Life-sized
statue representing the postulated appearance in life of Therizinosaurus
(© Dr Karl Shuker)
North of
Australia is the extremely large island of New Guinea, still plentifully supplied
with little-explored expanses of rainforest and mountainland. Might it be
hiding some modern-day non-avian dinosaurs, living neodinosaurs, no less? Over
the years, a number of searches for such creatures have been made there,
inspired by local testimony of elusive cryptids bearing varying degrees of
resemblance to dinosaurian reptiles, as will now be revealed.
Having said
that, we begin our quest for surviving prehistoric Papuans with what must
surely be one of the most bizarre episodes in the entire history of
cryptozoology.
Political
map of New Guinea, showing its division into Indonesia-owned Papua (left) and
the independent sovereign state Papua New Guinea (right) (Wikipedia)
During the late
1930s, Java-born explorer/camera-man Charles C. Miller and his newly-married
wife, former American society girl Leona Jay, spent their honeymoon visiting
the Sterren Mountains in what was
then Dutch New Guinea (the western half of New Guinea, now known variously,
and confusingly, as Western New Guinea, Papua, Western Papua, Irian Jaya, or
Indonesian New Guinea). Here they allegedly encountered not only a
hitherto-unknown tribe of cannibals called the Kirrirri but also what Miller
believed to be a living dinosaur. Their introduction to this latter beast came
about in a somewhat unusual manner - courtesy of a coconut de-husker used by
one of the native women.
Leona noticed
that the tool in question, roughly 18 in long and 20
lb in weight, resembled the distal portion of an elephant tusk or
rhino horn, but as there are no elephants or rhinos in New Guinea she was very
perplexed as to its true identity and origin. When she told her husband, he
made some enquiries and was shown several of these curious objects, which were
made of a horn-like substance present in cone-shaped layers - i.e. resembling a
stacked pile of paper drinking cups, one cup inside another. When pressed for
more details, some of the natives drew a strange lizard-like creature in the
sand, whose tail terminated in one of these horns. They called this beast the
row (after its loud cry), and said that it was 40
ft long,
Although Miller
was initially sceptical of their claims, he could not deny the evidence of the
horns and could offer no alternative explanation for their origin, and so when
he learned that the hills to the northwest of the Kirrirri camp reputedly
harboured these gigantic beasts, he set out with his wife and a native party in
the hope of filming them. After a couple of days' journey, they reached a
triangular swamp situated between two plateaux and occupying an area of roughly
40 acres. As Miller sat
there, looking at a bed of tall reeds a quarter of a mile away, the reeds
suddenly moved. Something was behind them. Hardly daring to breathe, Miller
waited for them to move again, camera in hand - and when they did, the result
was so shocking that Leona collapsed to the ground, almost fainting with fear.
A long thin neck
bearing a small head fringed with a flaring bony hood had risen up through the
reeds, followed by a sturdy elephantine body bearing a series of huge
triangular plates running along its backbone, and a lengthy tapering tail
bearing at its tip one of the mysterious horns that Miller had come to know so
well. Its front limbs were shorter than its hind limbs, and while Miller was
filming it, the row unexpectedly paused, raised itself up onto its hind limbs,
and peered in the party's direction, almost as if it sensed the presence of
these human interlopers within its private, prehistoric domain. In colour, it
was precisely the same shade of light yellow-brown as the surrounding reeds, no
doubt affording it excellent camouflage should it seek anonymity, but it was
presently intent upon more extrovert behaviour - rearing up on two further
occasions before disappearing from sight behind a clump of dwarf eucalyptus
trees, just as Miller's film ran out.
My
copy of the 1951 Travel Book Club reprint of Cannibal Caravan (© Travel
Book Club, reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for
educational/review purposes only)
In 1939, his
extraordinary adventure was first published in book form - Cannibal Caravan.
Yet despite containing many interesting pictures, there was none of his most
spectacular discovery, the row. There was not even a photograph of one of the tail
horns. Similarly, although Miller claimed to have shown the film to various
(unnamed) authorities, nothing more has ever emerged regarding it, or the
Kirrirri either, for that matter, as this tribe has apparently never been
encountered again by any other explorer.
