THE TANTALISING TWO-TONGUES IDENTIFIED AFTER ALMOST A CENTURY?

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

TONGUE-TIED BY THE TWO-TONGUES!

 

Is this what Malaya's mystifying two-tongued cryptids looked like? (created by me using Grok X1)

The days spanning Christmas and the New Year are traditionally ones filled with mystery and magic, a time of weirdness and wonder. So what better day than today, New Year's Eve, to present here on ShukerNature for your entertainment and enjoyument during this time the following cryptozoological conundrum?

In 1997, I included the following account in my book From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings, hoping that someone reading it might be able to propose an identity for the mysterious creatures described, as I was thoroughly perplexed by them – but no-one ever did. Consequently, I can only assume that these cryptids left them as taxonomically tongue-tied as they have done with me. Nor have I ever uncovered any additional information concerning them. So, 26 years later, in 2023, I reprinted my account in my regular Alien Zoo column on mystery animals and animal mysteries for the British magazine Fortean Times as a fascinating crypto-riddle to ponder over during the festive season, just in case it did elicit a solution from someone that time. Once again, however, answer came there none.

 

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

Consequently, one year on from its appearance in Alien Zoo, and in the hope that the familiar phrase ""third time lucky" will indeed prove true on this occasion, here yet again is the my account recalling the tangled tale of the two-tongues, in case ShukerNature's redoubtable readers can provide the long-sought key to its locked box of beastly secrets:

On May 27 1939, Modern Wonder documented some 'ultra-mysterious' mammals, allegedly captured by a photographer in the Malayan jungles and later observed by bemused officials in Manila, in the Philippines. Each of the beasts (of unrecorded number) was described as being quadrupedal, weighing about 200 pounds, covered in a furry, mole-like pelage (i.e. dark, dense, and shiny?), with a raccoon-like head [masked?], a pair of owl-like eyes (thus large and staring?), and odd dentition - some of its teeth resembled a man's, others were cat-like – plus a fondness for bananas. Except for their extremely heavy weight (an error on the part of the original report?), there would seem to be a chance of identifying them with some known animal type – until, that is, their most distinctive characteristic is revealed.

For the description also stated that each of these beasts had two tongues! Furthermore, it alleged that they never drank, because they absorbed all of the moisture that they required directly through their skins. This is generally a feature of certain animals living in water or in moist habitats, but the animals concerned are normally amphibians, fishes, and lower life forms, not mammals. Conversely, it is true that many desert-dwelling rodents rarely if ever drink water, because they obtain it from their food (e.g. juicy plant tissues) or from metabolic water released as they digest the dry components of their diet, but they do not absorb water through their skins.

 

 

Masked palm civet Paguma larvata, native to Peninsular Malaysia, named after its raccoon-like facial mask (© Denise Chan/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

In general appearance (and excluding weight), they are reminiscent of some of the lesser-known, mask-faced forms of Malay civet and badger – elusive, short-furred creatures of nocturnal lifestyle and partial to fruit within their largely omnivorous diet. Moreover, the owl-like eyes call to mind the tarsiers - those orb-eyed, sucker-fingered, lemur-like primates indigenous to southeast Asia (including the Malay Archipelago), and sufficiently strange in appearance to those not familiar with these rarely-seen nocturnal creatures to attract surprise and newspaper attention.

 

Sunda stink (=skunk) badger Mydaus javanensis, native to Indonesia and Malaysia, photographed in Malaysia (© Thompson Hyggen – copyright-free)

Even so, none of those identities can reconcile the mystery beasts' two tongues and the ability to absorb moisture directly through their skins. Could these attributes have been based upon misunderstanding or mistranslation, rather than upon reality? As nothing more is on record regarding the photographer's mystifying finds, there is no way of knowing. 

 

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

So there it is, the owl-eyed, twin-tongued, never-drinking plantain-eater – if nothing else (and confirming that I'm easily pleased!), it scans satisfyingly like the one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater immortalised in a classic 1958 Sheb Wooley novelty song and 30 years later in a 1988 family movie directly inspired by it!

