GIANT TOADS AND SOUTH AMERICAN SASQUATCHES?

Rolf Blomberg (Archivo Blomberg)

What does a South American sasquatch of sorts and the world's longest species of toad have in common? Perhaps I ought to rephrase that question, and ask who, rather than what, because the answer is the late Rolf Blomberg (1912-1996) - a Swedish explorer, photographer, and writer. As fully documented in my books The Lost Ark (1993), The New Zoo (2002), and the near-completed third edition of these books of mine on new and rediscovered animals, in 1950 Blomberg was instrumental in bringing to scientific attention a hitherto-undescribed species of giant toad native to southwestern Colombia. He achieved this by capturing a huge specimen there that he brought back with him to his home in neighbouring Ecuador, and which became the type specimen of this spectacular new species - duly dubbed Bufo blombergi in his honour a year later. Blomberg's giant toad can attain a total snout-to-vent length of up to 10 in (25 cm), which is greater even than that of the heavier, more massively-built cane toad B. marinus, the world's largest toad species.

(Incidentally, yesterday German cryptozoological correspondent Markus Bühler informed me that while browsing through a series of yearbooks from the 1970s for Stuttgart's Wilhelma Zoo, he noticed that the 1971 volume mentioned the chance birth at the zoo some years earlier of hybrids between a female B. blombergi and a male B. marinus. They were apparently indistinguishable from the paternal species, but exhibited unusually strong growth - no doubt a result of hybrid vigour. Bearing in mind that they were crossbreeds of the world's longest toad species and the world's largest toad species, it is a great pity that the book did not contain any additional information concerning them, because they must surely have had the potential to become veritable mega-toads!)

Less well known than his success with the giant toad, however, is that while exploring South America, Blomberg also investigated and documented reports of a mysterious man-beast known as the sacharuna. This entity is greatly feared by native tribes in Ecuador, who claim that it will kidnap humans, thereby calling to mind various comparable claims for North America's sasquatch or bigfoot. I am exceedingly grateful to Swedish correspondent Håkan Lindh for kindly bringing this hitherto-unpublicised cryptozoological aspect of Blomberg's researches to my attention, which he did in a detailed email to me of 15 January 2011, from which the following excerpts are quoted:

"He [Blomberg] had a colleague, a Danish man called Harry Nielsen, who himself had searched actively for the creature. And he even heard the alleged wailings at night from the beast, but while exploring he found that the source was a puma. Blomberg had, however, heard about two cases that made him take Sacharuna a bit more seriously than most. One case was a young girl that disappeared from her home but was found alive in the jungle some time later. She claimed that she had been kidnapped by an apelike creature, as big as a man, who gave her food but showed with grunts and gestures that if she tried to escape, he would kill her. She was interrogated several times by her parents and not once she did contradict herself.

"The other case was about a friend of Blomberg's, Emilio Bonifaz, who visited the area where Harry Nielsen had already searched for Sacharuna. He too heard odd noises from the jungle and was informed that that was the sound from the apemen. The locals claimed that at least three Sacharuna lived in the area, and that a few years earlier one was killed. The hunters showed Bonifaz where they buried the body, and Bonifaz excavated the spot. He did find bones, but so fragmented that it was impossible to draw any conclusions.

"Blomberg himself didn't believe Sacharuna was an unknown primate, or primitive human. He did, however, point out that many Indian tribes feared children with retardations, and...the Jivaros killed such babies on the spot as soon as they were born. Blomberg thought that Sacharuna may be such individuals with mental handicaps who had been cast out but had managed to survive in the jungle. Although Blomberg did not seem to think that explanation was completely convincing either, he favoured it over the purely cryptozoological theory. (I personally think that theory is very unsatisfying.)

"He also searched around for giant anacondas, but concluded that such stories were likely exaggerations."

Reports of man-beasts or wildmen have been discounted as sightings of mentally deficient outcasts or feral recluses/hermits on many occasions down through the ages, especially in relation to European woodwose, so this theory is hardly a new one. Moreover, like Håkan, I am not convinced by it at all, certainly not in a locality like the Ecuadorean jungle - where it seems highly unlikely that such individuals would survive the multifarious dangers posed there by such major threats as jaguars, venomous snakes and spiders, all manner of poisonous plants, virulent diseases, and even by other tribes. In contrast, there is a rich heritage of man-beast reports and sightings throughout the South American continent's dense tropical rainforests, so if this is the identity of the sacharuna, it would merely be another such example rather than a cryptozoological novelty.

