THUNDERBIRD FEATHERS AND PIASA PORTRAYALS

Northwest Coast styled Kwakwaka'wakw totem pole with thunderbird perched on top (© Dr Haggis/Wikipedia GFDL)

Cryptozoologists are familiar with the longstanding mystery of the missing thunderbird photograph (click here for my ShukerNature investigation of this curious case), but what about an alleged thunderbird feather?

Interviewed recently by Tucson-based freelance writer Craig S. Baker for an online article on unsolved mysteries of the Wild West (click here), veteran Wild West author/investigator W.C. Jameson made a claim of considerable potential significance to cryptozoology regarding the legendary thunderbirds.

Jameson stated that a Cherokee treasure hunter he once knew told him that while looking for a long-lost cache of Spanish silver in a Utah cave, he had dug up several huge feathers, each one over 18 in long and with a quill of comparable diameter to one of his fingers. Above the cave’s mouth, moreover, was an ancient pictograph of an enormous horned bird. Could this have been a piasa?

For anyone unfamiliar with the piasa, here is what I wrote about this extraordinary monster of North American mythology in my book Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013):

"In August 1673, Jesuit priest Father Jacques Marquette was travelling along the Mississippi while journeying through Illinois when, looking up at the cliffs towering above both sides of this mighty river at Alton, he was both horrified and fascinated by some huge, extraordinary petroglyphs carved into the face of one of the cliffs.

"They depicted a truly astonishing monster, which the local Indians informed him was known as the piasa. In overall appearance, it closely compared with the famous winged classical dragon of European mythology. Boldly adorned in black and red scales all over its body, the piasa had four limbs whose feet were equipped with huge talons. It bore a pair of long antler-like horns upon its head, it sported an extremely long tail with a forked tip, and two enormous bat-like wings with vein-like markings were raised above its body. But what set the piasa entirely apart from other classical dragons was its bearded face – for in spite of its snarling grimace of fang-bearing teeth, broad nose, and flaming eyes, it was nonetheless the face of a man!

"According to the Indians, the piasa had lived in a huge cave in the cliff face and was once friendly to humans – until it acquired the taste for their flesh. Afterwards, it became a bloodthirsty, insatiable killer, but was finally lured within range of the tribe's best marksmen, who severely wounded it with a barrage of arrows, then finished it off with their tomahawks.

"Tragically, in c.1856 these wonderful ancient petroglyphs were destroyed accidentally during some quarry work nearby, which caused the petroglyphs to crack and shatter, falling off the cliff face into the river."

Piasa - a modern-day depiction at Alton, Illinois (© Burfalcy/Wikipedia)

Returning to the thunderbird feathers: Jameson has also claimed that he actually owns the stem (i.e. quill) of one of these remarkable mega-plumes, albeit broken and incomplete, thus 'only' measuring 18 in long, and that its species had not been positively identified by any of the several (unnamed) ornithologists who had seen it. Click here to see an online photograph of Jameson's alleged thunderbird feather quill on Mark Turner's Mysterious World blog.

Assuming that Jameson’s story is accurate, could this giant feather be a bona fide thunderbird plume? Tangible, physical evidence for cryptids is, by definition, a rare commodity, so such a specimen could be of great scientific worth, thanks to the considerable power of modern-day DNA analysis in ascertaining taxonomic identity or kinship.

For by subjecting the feather to such analysis (using samples of dried blood if present at its base, or viable cells collected from the calimus - the portion of the quill that had previously been imbedded underneath the bird’s skin), biotechnologists might succeed where the ornithologists have reputedly failed, and duly unveil the hitherto-cryptic nature of its avian originator.

Sporting a colossal wingspan estimated at 23-24 ft, the giant Argentinian teratorn Argentavis magnificens; teratorns were huge prehistoric relatives of today's New World vultures, and some cryptozoologists believe that the thunderbirds of Amerindian mythology may be based upon late-surviving or even still-undiscovered present-day North American teratorns (© Justin Case aka Hodari Nundu/Deviantart.com)

Let us hope, therefore, that someone will be able to persuade Jameson to submit his giant mystery feather for formal DNA testing - always assuming of course that it really is a feather...