 

Failing abysmally in my attempts to generate a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater, here's a two-eyed, two-horned flying purple people eater instead! (created by me using Magic Studio)

Meanwhile, any thoughts or suggestions as to the two-tongues' possible identity, or any extra reports/information regarding them, would be very gratefully received!

 

A two-tongue with a banquet of bananas awaiting its pleasure! (created by me using Grok X1)

Incidentally, as some of you know, I've been experimenting with various AI image-generators, testing their capabilities and limitations so as to be better equipped to recognise AI-generated fake cryptozoologically-themed images with which the Net seems to be increasingly awash of late. So, as no image of the Malayan two-tongues has ever been created to my knowledge, I decided to put to the test two different AI image-generators that I've been exploring, Grok X1 and Magic Studio, and see how they performed when prompted to produce pictures of these bizarre beasts.

And, as I'm sure that those out there who are not AI fans will be delighted to learn, both programs were aptly rendered tongue-tied (or whatever the AI equivalent state is!) by the tortuous challenge posed by the two-tongues. Not only did they fail utterly to depict them as the very sizeable animals that anything weighing 200 lb must surely be (instead presenting what look far more like diminutive cubs!), but also, out of all the numerous images that they generated, only one, produced by Grok X1, actually featured creatures possessing two tongues apiece – and here it is:

 

A pair of two-tongues actually depicted with two tongues! (created by me using Grok)

Overall, Grok X1 was the superior creator with regard to this particular pictorial task, as it also created a number of images featuring creatures with a single but bilobed tongue that my own digital addition of a hand-drawn line separating the lobes into two separate tongues was sufficient to engender some satisfactory twin-tongued entities that I've included in this article. Even so, they still did not overly resemble the original 1977 verbal description of these creatures, quoted by me above.

As for Magic Studio: usually a very accurate depicter of animals (give or take some extra or deformed fingers/toes and the occasional additional leg, or two...): faced with providing an accurate portrayal of the two-tongues, it threw a veritable generative gasket, and yielded some illustrations of animals that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the two-tongues' verbal description. It even garbled my prompt for their tongues to be pink, bestowing upon its mixed-up mammals some portions of pink fur instead! However, albeit wholly inaccurate zoologically speaking, aesthetically some of the creatures thus created by Magic Studio were so attractive, appealing, and downright adorable that I couldn't bear to delete them. So here is a selection of them, in all of their delightful dottiness:

 

All three images created by me using Magic Studio

If nothing else, designers of prospective new cuddly toys could do a lot worse than be inspired by some of these ultra-cute beasties. You can pay me my 10% creator's commission later!

Today would have been the birthday of Nan, my maternal grandmother Gertrude Timmins (who once experienced a decidedly Fortean event of her own – click here to read all about it), who passed away peacefully in her sleep at the grand old age of 99 back in 1994. Just like me, and also like her daughter, my mother Mary Shuker, Nan loved wildlife and Nature in general, so I'm sure that she would have approved of my writing and presenting this fascinating fauna case here today on her birthday. God bless you Nan, and Mom, and all of my family, all of whom are long gone now but never forgotten by me. Ome day we shall be back together, never to be separated again.

 

My late grandmother, Gertrude Timmins, with Patch, my little wire-haired Jack Russell terrier (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Wishing all of my ShukerNature blog readers, and all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog readers too, a Happy New Year – may 2025 prove to be a kindly, successful year for you.

 

And it's toodle-pip from the two-tongues too! (created by me using Grok X1)

 

 

PUTTING THE QUEENSLAND TIGER AND THE CONGOLESE WATER ELEPHANT IN THE PICTURE!

 

My illustration of the Queensland tiger aka the yarri, which I prepared as a teenager back in the mid-/late1970s (© Dr Karl Shuker

Serendipity has played a big part in my life, usually involving my looking for one thing and, while doing so, finding something entirely different but equally worthwhile. And so it proved again today.