It now seems pretty well established that the infamous Loys's 'ape' Ameranthropoides loysi, as pictured propped upright with a stick underneath its chin in the famous 1920s photograph snapped during a Venezuelan expedition led by Swiss geologist Dr Francois de Loys, was a hoax - merely a dead spider monkey with its tail chopped off or hidden from view. Nevertheless, many other reports of similar bipedal ape-like beings untainted by this incident are also on file, and palaeontological discoveries here include the fossils of various huge species of spider monkey far bigger than any known to survive today. In my view, if a South American counterpart to the large anthropoid apes of the Old World has indeed evolved convergently, and is still awaiting formal discovery by science amid this continent's remote verdant wildernesses, it may well have done so from the spider monkey lineage.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM, 90 YEARS YOUNG TODAY!

My mother alongside a very small moai on Easter Island, April 2008 (Dr Karl Shuker)

In 1991, I dedicated my second book, Extraordinary Animals Worldwide, to my mother, with the following words:


To my mother, Mary D. Shuker, whose lifelong interest in wildlife has guided and encouraged my own since my earliest days.

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.”

Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts


Every word of this is true – without her gentle, ever-encouraging presence and guidance, I would not be the person I am today. Even my career in cryptozoology can be traced directly back to that life-changing day when she purchased as a birthday present for me (by then an early teenager) from Boots in Walsall, West Midlands, the Paladin paperback edition (1972 reprint) of Dr Bernard Heuvelmans’s classic book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

And so it is with great joy, pride, and thankfulness that on this very special day, 29 January 2011, I am celebrating with my mother her 90th birthday!

Happy birthday Mom – I love you very much!!

My mother and I in the Cat Street galleries, Hong Kong, summer 2005 (Dr Karl Shuker)

THE PICHICIEGO - ARGENTINA'S ARMOURED FAIRY

A cryptozoological animal is usually defined as one whose existence is known to the local people sharing its habitat but which is not recognised by science. All of the major new terrestrial species scientifically described and named since 1900 fitted this definition prior to their official discovery and recognition – the okapi, mountain gorilla, giant forest hog, Komodo dragon, kouprey, Congo peacock, Chacoan peccary, Vu Quang ox, and giant muntjac, to name but a few.

Notwithstanding this, there is at least one very distinctive mammal whose existence had genuinely remained hidden from its human neighbours until its formal scientific discovery – and that is the pichiciego (aka pichiciago) or pink fairy armadillo. No bigger than a mole, this extraordinary little creature is the world’s smallest species of armadillo, and is native to the dry grasslands and sandy plains of central-western Argentina, where for much of the time it remains underground, using its huge front claws to agitate the sand so that it can then quite literally swim through it, as easily as if it were swimming through water.

So rarely is this cryptic animal seen above-ground, however, that the local people were astonished when in 1824 zoologist Prof. Richard Harlan from the University of Philadelphia unearthed a pichiciego at Mendoza. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, either by them or by zoologists, and when he officially described its species in 1825, Harlan christened it Chlamyphorus truncatus – sole member of an entirely new genus.


Unlike the much thicker, tougher, and more comprehensive body armour of other armadillo species, the plates of the pichiciego are notably thinner, and only loosely attached to its skin by a thin membrane running along the vertebral column. In addition, none but its pelvic armour is hardened, and breast armour is completely lacking. However, its head armour extends beyond the horny nasal plate (probably to compensate for the fragility of the creature’s skull), and its broad-ended tail also has a covering of armour. As one might expect from a predominantly subterranean, fossorial species, the pichiciego’s eyes are extremely small, and its external ears are nothing more than tiny folds of skin.

Even today, this most minuscule of armadillos is so elusive and seldom seen that television naturalist Nick Baker’s recent search for it in Mendoza, as featured in an entertaining episode of his ‘Weird Creatures’ series from 2008, ended in dismal and seemingly inevitable failure. Despite setting 20 pitfall traps and persuading the local fire brigade to drench the search area’s sand dunes with water in the hope of stimulating some pichiciegos to surface (after learning from the locals that these rarely-spied creatures appear more frequently after rainfall), a dejected Nick ultimately conceded defeat, having to be satisfied instead with viewing a preserved specimen in the home of a villager. Indeed, on the few occasions when a pichiciego is encountered, it is usually captured alive and maintained in the living state for as long as possible by its fascinated captors before it is finally preserved in mummified form as a highly-prized curio.