After all: during medieval times, crusaders returning home to Europe from the Middle East often brought back with them as unusual souvenirs what they had been told by unscrupulous traders were feathers from an immense fabled bird known as the roc or rukh – said to be so enormous that it could carry off elephants in its huge talons. Even its plumes were gigantic, up to 3 ft long. In reality, however, when examined by naturalists these were swiftly exposed as the deceptively feather-like leaves of the raffia palm tree (for further details, click here).

A raffia palm tree leaf masquerading as a roc feather – one of several that I purchased several years ago as cryptozoological curios (© Dr Karl Shuker)

GRIFFINS, GRIFFINOSAURS, CYNOGRIFFINS, AND HIPPOGRIFFS – REVISITING SOME CLASSIC MIX 'N' MATCH MONSTERS FROM FABLE, FICTION, AND FACT

A beautiful majolica jardinière from the late 19^th Century in the form of a senmurv or cynogriffin (© Dr Karl Shuker)

My maternal grandmother's family surname was Griffin, in honour of which I have a griffin tattoo, so this famous beast of ancient myth and legend has always been special to me. A fabulous mix 'n' match monster combining the body of a lion with the wings and head of an eagle, and alternatively spelled as 'gryphon', it apparently originated in the Levant region, with accounts of griffins from this area dating back more than 4000 years, but later spreading their mighty pinions westward into Europe.

A ceramic griffin figurine (© Dr Karl Shuker)

These amalgamated animals were well-known for their fondness for gold - Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th Century BC, stated that griffins inhabited the lofty mountain peaks of India, where they dug up gold with which to construct their mighty nests, which in turn were greatly coveted by opportunist gold-hunters.

Griffin engraving from 1663

Also highly sought-after were their long curved talons, allegedly capable of detecting poison, and many were brought back to Europe during the Middle Ages by crusaders. Sadly, however, they invariably proved to be antelope or other ungulate horns, sold to the ingenuous crusaders by African entrepreneurs! As noted by Edward Peacock in the September 1884 issue of The Antiquary, for instance, a supposed griffin claw now preserved in the British Museum is believed to have been one of two contained in 1383 within the shrine of Saint Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral. However, it bears a very close resemblance indeed to the horn of an ibex!

Nubian ibex revealing its magnificent curled horns, once passed off as griffin claws by unscrupulous Middle Eastern vendors to gullible Crusaders (© Nino Barbieri/Wikipedia)

Traditionally, zoologists have sought to identify the griffin with a powerful species of vulturine bird of prey called the lammergeier Gypaetus barbatus, but in 1991 a very novel alternative candidate was proposed by Dr Adrienne Mayor, a classical scholar currently at California's Stanford University.

Lammergeier – a German chromolithograph from 1894

Dr Mayor noted that the Altai Mountains of central Asia, famous for their rich gold deposits and the locality of many ancient griffin legends, also contain the fossilised skeletons and eggs of a lion-sized species of quadrupedal ceratopsian dinosaur called Protoceratops andrewsi, whose most distinctive feature was its strikingly eagle-like beaked head.

Life-sized model of Protoceratops andrewsi (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Dating from the late Cretaceous Period (approximately 70 million years ago), if its remains had been encountered by early gold prospectors many centuries before the correct nature of dinosaurs as prehistoric reptiles was recognised, how would these veritable griffinosaurs have been explained by such people? Quite possibly as the skeletons of four-footed eagle-headed monsters - or, as we call them today, griffins.

Griffin statue spotted in the yard of a statue/figurine seller in Rome, 2001 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Closely allied (if not directly ancestral) to the griffin, and sometimes termed the cynogriffin, is the senmurv ('dog-bird') of early Persian mythology, which combines the body of a lion, and the wings and talons of an eagle, with the head of a dog. Its home was a magical tree, whose seeds, scattered throughout the world whenever the senmurv alighted in its mighty branches, cured diseases and evils of every kind.

