed a kangaroo-like creature shrieking at close quarters.
Moreover, any ventriloquist puma or owl working in conjunction with a kangaroo
stooge is much more likely to be found employed upon a Saturday morning cartoon
show than wandering through America's countryside!
Evidently,
the riddle of the screeching kangaroos will remain unresolved until a specimen
can actually be obtained. However, there is one final mystery macropod identity
(offered by several writers in the past as at least a theoretical possibility)
that has so far not been investigated here, but which is particularly pertinent
to this more aberrant, shrieking category of phantom kangaroo (because due to
their weird vocals these latter cryptids cannot be so readily considered as
straightforward escapees of known macropod species). The possibility in
question, albeit exceedingly remote and radical, is that America harbours an
unknown, indigenous species of macropod or macropod-like creature. Furthermore,
such a form could actually have arisen via two completely different means.
THE CHATATA BIPED AND THE DEVIL MONKEY
Although
today represented only by the didelphids (true opossums), caenolestids (rat/shrew
opossums), plus a lone surviving species of microbiotheriid (monito del monte),
and existing predominantly in Central and South America (a single didelphid species
occurs as far north as the U.S.A.), in earlier times the marsupials were a very
diverse group throughout the New World. South America in particular was once
home to a number of sizeable forms, including the pouched sabre-tooth Thylacosmilus
and the wolf-like borhyaenids that belonged to a now entirely extinct taxonomic
order whose members were known as sparassodonts and were only very distantly
related to all other South American marsupials.
Interestingly,
by morphologically paralleling the placental wolves, the borhyaenids also called
to mind Australasia's marsupial wolves, the thylacinids (of which the now
'officially' extinct Tasmanian wolf Thylacinus cynocephalus is the only modern-day
representative). Indeed, these two latter marsupial groups were once deemed to
be closely related. Following more recent research, however, it is nowadays recognised
that this is not the case at all – their notable outward similarity arose
instead through convergent evolution, due to their occupancy of the same
ecological niche upon their respective continents.
If the
Americas' pouched mammalian clan could produce a parallel to the Australasian
marsupial wolves, could it also have produced a parallel to the Australasian
macropods – and one, moreover, which (unlike the borhyaenids) has actually
survived to the present day, in North America? Sadly, however, all of the
scientific evidence currently available stands firmly against this possibility.
Firstly, excluding only a few surviving didelphids all of North America's
marsupials died out much earlier (and were much less specialised) than those of
the New World's southern continent. So if an indigenous American macropod-like
form had evolved and has possibly survived into the present day,
one would expect sightings from South or even Central America rather than from the
northern continent. Furthermore, no fossil remains of kangaroo-like beasts have
ever been recorded from the Americas (known New World fossil marsupials have
been carnivorous or insectivorous rather than herbivorous).
Holding some grapes, a
Virginia opossum Didelphis virginiana, the USA's only known living marsupial species (public domain)
Worth
noting for comparison purposes, however, is that despite the absence of geologically-recent
coelacanth fossils, two living species do indeed exist. Consequently, an absence
of recent fossils of a given animal group does not prove conclusively that no
living representative of this group survives. Moreover, one discovery has
occurred that may have particular bearing upon the veracity of this most intriguing
(albeit highly unlikely) mystery macropod identity.
On 9
November 1891, New York City historian Prof. Albert Leighton Rawson published
in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences a short paper
entitled 'The Ancient Inscription on a Wall at Chatata, Tennessee'. In this,
Rawson described a mysterious wall-like structure lately excavated near
Cleveland, in Bradley County, which was composed of red sandstone that bore
many hundreds of inscribed symbols of unknown meaning and origin. Moreover,
there was also evidence to suggest that attempts had subsequently been made to
obliterate them, by covering them with cement and placing on top of this a layer
of stone – all very strange.