But perhaps Nick and others have simply looked for pichiciegos in the wrong way or even in the wrong place. During his own search for this evanescent mini-mammal in Mendoza’s pampas region, 20th-Century German zoologist Wolf Herre journeyed to an isolated railroad station in the middle of a broad, flat expanse of pampas that was said to be the pichiciego’s centre of distribution – even the area’s shrubbery was named ‘pichiciego’ after it. And here he eventually did achieve success, albeit in a most surprising way:

"For hours we wandered under the bright sun, trying in vain to find tracks of the pichiciego. But in the vicinity, wooden railway ties were being replaced, and the pichiciego was found in the rotting wood, probably attracted by the insect larvae inside."

Altogether a very remarkable creature – so remarkable, in fact, that in the years following the pichiciego’s discovery by Harlan, no one expected to find anything else even remotely similar. In 1859, however, while crossing the Andes via a route not previously utilised by Western travellers, German zoologist Prof. Karl Hermann Burmeister discovered in the possession of a native Indian villager the mummified remains of a hitherto unknown species of armadillo that superficially resembled a larger version of the pichiciego, and thus became known as the greater pichiciego.

This intriguing species’ generic name has changed several times since it was scientifically described by Burmeister in 1863, and some zoologists no longer consider it to be closely related to the pichiciego. However, it is still commonly referred to as the greater pichiciego, and is known scientifically as Calyptophractus retusus, the only member of its genus. Even today, it remains scarcely-known, and much of the little information that has been documented about this mysterious mammal, which is native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia, was gained from observations made of a living specimen captured in Mendoza during July 1965, which was subsequently sent to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, where it lived until its death in December 1971.

Greater pichiciego

NB - All other illustrations here are 19th-Century engravings of the pichiciego.

STONE GIANTS, MAN-BIRDS, AND LONG-EARED GHOSTS

Easter Island birdman on festival poster (Dr Karl Shuker)

As you already know from my books The Unexplained (1996), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), and Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), as well as from a wide range of articles, my interests in mysteries are not entirely confined to those appertaining to natural history. Consequently, here, for a change, is my examination of one of the world's most mysterious, enigmatic localities, which I was fortunate enough to visit just a few years ago.

STONE GIANTS, MAN-BIRDS, AND LONG-EARED GHOSTS
- WELCOME TO EASTER ISLAND!

Not so long ago, in a magazine and internet survey to find the world’s most mysterious, paranormal locality, the runaway winner was a certain tiny triangular island (no more than 25 km across) separated by over 2000 km of southeastern Pacific Ocean from any other inhabited locality, formerly home to an extraordinary birdman cult, and ringed by numerous stone statues of enormous size and alienesque appearance that stare inward across their lonely domain through unseeing eye-sockets yet with a gaze as chilling as the rock from which they were hewn many centuries ago. Where else could this be but Rapanui – or, as we know it better in the West, Easter Island.

MEETING THE MOAI

A special territory of Chile since 1888, Easter Island is so-named because it was first encountered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722, when it was reached by Dutch explorer Admiral Jacob Roggeveen. In April 2008, my mother Mary Shuker and I fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime by finally visiting this truly remarkable island – containing three extinct volcanoes, a lush but entirely artificial flora and fauna almost entirely introduced by man from elsewhere to replace its own decimated native ecosystem, and only a single dusty town, Hanga Roa (with roughly 3500 inhabitants), which recalled to mind a 19th-century frontier town that had somehow been transported by cyclone far from its Wild West homeland and unceremoniously dropped down upon a fragrant tropical isle. But whereas Dorothy and Toto met the munchkins and the wizard of Oz, we met the moai – or at least a sizeable representation of them.

Alongside a half-buried moai on the slopes of Rano Raraku (Dr Karl Shuker)

No amount of photographs or films can prepare you for the sheer scale and awesome majesty of these gigantic stone statues, Easter Island’s most famous denizens, coldly aloof and silent, their thin lips and haughty visage radiating Ozymandian disdain. Numbering over 800 in total, many are still inside the quarry, within the eastern volcano Rano Raraku, where they were originally hewn from tuff (an igneous rock ash). Some lie there fully formed, waiting for the acolytes that will never come, to transport them out of the volcano and down the slopes, to be erected with honour as protective icons upon a ceremonial stone platform known as an ahu. Once greatly venerated as the revered representations of their sculptors’ ancestral leaders, and also as the earthly vessels of their leaders’ spirits, even today the moai command respect and deference – it is illegal merely to touch one of these stupendous monuments.