Equally odd was
that in Cannibals and Orchids (1941), Leona Miller's own book recalling
their ostensibly highly eventful New Guinea honeymoon, she relegated the row episode
to just a few short paragraphs (of which only a single half-paragraph directly
documented their actual supposed sighting of it), and which contained none of
the descriptive details given by her husband in his book (indeed, her entire
description of it was confined to a single sentence, concerning its length).
Needless to say, this is hardly what one might expect from someone who had
supposedly encountered (and been thoroughly unnerved by) a living dinosaur!
Nevertheless,
because I am unaware of any previous cryptozoological document ever having
quoted her account of the row (as opposed to his), I am doing so now for its
historical (if not its descriptive) value:
In the village we found the horny tail-tip of
the row. It looked like a rhinoceros horn, except that one side had been
worn flat and smooth from dragging across the ground. The Kirrirri women, undaunted by the
battleship proportions of the creature that supplied it, used the point for
husking coconuts.
Having seen the tip of the tail, Charles had
to see the row. The Kirrirris,
mightily impressed by Charles’s guns, were agreeable. They were just crazy enough to see what would
happen when Charles popped at a monster with a gun, and Charles was just crazy
enough to show them. I went along
because I wouldn’t have been any better off if I stayed behind, and I also had
an idea that if there really was such a thing as the creature described – I
didn’t believe it for a minute – I wanted to be where I could yank Charles out
before he did something he wouldn’t have time to regret.
We went, we saw the darn thing, and we came
back. Charles got motion pictures of it, but it was his reflexes, trained in
Hollywood, that started the camera. His
brain was just as frozen as mine. In fact
of the two of us, he was more scared than I. I was just scared blank and couldn’t get any more frightened. Charles
had been in so many tight spots before, he could appreciate the various
shadings of danger. This was the
blackest shade he had ever encountered, so he hit a new high in fright. He says it really takes an expert to be as
scared as he was, though I later encountered moments when I came awfully close
to it.
Artistic
representation of the row (© Tim Morris)
The row
was the real thing. In a radio broadcast
on a nation-wide hook-up I ventured to describe it over the air. The resulting fan-mail indicated the public
was still interested in prehistoric monsters. It has long been known to science
that Dutch New Guinea harbors some sort of monster on the order of, but much
larger, than the Varanus Komodoensis. Other explores have found additional
evidence, but Charles and I believe we are the first white people actually to
see one alive and to have found its lair.
The giant reptile we saw was somewhere between
thirty and forty feet long, which is not big considering that some of the crocodiles
grow thirty feet long in the Merauke River. It was its bulk that made it so tremendous. But every tiny detail was impressed upon my
mind, to be recalled bit by bit as the first shock wore off. Many a night after that I lay awake staring
through the clouds of mosquitoes humming around my net and seeing only this
monster smashing its casual way through what should have been an impenetrable
quagmire of thorn brush and barbed wire marsh grass.
Charles took no shots at it. He recalled
suddenly that he owed it to civilization to photograph in full the various
details of the lost tribe. We hastened
back to resume our travelogue where we left off. It was strangely restful to
get in back of a tripod again, with nothing more alarming in front of the lens
than a few dozen cannibals.
Perhaps the most
paradoxical aspect of this entire episode, however, concerns the row itself.
For although palaeontologists currently recognise the former existence of many hundreds of different dinosaur species, collectively yielding a myriad
of shapes, sizes, and forms, not one compares even superficially with the row -
and for very good reason. As Dr Bernard Heuvelmans pointed out in On the
Track of Unknown Animals (1958), the row's morphology is truly surrealistic
- because it combines the characteristics of several wholly unrelated dinosaur
groups.
Little wonder,
then, why cryptozoologists are reluctant to countenance any likelihood of this
morphologically composite creature's reality. Of course, their denunciation
could be premature - but as long as Miller's film remains as elusive as the
beast that it allegedly depicts, how can we blame them for remaining
unconvinced?
Intriguingly,
however, as documented in Rex and Heather Gilroy's fascinating Australian
cryptozoology tome Out of the Dreamtime (2006), reports of a
neodinosaurian cryptid with the similar-sounding local name of rahruh have
apparently been emerging elsewhere in New Guinea, but especially
Papua New Guinea, for at least a
century.