As a teenager during the mid-/late 1970s, I'd written a letter to Prof. Christopher Evans, a very notable Welsh scientist and psychologist who at that time was also acting as scientific advisor for ITV's hit British teenage-oriented sci fi TV show The Tomorrow People. My letter concerned a biological subject touched upon not only within one of this show's series but also, and this time in much more detail, within an episode of the original, classic Star Trek TV show. I didn't really expect to receive a reply, as I assumed that he must receive countless letters from fans of the show, so I was both surprised and delighted when I did indeed receive one, in the form of a charming, insightful letter from the man himself, which I greatly treasured – and especially so when Prof. Evans tragically died not long afterwards, of cancer, in 1979, aged only 48.

It occurred to me recently that I sought to scan this precious letter from Prof. Evans and post it here on ShukerNature with the background details leading up to it, thereby preserving it publicly for posterity. So today I sought out the folder in which I always believed it to have been placed by me long ago for safekeeping – only to realize to my horror when searching for it that I no longer had any idea where said folder was! After several hours, however, I finally uncovered it – only to discover once again to my horror that it did not contain said letter! So now I have to start searching all over again for it.

However, in that very same folder I did find two other items that caught my attention, both of which I'd hitherto entirely forgotten – a pair of colour illustrations of two mystery mammals that I'd prepared at much the same time that I'd written my letter to Prof. Evans, meaning that they are almost 50 years old and have never been seen outside that folder – until now. For although I freely confess that my artistic attempts fall far short of those wonderful artworks created by my various bona fide artist friends on social media and elsewhere, as they nonetheless constitute one of my earliest forays into creating cryptozoological output I felt that followers of my Shukernature blog might like to see them, and also it means that they are now at least for the present preserved online. So here they are.

 

My copy of the hardback First Edition of On the Track of Unknown Animals, by Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, featuring several line illustrations by Monique Watteau on its dustjacket, including her rendition of the Queensland tiger (© Dr Bernard Heuvelmans/Monique Watteau/Rupert Hart-Davis – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

The first one, opening this particular blog post, is my colour illustration of Australia's elusive Queensland tiger or yarri (documented by me here on ShukerNature), which was inspired by a b/w line drawing prepared by French artist Monique Watteau that appeared in veteran cryptozoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans's seminal tome On the Track of Unknown Animals (1958). In addition, when I prepared my above illustration, I had never encountered a full-colour image of the Queensland tiger anywhere, so mine may actually have been the very first one prepared (but don't quote me on this, just in case!).

The second one, posted below, is of Africa's enigmatic Congolese water elephant (documented by me here on ShukerNature), which I recall being inspired by another original line drawing in a publication, but I haven't been able to trace which one. I thought that it was another Watteau line illustration from Heuvelmans's afore-mentioned book, but I cannot find any such image in it.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy viewing them here. Meanwhile, my search for the lost letter from Prof. Evans continues…

 

My illustration of the Congolese water elephant, which I prepared as a teenager back in the 1970s (© Dr Karl Shuker

 

THE PEEL STREET MONSTER - LOOKING BACK AT A LOCAL CRYPTID

 

Vintage illustration of a coati (public domain)

It's always good to stumble upon the history of a mystery beast not previously documented in the cryptozoological literature (which it hadn’t been, prior to my doing so in a Fortean Times article and subsequently in my book Extraordinary Animals Revisited), and especially when it happens to be a local one – having occurred just a few miles away from where I was born and still live. Yet although the case of the Peel Street Monster began in high drama, the outcome was distinctly underwhelming.

During winter 1933-34, rumours began circulating within the area of Brickkiln Street and Peel Street in the large urban West Midlands town (now city) of Wolverhampton, England, of a bizarre creature that was attacking children. One bold lad who tried to pursue this beast, which became known as the Peel Street Monster, presumably angered it, because it allegedly leapt at his throat, attempting to bite him.