Having said that, some moai have not even been detached from the inner rock face from which they were carved. Consequently, everywhere that you look within this volcano’s obsidian depths there is a surreal juxtapositioning of heads, noses, brows, elongate ears, and hooded eye-sockets, staring imperiously but sightlessly upwards and inwards at every conceivable – and inconceivable – angle, like a particularly febrile nightmare of Picasso, Dali, or Hieronymus Bosch.

Mom and I alongside a toppled moai with Rano Raraku in the background (Dr Karl Shuker)

A fair few did make the journey out, however, and today they can be found in many locations around the island. A number stand half-buried in grassy soil on Rano Raraku’s outer slopes, like a scattering of abandoned chess pieces on a giant’s forgotten chessboard. Others still lie in prone humiliation, where they were deliberately tipped over centuries ago by warring clans, but in modern times a select company have been raised and re-erected onto their ahus at various sites by teams of visiting researchers. With the exception of an ahu of seven moai at Ahu Akivi at the island’s centre, which look out towards the sea, all moai were originally erected by their sculptors near the island’s edge and faced inward, overlooking their clans as protective effigies. Such sites include Ahu Tongariki (restored with 15 moai) on the island’s southeastern edge, Ahu Nau Nau (with seven moai) at Anakena on its eastern edge, and Ahu Kote Riku at Tahai on its northwestern edge.

A HISTORY OF MYSTERY

Until Thor Heyerdahl’s famous first archaeological dig here during the 1950s, it was not generally realised that a moai is more than just a giant head. In reality, it is carved down the hips, with a pair of spindly arms and long-fingered hands pressed closely to its bulbous torso’s sides. However, so many moai were half-buried in soil and other deposits after centuries of gradual concealment by natural encroachment from sediment and plant life that their true nature was not realised until Heyerdahl oversaw the first scientific excavation of a moai, revealing its entire form.

One of Easter Island's most famous and much-photographed, half-buried moai, showing one of its characteristic long earlobes (Dr Karl Shuker)

On Rano Raraku, we encountered torso-buried heads that were 6 m tall, so when you add to that the height of the hidden body, it becomes evident that these extraordinary statues are indeed gargantuan, far bigger than anything even remotely similar to be found elsewhere in the world. Biggest of all is El Gigante, which would have stood a colossal 23 m high if it had ever been transported out of Rano Raraku, but this petrified giant remains here, its vast weight (estimated at over 145 tonnes) probably proving too much for even the most enthusiastic sculptors and workers to overcome.

With a moai inside a ring of stones (Dr Karl Shuker)

Like so much of Easter Island’s past, the history of the moai is enshrouded in controversy and mystery. Estimates as to when they were created vary by as much as a millennium depending upon the authority consulted. The current consensus (discounting Heyerdahl’s problematic views of a South American origin) is that the island was first colonised in the 4th Century AD, by seafaring Polynesians, who subsequently split into separate, independent clans or kin-groups, and began constructing ahus and carving statues of modest proportions a few centuries later. By the 15th Century, however, moai production had reached frenzied proportions, as indeed had the moai themselves – now monstrously huge. Then, so abruptly that many of these statues were simply abandoned where they lay, complete or still in various unfinished stages of carving inside Rano Raraku’s volcanic bowels, moai production ceased. This is believed to be due to increasing rivalry and hatred developing between the various clans, culminating in violent battles and, as highly symbolic desecration, purposefully toppling over each other’s sacred moai.

Another factor is the wholesale destruction of the island’s once-luxuriant native foliage, most notably the giant palm trees that were eventually felled across the entire island. Their sturdy trunks were used as rollers on which to transport the moai from Rano Raraku to their chosen sites elsewhere, but once the palm trees had vanished, the moai could no longer be moved.

Mom alongside a very little moai on Easter Island (Dr Karl Shuker)

ALIEN RAYS AND THE STATUES THAT WALKED…?
Having said that, tree-trunk rollers (and also sledges constructed from trunks) may well be the orthodox explanation for how the moai were moved, but it is not the only one that has been proffered. Highlighting the paranormal links to Easter Island, proponents of the ancient astronauts school of belief have suggested that visiting aliens transported and erected the moai using anti-gravitational beams released from their spacecraft. Another suggestion is that the natives somehow levitated the moai by harnessing electromagnetism. And our Rapanui-born guide noted that according to traditional native lore, the moai themselves very obligingly walked to their chosen sites during the night, utilising a special life-force called mana. Then again, she was smiling when she said this. In any event, the moai are certainly left strictly alone following the onset of darkness, because even during the sunny daylight hours many visitors have reported experiencing a dark, unfathomable feeling of oppression and apprehension when in the presence of these stark, brooding sentinels.