Out
of the Dreamtime (© Rex and Heather Gilroy/URU Publications –
reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for
educational/review purposes only)
The reports
describe an extremely large bipedal reptile with a very long neck, long tail, and
predominantly frugivorous diet, but one that will also readily encompass the
consumption of any Highland tribespeople who attempt to confront it. There have been many reports and sightings here of
gigantic monitor lizards or varanids known as the artrellia, far longer than
the accepted maximum length of 15 ft accorded to
this island's native Salvadori's monitor Varanus salvadorii, and
monitors can walk bipedally for a short time or distance, but the rahruh is
supposedly very distinct from any such lizard.
Over the years, moreover,
alleged sightings of sauropod-like mystery beasts have been reported from
various tiny islets off the southwestern coast of the much larger island of New
Britain (and also from New Britain itself), situated in the Bismarck Archipelago
to the east of New Guinea, but little information concerning their precise
appearance has been recorded. Conversely, I know of at least one reputed
encounter with a very different type of supposed living dinosaur on one of
these specks of land for which a detailed description is indeed on file, and
which has been likened to a highly distinctive if decidedly surprising fossil
form.
Brian
Irwin on West New Britain's
Ursula River
(© Brian Irwin and Todd Jurasek)
In January 2008,
Australian cryptozoologist Brian Irwin visited the island of Ambungi (aka
Umbungi), and while there he interviewed one of two eyewitnesses who claim to
have seen an extraordinary animal in 2005/2006, and which has apparently been
sighted here and on a neighbouring isle called Alage at least nine times since
the early 1990s. Robert, whom Brian interviewed (the absent eyewitness was
named Tony Avil), stated that the creature was approximately 30-45
ft long, possessed smooth brown shiny skin, a long tail, and also
a long neck, but was bipedal, and resembled a huge wallaby in overall
appearance, except for its head, which was turtle-like.
When walking
slowly on its hind legs, the top of this creature's head was estimated to be
"as high as a house", and the vertical distance from its underbelly
to the ground was estimated to be equal to the height of an adult man. It was
observed from a distance of around 150
ft in the late afternoon, and for some considerable time, while it
ate vegetation before eventually walking away, entering into some water,
followed cautiously at a distance by its eyewitnesses.
Another
view of a life-sized statue representing the postulated appearance in life of Therizinosaurus
(© Dr Karl Shuker)
When shown
pictures of creatures, Robert selected a restoration of the possible appearance
in life of the theropod dinosaur Therizinosaurus as most closely
resembling what he and Avil had seen that day – except for the head, which was
depicted as horse-like in the illustration. As Brian has commented, however,
the head's morphology in that picture was entirely speculative, because no
skull identified as being from a Therizinosaurus has ever been
documented, so the appearance of its head is currently unknown. Indeed, the
only portions of this very large theropod from the late Cretaceous that are
known from fossil evidence are its limbs and some ribs, so much of its likely
appearance is merely deduced from related forms.
Ironically,
however, its most famous confirmed attributes, and which must have been truly
spectacular in life, are conspicuous only by their absence from Roger's
description of the cryptid seen by him and Avil – because Therizinosaurus
possessed incredibly long claws on its hands, probably up to 3
ft long (only incomplete versions are currently on record). In
short, combining this startling absence from Roger's description with the
relatively undetermined appearance of Therizinosaurus as a whole anyway,
his identification of the latter dinosaur's illustration as being most similar
to the cryptid that he saw clearly cannot be taken literally in any sense
(although it has been on some websites), and can do no more than offer a basic
idea of the latter beast's general form.