Embroidered senmurv, based upon the royal symbol of the Sassanian Empire of 224-651 AD (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Later Persian legends transformed the senmurv into a huge, resplendent bird known as the simurgh, which nested on the highest peak of northern Persia's Alburz Mountains, and was permanently hidden from mortal view behind a shimmering veil of darkness and light. Nevertheless, this supposedly unseen bird was frequently, and lavishly, portrayed in ancient bestiaries and manuscripts - a paradoxical situation that incited one short-tempered scholar long ago to pen the following terse but apt comment in the margin of an exquisite plate depicting the simurgh in a 13th Century bestiary: "Thou fool, if nobody has seen the simurgh, then how dost thou portray it?".

Simurgh depicted upon the portal of Nadir Divan-Beghi Madrasah, in Bukhara, Uzbekistan (© Alaexis/Wikipedia)

Folklorists consider it most likely that the simurgh was based upon one or more of the large vultures and eagles native to Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its 'evolution' was probably also influenced by Arabian myths of the enormous roc or rukh - a gargantuan bird of prey that could carry elephants aloft in its huge talons and inhabited an unspecified island in the Indian Ocean. As documented in further detail elsewhere on ShukerNature (click here), fronds from the exceptionally large raffia palm tree Sagus ruffia were once believed to be the feathers of the roc.

Supposed roc feather, in reality a frond from the raffia palm tree (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Yet however improbable dinosaur-inspired griffins and dog-headed griffins (not to mention elephant-abducting giant birds!) might seem, they all pale into insignificance when compared with a certain category of griffin that was so unlikely it was specifically created to personify the concept of impossibility - namely, the hippogriff. According to mythology, the rapacious griffin would readily attack and devour a horse, and in any case these two animal types were entirely dissimilar in form from one another. So how could anyone believe that they might ever mate and yield viable offspring (always assuming, of course, that anyone could actually believe that griffins themselves were real)? Such an unnatural liaison would clearly be impossible, but even if somehow it might indeed take place, no offspring could ever result from it. Thus originated the notion of the hippogriff, as initially coined (though not actually named, merely alluded to) by Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BC) in his Eclogues, as the embodiment of all that could never be - except that like so many other fictitious monsters, the hippogriff ultimately took on a veritable life of its own.

'Roger Délivrant Angélique' ('Roger rescuing Angelica'), painted by Louis-Édouard Rioult in 1824

Uniting the head, plumed wings, and front limbs of an eagle with the body, hind limbs, and tail of a horse, the hippogriff presented such a spectacular image that it became a popular subject for Classical artists to portray, it appeared in heraldry on several notable coats of arms, and in the poem Orlando Furioso ('Mad Orlando') penned by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516 this monumentally mixed 'n' matched monster was formally designated the name 'hippogriff' (also spelled 'hippogryph'). In this latter literary work, the wandering knight Roger rescues the fair Angelica from a voracious sea dragon while riding the airborne hippogriff - a beast of such astounding flying ability that it can soar entirely around the earth without pausing, and even take wing to the moon and back. During the 19th Century, Gustave Doré (1832-1883) produced some striking images of the hippogriff in his celebrated series of engravings illustrating Ariosto's poem.

Roger rescuing Angelica, portrayed by Gustave Doré

Without any doubt, however, the most famous modern-day representation of this fabulous animal is Buckbeak, the prominently-featured hippogriff in the bestselling Harry Potter series of teenage wizard and wizardry novels by J.K. Rowling, which has introduced to millions of readers worldwide what had hitherto been for centuries a somewhat obscure fantasy beast. Not bad at all for a creature originally invented expressly to signify anything that could never exist!

Buckbeak the hippogriff as depicted upon the front cover of The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third Harry Potter novel (© J.K. Rowling/Bloomsbury)

BETWEEN A ROC AND A HARD PLACE

One of my roc feathers (Dr Karl Shuker)

The main shopping centre of Birmingham, the United Kingdom’s second largest city, is replete with unique shops and market stalls selling all manner of interesting and often quite esoteric items. Even so, the last thing that I expected to find there when casually browsing in a certain large fancy goods shop a couple of years ago was a sheaf of roc feathers! But that is precisely what I did find, much to my astonishment and delight. Allow me to explain.