Some moai originally bore on their heads a huge ceremonial topknot or pukao, carved from red scoria rock transported from Puna Pau, a quarry in the island’s southwestern region. How these enormous blocks were raised onto the moai’s heads, well over 6 m high in some cases, remains unresolved. A few of the lately re-erected moai have their pukao in place, but these were placed there using modern-day cranes.

Moai with topknot and restored eyes at Tahai (Dr Karl Shuker)

Most intriguing of all, thanks to the unearthing of an intact example in recent years, is the realisation that the moai originally had eyes. These were made from white shells with pupils of black obsidian, but were destroyed or removed during the inter-clan battles that marked the end of moai production.

BIRD-HEADED MEN AND LONG-EARED GHOSTS
Less famous but no less extraordinary than the moai of Easter Island, and further earning it its claim as the world’s most mysterious, paranormal location, is its erstwhile birdman cult. The cliff faces around Rano Kau, the island’s westernmost volcano, are liberally etched with striking birdman petroglyphs depicting bizarre bird-headed humanoids, often curled up in almost foetal pose – which if nothing else is fitting, given that this volcano’s slopes also harbour a prehistoric village called Orongo that contains many remarkable stone houses supposedly representing the human womb.

Until as recently as 1878, when the arrival of Christianity here swiftly suppressed it, the election of the Birdman each September was a very significant event. Every clan sent a representative to Orongo to compete for the birdman title. The competition consisted of scaling down the steep, jagged cliffs of Rano Kau into the sea and swimming through shark-infested waters to a small outlying islet called Moto Nui, where the objective was to collect an egg newly-laid there by a small seabird called the sooty tern, and bring it back safely to Orongo. The winner would be duly crowned the Birdman or Tangata Manu, bringing great glory and esteemed status to his clan, because the Birdman was deemed to be the living reincarnation of Makemake, Easter Island’s eminent fertility deity. He would then be taken away to live in solitude for the next 12 months inside a sacred cave on the other end of the island, at the foot of Rano Raraku.

Petroglyph of crouching birdman, head thrown back, on a rock near Rano Kau (Dr Karl Shuker)

The birdman cult is no more, and even its origin remains unknown, but its image lives on, sometimes in the most surprising locations. There are a number of underground cave systems on the island, including Cave of the Cannibals, whose walls are profusely decorated with birdman carvings, but when viewing them, just pray that the light does not illuminate the cave’s more frightening inhabitants – the moai-kava-kava, the ghosts of the ancestral long-eared clan chiefs, said to haunt this subterranean domain! The birdman image has also been utilised abundantly in modern-day signs and gifts for sale in Hanga Roa, but perhaps the most unexpected location for birdmen is inside the town’s church, where Christian icons share its inner sanctum with statues of bird-headed humans.

THE RIDDLE OF RONGORONGO

As if the moai, birdmen, and assorted ghosts were not mysterious enough, Easter Island can also boast an indecipherable native script language – rongorongo. Carved on wood, these hieroglyphics could only be read by the native elders and priests, but when Peruvian slave raiders reached the island during the 1850s-60s, all of its educated native men were transported to Peru’s guano mines as slaves, where they soon died, leaving no-one behind on Easter Island who could decipher the rongorongo tablets. Even today, these cryptic scripts remain largely unexplained, and the few surviving rongorongo tablets are priceless relics in museums.

Holding a replica rongorongo tablet (Dr Karl Shuker)

Whereas Easter Island may not lay claim to such overtly or ostensibly supernatural phenomena as headless horsemen, baying werewolves, or weeping statues, as someone who has experienced the sheer unearthly nature of this truly strange locality, stood in the chill shadow-casting presence of its grim monolithic moai, and shivered in the stygian gloom of caverns populated by countless carvings of grotesque long-beaked birdmen I can well appreciate why this lonely Pacific Island has been voted the world’s most paranormal place. Sometimes, not seeing a ghost (long-eared or otherwise) can be more unnerving than seeing one!