 

Extraordinary Animals Revisited (© Dr Karl Shuker/CFZ Press)

There came a day in January 1934, however, when this vicious creature made one onslaught too many. A crowd of boys and youths, who included among their number a 17-year-old called Georgie Goodhead, were playing on the corner of St Mark's Street and Raglan Street, when another boy, Jackie Franklin, raced out of Peel Street and up towards them in a state of great alarm. Shouting for help, he told them that a youngster called Billy Wright (but not the famous future Wolverhampton Wanderers footballer of that same name, at least as far as I'm aware) was being attacked by the monster on some waste ground. Georgie and his mates raced back to Peel Street at once with Jackie, where they observed a peculiar-looking animal threatening a small boy. In a later Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper report, Georgie recalled:

I went and saw a queer animal, far too big for a rat, leaping towards a child about five-year[s]-old. I shouted and the thing turned on me. It crouched, its eyes bulging, then it leaped like lightning.

According to the newspaper report, as the creature neared his throat Georgie picked up a brick and hit it with this hefty implement as hard as he could. The animal collapsed, falling into a pool of water, and was swiftly kicked to death by the crowd that had gathered to watch the boys confronting it. Happily, little Billy was unhurt, and was taken by some of the boys to his parents' sweetshop in Peel Street, while Georgie and Jackie gave a statement at the Red Lion police station and received half a crown each for their bravery.

As for the Peel Street Monster: apart from noting that it was a male, no-one had any idea what this mystifying beast was. According to media reports, naturalists, taxidermists, and vets were all called in to identify it, but to no avail. One unnamed 'expert' did suggest that it may be an anteater – in Wolverhampton?? Another one considered it possible that the creature (despite being dead!) might become a serious rival to the Loch Ness monster.

 

A ring-tailed coati Nasua nasua, the most familiar of the four recognised coati species and native to South America (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Events took an even more surprising turn the following day, when a second mystery beast was found in the Brickkiln region. This one, a female, was already dead, but it closely resembled the Peel Street Monster. Moreover, a photograph of it published in the Express and Star helped to identify its species.

It was a South American coati (coatimundi) – a long-tailed relative of the raccoon and belonging to the genus Nasua, with a head-and-body length of up to 2 ft, a thin tail of much the same length, and distinguished by its very elongate snout (responsible for the 'anteater' identity proffered for the Peel Street Monster?). But where had it, and the Peel Street specimen, come from? And if there had been a pair on the loose, could there be more?

The prospect of a plague of coatis terrorising the good residents of Wolverhampton may seem decidedly slim (not least because the favoured diet of coatis consists of invertebrates and small lizards – as opposed to small children!). Nevertheless, the council was clearly taking no chances, for as the Express and Star duly reported:

And fresh fears arose in Wolverhampton as rumours spread that there may be a colony of the creatures hiding in partly closed cellars. Hundreds of people gathered in Salop Street to watch council workers trying to ascertain if a colony of the creatures were hiding there. The crowds were so great they hampered the efforts of the official rat-catcher. In the search, weapons brought in to confront any coatimundis found included poison gas, traps, sulphur, terriers and ferrets. It was uncertain whether the ferrets were to be used following a suggestion that they might form part of the coatimundi diet [I don't think so!].

 

As ably demonstrated by this white-snouted coati Nasua narica: when walking quadrupedally, coatis are famous for often holding their tails vertically upright with a little curl at the tip, giving them an unexpected superficial resemblance to small furry sauropod dinosaurs! (© Dennis Jarvis/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

Ferrets or no ferrets, the search did not find any other errant coatis. Police investigations did reputedly reveal that the female coati had been in a travelling menagerie that had parked here earlier (circuses and fairs would sometimes set up on this slum-area waste ground at that time), and had discarded the creature's body after it had died. However, the Peel Street Monster's origin remains a mystery to this day – as do various other aspects of this curious case.