Strangest
of all, however, was the fact that certain of the symbols took the form of
unusual animal types, not clearly identifiable with known American species. Of
these, the most perplexing must surely be the very distinctive creature whose
inscribed form is replicated here:
Exact reproduction of the inscribed form of the mystifying bipedal
beast present on the Chatata Wall (public domain)
For
whereas certainly not matching any 'official' New World animal, it closely
corresponds with an 'unofficial' form – the American phantom kangaroo. Unlike
known macropods, of course, the Chatata biped sports a beard-like structure
hanging from its lower jaw, plus strange-looking hind feet. Such differences,
however, could simply be due to artistic style. Also, if the Americas have indeed
yielded their own macropod form, one would expect at least slight differences
from the Australasian version – another reason for the 'beard' and feet?
The
specific age of the inscriptions is unknown, but they would certainly seem to
predate very considerably the last 200 years or so – when Australasian
macropods first began to arrive in America bound for zoos, sideshow, and
circuses, and from which escapees could subsequently infiltrate America's
countryside.
Of
course the Chatata biped may simply be a beast created by the inscriber's
imagination. Nevertheless, is it not curious that it bears so close a
resemblance to one of America's most puzzling modern-day mystery creatures, the
phantom kangaroo? Tragically, however, no direct investigations of this carving
or any others on the Chatata Wall can currently be undertaken, because,
incredibly, the wall's exact location is no longer known! There is also a
much-debated theory that its inscriptions may actually be nothing more than the
casual, non-coordinated product of natural geological or palaeontological
phenomena, but I cannot in any way comprehend how such precise, well-delineated
forms could have been created by such random means.
Artistic reconstruction of
the possible appearance of a devil monkey, based upon eyewitness descriptions (©
William M. Rebsamen)
More
than 20 years after I wrote the original version of this article (back in the
mid-1980s), a new and very different but no less intriguing cryptozoological
connection to America's phantom kangaroos was postulated – this time by Loren
Coleman and fellow American mysteries researcher Patrick Huyghe in their book The
Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999). Even
though I have otherwise largely refrained from including updates, this highly
intriguing identity certainly deserves mention here.
They proposed
that at least some of America's reported mystery macropods are not macropods at
all but actually constitute an undiscovered species of indigenous primate, a
giant simian to be precise, that Coleman and another of his co-researchers,
Mark A. Hall, have dubbed the devil monkey. Here is how Coleman and Huyghe described
this postulated cryptid in their book:
They appear to be a kind of
giant baboon that moves by saltation, leaping as do kangaroos – and are often
mistaken for them. Due to their size [standing up to 5 ft tall according to a
reconstruction of this cryptid's possible appearance included alongside its verbal
description] and means of locomotion, they have evolved a large flat foot with
three rounded toes. Immature Devil Monkeys resemble marsupials such as
wallabies due to convergent evolution but this similarity diminishes as they
mature.
A
fascinating if entirely speculative proposal, because as yet there is no known
fossil evidence to confirm the prior existence of any type of endemic primate
in continental North America (other than our own species in modern times, of
course), thereby reducing the likelihood that any such creatures exist here
today.]
A more baboon-like
interpretation of the devil monkey's possible appearance, should it actually
exist (© William M. Rebsamen)
OAHU'S ROCK WALLABIES
The
second way in which America could possess its very own, separate macropod form
can be illustrated by the startling case of the distinctive form of rock wallaby
unique to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. As noted in 1982 within a Science
Digest news report, a single pair of Australian brush-tailed rock wallabies
Petrogale penicillatus escaped from a zoo on Oahu in 1916. They were
never caught, and subsequently reproduced in the wild, their offspring in turn
mating amongst themselves, until a sizeable population of several hundred wallabies
was established (although this has since declined to a present-day total of
only 40 or so specimens).
Furthermore,
in the early 1980s, when studying these most unusual additions to the Oahu
fauna, American biologist Dr James Lazell claimed that they now differed so considerably
both in body size and in colouration from their original Antipodean ancestors
that they actually appeared to have evolved into a totally separate subspecies –
unique to Oahu. Such rapid evolutionary divergence from the original form (less
than 60 years in the case of the Oahu wallabies) is particularly common amongst
very small populations of creatures isolated from all other
intraspecific individuals – a phenomenon termed genetic drift. Furthermore, as Lazell
noted in Science Digest, dramatic deviations will occur if the original
organisms possess any marked genetic irregularities.