Two rocs attacking Sinbad's ship

According to Eastern legend and lore, the mighty roc or rukh - featuring as one of Sinbad the Sailor’s most formidable protagonists in the ‘Arabian Nights’ - was said to be a monstrous bird of such prodigious size and strength that it could haul elephants aloft, and carry them away to its gargantuan nest where its brood of hungry super-sized offspring would feed upon these hapless pachyderms. For decades, zoologists and cryptozoologists alike attempted to explain the mythical roc as having been based upon sightings of a gigantic ostrich-like ratite known scientifically as Aepyornis maximus, the great elephant bird, standing 10 ft tall and weighing up to half a ton.

The roc carrying off an elephant

Formerly native to Madagascar, this avian goliath inhabited the extensive marshes and swamps once present on this large island mini-continent, and was known locally as the vouronpatra or vorompatra. It is believed to have survived until at least as recently as the late 1700s, before a lethal combination of over-hunting, introduced avian diseases, and deforestation leading to the drying out of its swampland habitat brought about its demise, but fragments from its enormous eggs can still be commonly found on beaches here.

With an Aepyornis egg and a life-size Aepyornis silhouette (Dr Karl Shuker)

Unfortunately, reconciling the roc with the great elephant bird faced one major problem. Aepyornis was flightless, and therefore wholly incapable of abducting unwary elephants and swooping off into the air with them, gripped tightly in merciless talons of steel as those dusty Arabian legends would have us believe. Nevertheless, on account of its huge size, the great elephant bird remained the closest match – indeed, the only remotely plausible match – for the fabled roc...until 1994, that is.

This was when palaeontologist Dr Stephen M. Goodman published a paper documenting the subfossil remains of a hitherto-unknown species of huge eagle, which he formally christened Stephanoaetus mahery, the Madagascan crowned eagle, and which is believed to have survived on the island until around 1500 AD (both it and its prey were probably hunted into extinction by humans). This spectacular raptor is thought to have preyed not only upon various now-extinct species of giant lemur (subfossil remains show that some weighed up to 26.5 lb) but also quite possibly upon the great elephant bird itself. Clearly, sightings of this mega-eagle made by early European explorers visiting Madagascar and subsequent exaggeration of these sightings during retellings when back home provide a much more likely explanation for the origin of the roc legends than does the flightless elephant bird.

Yet not even Madagascar’s colossal crowned eagle can explain the truly immense plumes that crusaders sometimes purchased in the Middle East to delight and bewilder their families and friends back home in Europe. Claimed by their Arabian vendors to be genuine roc feathers, they sometimes measured 3 ft or more in length, and their vanes’ blades were razor-sharp to the touch.

In reality, of course, these spectacular objects were not feathers at all. They were actually the extremely long leaves of the raffia palm tree Raphia regalis (and related species), but they were certainly convincing enough in their superficial resemblance to gigantic feather to fool the unsuspecting crusaders into spending their hard-earned money on them as exotic souvenirs.

Moreover, when I first came upon the tall vase containing sheafs of these wonderful objects in that Birmingham shop, for just a few moments I too shared the shock and wonder that those crusaders must have experienced when first they saw them. A few of these pseudo-plumes stood nearly half as tall as I am (5’10”), and whereas some were brown, others were an exotic jungle green. Once I’d recovered from my shock, I knew at once what they were, but I still marvelled at finding such cryptozoological curios in such a relatively mundane locality as a high street shop in Birmingham, rather than some mysterious, shadowy souk in the depths of an Arabian kasbah.

Picking a few up – and soon discovering how painful it was when their sharp vanes stabbed into my hands! – I could definitely understand how their wily vendors in those far-distant Middle Eastern lands and times had talked the naïve crusaders into believing that these fantastic objects were roc feathers. Indeed, part of me even wanted to believe it myself!

Instead, however, I satisfied myself with the knowledge that here were some wonderful additions to my collection of zoological esoterica, but I received a final shock when I took half a dozen of the green versions (which looked much more feather-like than the plainer brown ones) to the till to pay for them. Incredibly, all six together totalled less than £2, making them without a doubt the best cryptozoological bargains that I had ever purchased!

A month or so ago, I found myself back inside that very same Birmingham shop, but its remaining roc feathers were long gone - which, I suppose, is no more than one should ever expect when dealing with imaginary monsters!