Can we even be sure that the Peel Street Monster was a coati? For if the accounts of it are true, it must have been an exceptionally belligerent specimen. The Express and Star published a photo of this creature lying dead with a crowd of onlookers surrounding it, but its form cannot be discerned. And what happened to the two carcases? Some correspondences reminiscing about this incident appeared 50 years later in the Express and Star during March 1994, but conflicting recollections only served to muddy these already murky waters even further.

All in all, after also allowing for the likelihood of embellished descriptions with such an odd episode, the only thing that can be said with certainty regarding the Peel Street Monster is that something unexpected was seen and killed in Wolverhampton – a most unsatisfactory end to one of the most intriguing OOP animal cases on file from the West Midlands. True, coatis (unlike anteaters!) are nowadays often kept as exotic pets – a friend of mine at university owned one, and I also well remember about 10 years ago seeing one with a collar and lead being taken for a walk by its owner through another local Midlands town, duly attracting considerable interest and attention from passers-by, including me – but whether an escaped/released pet coati explains the Peel Street Monster is another matter entirely.

Finally: I was recently reminded of this curious case when Canadian Facebook friend Kevin Stewart kindly sent to me a scan of a Canadian newspaper cutting documenting it, which was particularly interesting to me as I was previously unaware that this relatively obscure, ostensibly local-interest-only UK story had ever attracted any overseas media coverage. The cutting was from Alberta's Edmonton Bulletin for 17 February 1934, so for the purposes of historical documentation, here it is – thanks Kevin!

 

Edmonton Bulletin newspaper report of 17 February 1934 concerning the Peel Street Monster public domain)

 

 

 

KICKING UP A STINK - BARBARA WOODHOUSE'S PERPLEXING POUCHED SKUNK

The late Barbara Woodhouse on the front cover of one of her books, No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way (© Barbara Woodhouse/Summit Books – reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

I've said it before, but it's well worth repeating - mystifying creatures can turn up in the most unexpected locations, and the following example is certainly no exception.

To those of us of a certain age, the name Barbara Woodhouse is fondly associated with the staccato cry "Walkies!", uttered by a Joyce Grenfellesque lady of the genteel English schoolma'am variety that, sadly, seems to have quietly expired in these much more thrusting, belligerent modern times. She acquired national - indeed, international - fame rather late in life, aged 70, when in 1980 her idiosyncratic show 'Training Dogs The Woodhouse Way' was first screened on British television and soon attained cult status, as a result of which she became one of the most recognisable, and parodied, personalities of the '80s.

The Fontana paperback edition of Talking To Animals that I own (© Barbara Woodhouse/Fontana Books – reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

Nevertheless, there seemed to be no connection between the redoubtable Ms Woodhouse and cryptozoology - at least, that is, until the 1990s, when I was reading through her autobiography Talking To Animals (1954), and, while perusing a section concerning her life as a young woman training horses in Argentina, stumbled upon the following fascinating, but very perplexing, paragraph:

Shortly after the storm [she had been describing the aftermath of a very violent storm that had hit their estate the previous evening], the foreman's little son came rushing up to say that all his pet rabbits had gone and that in the cage instead was a baby skunk. The mother had perished in the storm and lay dead by the cage. How that living little skunk had got into the undamaged cage, and the rabbits out of it, was beyond our understanding. In the mother's pouch were two dead babies. Experts cannot account for a skunk with a pouch, and try to persuade me that she was a 'possum. But she was no 'possum: she had the bushy tail of a skunk and was identical with the skunk picture in Cassell's Book of Knowledge. She did have a pouch: I examined her closely.

Woodhouse then went on to describe how she attempted to care for the alleged baby skunk by rearing it and feeding it in a cottonwool-lined pocket of her riding skirt, noting that it successfully fed and survived in this makeshift pouch for a week before ultimately dying after escaping from the pouch one night and becoming severely chilled.