[It
should be pointed out, however, that a detailed molecular genetic analysis of
the Oahu wallaby population conducted by Drs Mark D.B. Eldridge and Teena L.
Browning, and published by the Journal of Mammalogy in 2002, refuted
previous suggestions that these Hawaiian specimens now constituted a separate taxon.]
If, as
seems probable, many of the reported 'normal' macropods sighted across America
are descendants of original escapees that survived and multiplied in the wild,
might it be possible that at least some of these have evolved (or are evolving)
into separate taxa from their captive ancestors? In other words, could America genuinely
possess its own indigenous macropod form, albeit of accelerated modern-day
rather than traditional prehistoric evolutionary origin? It is to be hoped that
whenever living macropods are captured in the wilds of North America, precise
genetic and protein analyses will be undertaken to discover conclusively their
taxonomic identity and reveal whether such an exciting phenomenon is indeed
occurring here.
NEW ZEALAND'S KAWAU
WALLABIES
Also well worth noting at this point is a comparable wallaby-themed
situation on a small New Zealand island to that on Oahu. The white-throated
(parma) wallaby Notamacropus (=Macropus)
parma is a very handsome animal, dark brown on top, white underneath, with
a black stripe running from its neck to midway down its back. It was once
plentiful in the Illawarra and Cambewarra mountainous areas of southern New
South Wales, Australia, but as a result of its woodland habitat's wholesale
clearance by humans, its numbers rapidly dwindled. By 1932, this attractive
mammal was considered extinct.
In 1966, however, it made a reappearance that was particularly
unexpected – due to the specific locality in which its reappearance took place,
which was not in Australia at all, but instead in New Zealand, on a 500-acre
island called Kawau, sited 30 miles north of Auckland on North Island. New
Zealand is a country famed for having just two species of native mammal, both
of which are bats. So how could the existence on a small New Zealand island of
an allegedly-extinct Australian wallaby be explained? For once, the answer was
quite straightforward.
A white-throated (aka parma) wallaby (© Dr Karl Shuker)
In 1870, settlers had released several white-throated wallabies
from Australia onto Kawau, just as they had earlier introduced many other
non-native animals onto New Zealand's two principal islands. The wallabies had
thrived, and multiplied, so that a healthy population now existed there
(alongside those of four other wallaby species also brought here from Australia
at various times). And of interest, they are markedly smaller in body size than the original introduced stock, indicating insular evolution has taken place here too, as on Oahu.
To safeguard this species' future, some of the island's white-throated
wallabies were sent to zoos around the world to initiate captive populations
(which has been a great success), just in case disease or some other threat
should decimate the Kawau colony. Not long afterwards, moreover, it was
rediscovered on mainland Australia too, by G.H. Maynes, who located some
notable forest-dwelling populations in an expanse of land stretching from the
Hunter River to the Clarence River in northeastern New South Wales, thereby greatly
increasing its survival chances in the wild too.
NATURALISED WALLABIES IN BRITAIN
This
whole subject also has great bearing upon creatures far closer to home for me –
namely, within the British Isles. For it is well known that established populations
of naturalised Bennett's wallaby Notamacropus
rufogriseus officially exist in Britain.
As
detailed by Sir Christopher Lever in his definitive book The Naturalised
Animals of the British Isles (1977), one such population was long located
within heather moorland, scrub, and woodlands in the Peak District of
Derbyshire and Staffordshire, England, descended from five macropod escapees from
a private zoo near Leek during World War II. Sadly, however, this population
seems nowadays to have all but died out, due to a succession of harsh winters,
although occasional sightings of single specimens are still reported here.