Todd
Jurasek and Brian Irwin (© Brian Irwin and Todd Jurasek)
During late
December 2015 through early January 2016, Brian was in New Britain, accompanied by
American cryptid investigator Todd Jurasek, to continue Brian's earlier
researches. Todd's summary of what they learnt while there (plus a selection of
their photographs) is included exclusively here as follows, with his kind
permission:
1) Ambungi Island - We visited Ambungi Island
examining the caves reportedly used by a sauropod in recent years. Brian and I
and [a] large group [of] islanders went to the caves at night. Conflicting
reports from the native divers led me to suspect it wasn't really a deep one. I
went back and physically examined the cave the next day in daylight. The
water surrounding the entrance was maybe 15 ft at its deepest point, the cave maybe about 10 ft wide and deep. I placed a trail camera for a week above a
secondary purported cave with no success. The last reported dinosaur
sighting around the island was back in July of 2015 by an adult male who wished
to remain anonymous. He watched a brown long necked creature with a saw like
ridge on his back moving in the open ocean in the afternoon while in a canoe. Ambungi Island
appears to be visited at times by these creatures but I saw no surface caves
capable of hiding an animal larger than an adult human. The island is comprised
of pocketed limestone that has the appearance of Swiss cheese or iron/steel
slag discard from an iron or steel mill. (I'm guessing most of the islands in New Britain if
not all appear this way.) Just like Swiss cheese there are no real continual
holes to be found, just many odd-shaped pot-marked ones of various
sizes. The only sizable holes on the island that I saw were along the shores
where water erosion has occurred on [a] consistent basis creating small bluffs
or overhangs.
Main
cave, next to boat, on Ambungi Island
reputedly used by sauropod-like creature (© Brian Irwin and Todd Jurasek)
2) Aiu Island (nearest island to Ambungi, also owned by the Ambungi people).
According to [an eyewitness called] Davis who lives on the island, he and
others had been chased out of the sea on multiple occasions at night by
something emanating a bright white light. They were spearfishing at night
when a bright white light would come out of the horizon and chase them to
shore. Davis couldn't tell if the light was an animal or not. After
chasing the group to shore the light would then fly away to heights of the
island. The men and boys spearfish at night off canoes. My guess is whatever
the light was [it] was attracted to their flashlights maybe even more so than
their presence or movement. (Flashlights are used to both guide their
boats and underwater for spotting fish and predators.) The light fits
the descriptions of the New Guinea pterosaur-like cryptids known as ropen. Flying brightly-lit
nocturnal creatures were also reported to have been seen in Karadian in the
past; one such story was told to me by [local missionary] Bryan Girard's
son, Rist. Another person in Karadian told me about an encounter with lights
there at night. No planes fly in PNG [Papua New Guinea] at night so they couldn't have been aircraft. As Brian and I
travelled to Karadian along the Armio road I met a young ex-school teacher from
the island of Bali, PNG (not Indonesia) whose name I forget (have picture of him). He told me of similar
creatures on his island. He said a bright light flew over the ocean
or travelled partially submerged in the water like an octopus with its head
sticking out from Bali at night to another nearby island. He was familiar with the
subject of living pterosaurs and brought up Umboi Island to me as well as
Roy Mackal's famous New Britain lake cryptid [already known for his
mokele-mbembe expeditions, Prof. Roy Mackal also investigated the migo of New
Britain's Lake Dakataua during the 1990s].
3) Akinum. Brian and I visited the [New Britain] village of Akinum
where Michael Hoffman filmed the "West New Britain Carcass"
video that was posted on YouTube in January of 2014. We were led to
believe the rotten carcass was buried by a back hoe at some point after washing
ashore; however, it appears the remains may have just washed back into the sea.
Michael accompanied us to Akinum as well as to Ambungi Island. A
mechanic from Karadian who viewed the decaying remains said it
was built like a wallaby with a saw on its back, had small front arms with
four fingers on little hands and very large back legs. The legs were so
large that two men had [a] hard time lifting and moving one of them. This was
reported to me by missionary Bryan Girard, the poster of the YouTube video.
There were conflicting reports as to what happened to the remains. Brian Irwin
and I went to the village under the impression the remains were buried on the
spot due to the stench. We also heard they were picked over by curiosity
seekers and that the remains had just washed out slowly back to sea. It is my
opinion based from talking to the locals that this is what most likely
happened. The natives that we spoke with told us they had never seen the animal
before and were adamant it did not live anywhere around there.