An engraving from 1848 depicting the Andean hog-nosed skunk (public domain)

Skunks, of which there are at least ten recognised species, were traditionally classed as mustelids (members of the weasel family), but more recently, based upon genetic studies, these infamously malodorous mammals have been allocated a taxonomic family of their own. However, although they do exhibit quite a diversity of morphologies, none of them has a pouch – a taxonomically-significant anatomical feature specific to marsupials. Moreover, only the hog-nosed skunks (genus Conepatus, constituting 4-5 species, depending upon opinion) are native to South America, and only two of these species are known to occur in Argentina – the Andean C. chinga in some of this vast country's northern regions, and the Patagonian C. humboldtii throughout much of its southern portion.

The Patagonian hog-nosed skunk (© Payayita/Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

Consequently, I find myself in agreement with the unnamed experts who claimed that Woodhouse's 'pouched skunk' was a 'possum - or, to be accurate, an American opossum, of which many species in several genera have been described. Having said that, the fundamental problem with this identity is that none of the known species of American opossum bears any real degree of similarity to a skunk.

True, the black-shouldered opossum Caluromysiops irrupta has distinctive black shoulders, a black dorsal stripe, and dark feet and tail that contrast markedly with the much paler fur on the rest of its body, but it is hardly skunk-like. And the distal portion of its tail is unfurred and rat-like, thereby bearing no resemblance to the uniformly furred tail of a skunk.

Photograph of the black-shouldered opossum (© owner's identity unclear to me; I found this picture on Globalspecies.org's page for the species – it is now reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

Conversely, there is another species, Glironia venusta, which is actually known as the bushy-tailed opossum because of its unusually thick, densely-furred tail; however, it lacks any black-and-white fur colouration reminiscent of a skunk's, and as with the previous species its tail's distal portion is unfurred.

Illustration of the bushy-tailed opossum (© owner's identity is unclear to me; I found this illustration on Wikipedia, and it is now reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

Even the yapok or water opossum Chironectes minimus, whose distinctive black and pale grey fur may conceivably invite comparisons with skunks by observers poorly acquainted with these latter mammals, can be readily eliminated from further consideration by virtue of its very slender, wholly unfurred tail.

Illustration of a yapok from Dr Richard Lydekker's volume A Hand-Book to the Marsupialia and Monotremata (1896) (public domain)

As for the thick-tailed or lutrine opossum Lutreolina crassicaudata (aka the little water opossum), its pelage (especially in females) also has dark and light markings, though these are far less prominent than those of the yapok; however, it has a thicker tail than the yapok, but this is still far less bushy than that of a skunk. Moreover, of the species noted here, only the yapok and the thick-tailed opossum are native to Argentina anyway.

Taxiderm specimen of a thick-tailed opossum at Italy's Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Genova (public domain)

So what could Woodhouse's pouched skunk have been? I have even considered briefly the possibility that the adult female animal found dead was a genuine skunk that was heavily pregnant, and that the shock of the storm had caused one of her babies to be born prematurely, with Woodhouse mistaking this mother skunk's vagina and uterus for a pouch! However, this all seems highly improbable, especially as Woodhouse was someone with considerable experience from a very early age at caring for and handling animals.

I would have dearly loved the opportunity to contact Barbara Woodhouse in order to elicit more details concerning her baffling little beastie, but, sadly, she died in 1988, well before I discovered her account of it in her book. There is still one way, however, of shedding, perhaps, just a little more light on this mystery.

Exquisite 1800s engraving of a yapok (public domain)

Does anyone out there have a copy of Cassell's Book of Knowledge, which I am assuming must date from around the 1920s or 1930s, bearing in mind that Barbara Woodhouse was born in 1910 and lived in Argentina for more than three years during her 20s? If so, I'd love to see its picture of a skunk, because this would give some idea of what her supposed pouched variety looked like (bearing in mind that there are several very different skunk morphologies, depending upon the species in question). That in turn may provide clues as to its real identity – unless, of course, by any remote chance it really was a pouched skunk, and thereby constituted a still-undescribed and dramatically different species?

And don't forget to check out my next ShukerNature blog post, here, to read about a very different but equally memorable skunk-affiliated anomaly.

This ShukerNature blog article is excerpted from my book Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times.