A shy Bennett's wallaby (© Dr
Karl Shuker)
Another
documented British wallaby population exists in the St Leonard's Forest and
Worth Forest area south of Crawley New Town in northern Sussex, England, and
may have been similarly established by wartime escapees, this time from
Leonardslee Park near Horsham. There is even a famous wallaby population on
Inchconnachan, one of the islands in Scotland's Loch Lomond. These are
descended from some specimens that were introduced there during the 1940s by
Lady Arran Colquhoun, and Inchconnachan itself is popularly referred to
colloquially as Wallaby Island.
In
view of the Oahu wallabies, is it conceivable that in time to come these
British naturalised wallabies will evolve into at least a
phenotypically-distinct form, visually distinguishable from their escapee
ancestors? Truly a most stimulating thought, and one made even more tantalising
by the fact that prior to their population crash the Peak District wallabies
had already yielded some individuals differing markedly in colouration from the
original escapees. Moreover, in recent years a number of albino wallabies have
been reported in the wild from various disparate localities across Great
Britain.
An albino Bennett's wallaby (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Intriguingly,
reports have also been filed involving British sightings of macropods in
locations other than those officially confirmed to be occupied by populations.
In some cases, such reports are known to have been caused by lone escapees from
captivity nearby; in others, an individual from one of the official naturalised
populations may simply have strayed elsewhere.
However,
a fair few reports exist that cannot be satisfactorily explained by either of
these answers, leading to the prospect that other, currently unconfirmed
populations of escapee descendants may exist in Britain. Take, for example, the
Oxfordshire outbreak of August 1985:
ELUDING CAPTURE
On 14
August 1985, student Greg Caswell gave chase to a wallaby spotted bounding
along the Benson to Crowmarsh road in south Oxfordshire, England, while he was
driving home late that evening, but he didn't catch it. Although two or three
wallabies were known to have escaped before Christmas 1984 from the McAlpine
estate near Fawley (about 8 miles from Crowmarsh), these were all thought to
have been killed in road accidents (Fortean Times, winter 1985). On 24
or 25 August, a drowned wallaby was discovered in a private pool at Crowmarsh –
possibly the individual that had eluded capture by Greg just over a week earlier
(Oxford Mail, 28 August).
A few
days before that find, and at least 30 miles north-west of Oxford, Julia Brooks
of Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, had been surprised to observe a wallaby
in her garden eating food scraps put out for the birds; and on 25 August,
workers on the Cornbury Park estate (about 15 miles southeast of Chipping
Campden) sighted a macropod in nearby fields, but they claimed that it was 5-6
ft tall, grey-coloured, and was identified emphatically by them as a kangaroo,
not a wallaby (Fortean Times, winter 1985).
Might it have been an eastern
grey kangaroo Macropus giganteus,
like this individual? (© Danielle Langlois/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)
Thus
it seems that this latter, much larger beast was not the same macropod that Brooks
had spied. On 17 September, the Oxford Mail reported that Police
Constable Jon Badrick from Chipping Norton had been assigned to capture his
town's mystery macropod(s), and he revealed that the wallaby may have once
belonged to a Dennis Washington who kept wallabies at Middle Barton – although
whether any of his had in fact escaped was not mentioned. Moreover, on 6
October London's Mail on Sunday newspaper actually published a photograph
of a wallaby eluding capture by a Chipping Norton policeman. Yet whether any
macropods from this hotbed of hopping activity were ever caught is unknown
– like so many cryptid sagas, after a blaze of publicity Oxfordshire's mystifying
marsupials simply faded from the news.
Less
than two years later, a wallaby was being pursued by the Royal Ulster
Constabulary after having been spotted near to Belfast Zoo in Northern Ireland,
but it was not revealed whether this specimen had in fact escaped from the zoo
(Sandwell Express and Star, 30 April 1987). Similarly, another wallaby
of uncertain origin was also being sought by police after having been spotted
hopping down the Weymouth to Wareham road in Dorset, southwestern England, by
an ambulance crew (Sandwell Express and Star, 14 August 1987).