4) Crocodile Point. Brian and I looked into a story of a man
(Graham Sangeo) who reportedly had fed fish to a small bipedal dinosaur for
years near Crocodile Point. The animal turned out to be a male primate of some
sort that walked primarily on two legs according to our guide Leo Sangeo,
Graham's father. He guided us to the cave which is currently
abandoned. Leo described the creature as brown colored, about a meter
to a meter and a half tall, big muscular arms and shoulders. The arms were
shorter than the legs and its knees and big legs could be seen. The
animal's feet were like a dog's hind feet with five toes (I asked Leo
repeatedly about this feature to make sure I understood him correctly), it had
very small to no tail, and canines like a monkey or ape does. The creature
would come down out of the cave at night [and] scrounge around, walking on two
legs at least a part of the time. It could be seen at times seemingly
staring out to sea as if it was watching the horizon. Leo and Graham and a
few others would attach cooked fish to tall branches and lift them up to it. It
would then eat the food out [of] its hands. Leo said the animal grew bigger
over time. The creature eventually brought two babies. He said he never saw the
female. I'm not sure if the others saw the female or not. Graham discovered the
creature in 2011, feeding it until he left for school in 2014 or 2015; others
continued afterward but eventually stopped and the creature disappeared. Based
on the description I'm inclined to believe this was a small ape of some sort or
possibly a small bigfoot like creature. I was told by at least one other
person along the distant Andru River that
wild hairy men could be found in the Whitman range.
The
Andru River
(© Brian Irwin and Todd Jurasek)
5) Aivet Island. In 1992 John Manlel of Aivet Island had
a startling encounter along the mangrove strewn shores of the island with what
he described as a bright green dinosaur. He had been canoeing along the shores
of the island around 4 pm when he accidentally
startled the creature from about 20 or so yards away in open water. The
animal attempted to submerge quickly but struggled because of how it was
built. John said he watched it for about 5 minutes. He said he knew it lived on
land because of the way it was built. The creature had two short hand-like
front legs and much bigger back ones. The body was about 12 ft long with a very thick 5 to 6 ft tail that was about 8 in wide.
The animal moved its tail back and forth as it moved through the water.
John said the head looked like that of a dinosaur, the skin was rough like a
crocodile and over-all build was kangaroo in shape. The creature had a small
saw like structure on its back that became much bigger from back legs to the
end of tail. There may have been an outlying ridge of small saw like
structures along its tail like a crocodile has. If I can remember
correctly the central ridge originating from the back ran between these.
John said he never spoken to anyone but family about this encounter until he
told Brian and I. He was frozen terrified by [it] when he sighted the creature
and was adamant it was a dinosaur of some sort.
For the most
part, the serrated-back water creatures sound very much like large crocodiles,
but one would expect the local people to be very familiar with such beasts and
not deem them to be anything other than crocodiles. Also, the bright green
version reputedly spied by John Manlel, which had much shorter forelegs than
hind legs, does not recall any crocodilian species known to exist today. Having
viewed the 'West New Britain Carcass' video on YouTube (which can be accessed here),
in my opinion it is the highly-decomposed remains of a large whale rather than
anything reptilian, and various other zoologists and cryptozoologists who have
seen it hold the same opinion, but some others favour a reptilian identity,
ranging from a large crocodile or giant lizard to a bona fide dinosaur. Sadly,
no physical samples from it were made available for formal scientific analysis,
so the video is the only visible testament to this intriguing entity.
Two
views of my Therizinosaurus model, reconstructed with feathers fringing
its forelimbs (© Dr Karl Shuker)
As for the
mysterious bipedal ape-like entity fed by Graham Sangeo: no species of monkey
or ape is known from anywhere in New Guinea, but there have long been reports
from here of a mysterious miniature bigfoot-like creature known locally as the
kayadi. So if such a creature truly exists, perhaps this is what Sangeo had
been feeding. Also of note is that Sangeo claimed that the adult female was
never seen, i.e. indicating that they believed the adult individual bringing
the two babies to have been a male. However, it may be that the latter was
actually a female but with a large clitoris that its eyewitnesses had mistaken
for a penis (in some primate species, famously including the spider monkeys Ateles
spp., the adult female's clitoris is indeed noticeably large and superficially
penis-like). After all, it is far more likely to have been an adult female than
an adult male that was caring for the babies.
Brian Irwin and
Todd Jurasek have asked me to announce that if anyone reading this account here
has information concerning any of the mystery beasts sought by them in New
Britain and its outlying islets, please contact them via Todd's email address:
hunterfox743@gmail.com
This ShukerNature
blog article has been excerpted and expanded from my book Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors.
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