As demonstrated here by the individual standing between (but
further back than) my mother Mary Shuker and myself at a farm in Melbourne,
Australia, adult kangaroos can be well over 5' tall (I am 5'10" but by
standing nearer to the camera than the kangaroo was, I appear much taller than
it was, due to forced perspective) (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Naturalised
kangaroo (as opposed to wallaby) populations are not supposed to exist anywhere
in the British Isles, which makes the Cornbury Park specimen a notable puzzle.
Even more bizarre, however, is the Lancashire creature observed one afternoon
in 1967 by David Rees at the edge of a wooded area called Freshfields near
Southport, England – an incident recalled by him in Fortean Times (summer
1980). For this animal, described by Rees as being a kangaroo, was at least 8
ft tall, with a rusty-brown pelage. Its most surprising feature, however, was
its gait. Rees reported that after viewing him, the creature "...turned
around and walked into the undergrowth and out of sight". Enquiries to local
police failed to ascertain its origin.
Although,
as stated by Dr Alyson Lander of New South Wales, Australia, in a follow-up
letter (Fortean Times, Summer 1981), its colour matched that of a male
red kangaroo (albeit an exceedingly tall one), no modern-day species of macropod
moves by walking. Not only the origin but also the zoological identity of this
animal thus remains a mystery.
ENORMOUS RABBIT-LIKE MYSTERY BEASTS DOWN UNDER
Continental
Europe is not immune to phantom kangaroos either. A selection of reports
concerning the French equivalent of America's 'normal' category of such beasts
appeared in Fortean Times (spring 1987), courtesy of Jean-Louis Brodu.
Additionally, in September 1985 one or more kangaroos were frightening
villagers in northern Hungary; a Hungarian Sunday newspaper applied the escapee
theory as an explanation (Fortean Times, winter 1985).
Inevitably,
tales of phantom kangaroos have also been recorded from the original homeland
of all marsupial hoppers – the vast island continent of Australia. However, the
Antipodean brand of mystery macropod makes even the mighty 6-7-ft-tall red
kangaroo, capable of 10-ft-high bounds, look positively puny in comparison. For
in the arid desert land constituting the dry heart of Australia, reports from
gold-prospectors and other occasional travellers to these inhospitable zones have
spoken of enormous rabbit-like beasts that disappear in a single bound.
Furthermore, some accounts refer specifically to "kangaroos 12 feet
high".
Consequently,
in his classic cryptozoological book On the Track of Unknown Animals
(1958), Dr Bernard Heuvelmans boldly suggested that these may actually be
surviving representatives of Australia's giant Pleistocene macropods. Grazers
such as Procoptodon and browsers such as Sthenurus attained
heights of 10 ft.
However,
in recent years anatomical studies based upon their fossil remains have
indicated that these bipedal giants most likely moved not by bounding but
instead by walking. In any event, the possibility that such massive marsupials still
exist is one that may never be investigated fully, due to the daunting
conditions that must be faced by anyone penetrating these environmentally
hostile regions.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It is
clear that the creatures hitherto classed as phantom kangaroos actually
constitute a diversity of different animal types, of which only the 'normal'
category is likely to feature genuine macropods. Consequently, usage of the
term 'phantom kangaroo' should be restricted hereafter to this single specific group.
It is also evident that public awareness concerning the phenomenon of mystery macropods
has been stimulated in particular by the extensive investigations of Loren
Coleman and David Fideler, and the unstinting documentation of reports by Fortean
Times. It is hoped that their efforts will be ultimately rewarded by
unequivocal solutions to this most curious cryptozoological conundrum.
In the
meantime, however, whenever you put out scraps for the birds, don't forget to
check whether the bipeds eating them include not only winged and feathered
examples but also some pouched and furred ones!
Finally,
be sure to click here
and here
in order to read Parts 1 and 2 of this ShukerNature article – you know it makes
sense!
Rolling back the years – how I
looked way back in the mid-1980s when I wrote the original version of this
article at the very beginning of what has become for me a lifelong and
exceedingly enjoyable cryptozoological career (© Dr Karl Shuker)
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