Ahu Tongariki (Dr Karl Shuker)

 

SHUKERNATURE - THE BOOK!

Attending the 'Myths and Monsters' cryptozoology exhibition in Birmingham, England, 2008 (Dr Karl Shuker)

Today, 20 January 2011, is the second anniversary of the launching of my ShukerNature blog, so it seemed an appropriate time to make what I hope will be for many of you an exciting announcement. After recently receiving a number of requests, enquiries, and affirmations of interest in such a publication, I’ve decided to prepare a ShukerNature compilation volume, containing a sizeable selection of my blog’s most popular and unusual posts, and as many as possible of the original illustrations that have accompanied them.

Moreover, as my blog posts would not be complete without the numerous fascinating and fact-filled comments that so many of you have kindly posted here in response to them, I would also like to include a selection of these in my ShukerNature book. Consequently, I’d like to take this opportunity to ask whether anyone who has contributed comments would have any objection to my including them in my book. All such comments that I do decide to use will be inserted directly after the respective posts re which they were originally submitted, just as they are here on the blog; and apart from minor correcting of typing/spelling errors, they will not be edited in any way but will appear exactly as they do here.

As I am hoping to see the ShukerNature book in print by the end of this year, if there is indeed anyone who for any reason whatsoever would prefer for their comments not to be considered for inclusion, please contact me asap - ideally, before the end of this month, January 2011 - so that I can act accordingly in response to your wishes. Thanks very much!

And yes, in response to a number of queries, my blog’s title, ShukerNature, was indeed inspired by the late Lyall Watson’s classic bestselling book, Supernature: The Natural History of the Supernatural (1973). In fact, I believe that it was the CFZ’s very own Oll Lewis who first suggested it – thanks, Oll! And who knows – I might even incorporate my own unique version of that book’s iconic front cover image (see photograph below) – a flowering plant growing out of a chicken’s egg – on the front cover of ShukerNature: The Book!

Meanwhile, I wish to offer a massive, sincere vote of thanks to all of you for reading and supporting this blog during these first two years – without your enthusiasm and interest, it could not have survived – and I now look forward to sharing many more cryptozoological secrets and surprises, as well celebrating many more ShukerNature anniversaries, with you in the years to come!

The iconic front cover illustration from the 1974 Coronet paperback edition of Lyall Watson's book, Supernature

THE REAL LEVIATHAN?

Behemoth (upper creature, depicted as a hipopotamus, its most popular mainstream identity among scholars - see my previous blog post) and Leviathan (lower creature) - illustration by William Blake

Over the years, there have been countless considerations of giant sea monsters, but what about the real, original leviathan? This colossal mystery beast of the Bible - "the piercing serpent...that crooked serpent...the dragon that is in the sea" (Isaiah, 27:1) - is, after all, the creature whose name has ultimately become an umbrella term for large, unidentified water beasts everywhere - as evinced by Tim Dinsdale's classic book on this subject, The Leviathans (1966, 1976).

The Old Testament contains four references to this monstrous sea creature, which provide several important morphological features - including its huge size, extensively scaled body, elongate shape, large plentiful teeth, shining eyes, powerful neck, smoking nostrils, and distinctive fins. Biblical scholars have nominated several different animals as the leviathan's identity, but whereas each possesses some of its characteristics, none has all of them.

The most popular identity is the Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus, which is indeed scaly and somewhat elongate, with an abundance of large teeth, a powerful neck, shining eyes, and a sizeable (albeit not enormous) body. However, it possesses neither fins nor smoking nostrils, and is not marine in habitat. Sharks are marine and finned, some are very large and fairly elongate, and many have plenty of large teeth, but not smoking nostrils, shining eyes, or scales.

Whales are also marine, finned, often very large and quite streamlined, and some have many large teeth. Moreover, the spray spouted upwards from around their blow-holes when they exhale could conceivably be distorted into smoke during the telling and retelling of leviathan reports over successive generations - but whales are neither scaly nor shiny-eyed, and their necks are almost invisible.

And so it goes on - even identities as unlikely as the rock python Python sebae have been offered in a desperate attempt to reconcile this exceptional creature with a known type of animal.

Most probably, the leviathan is a non-existent composite, part-myth and part-reality. The latter component comprises a hotchpotch of distinctive features drawn from all of the animals noted above, and possibly one other too - a bona fide sea serpent.

On account of its scaly skin, veteran cryptozoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans considered the leviathan to be of the 'marine centipede' type. (Thus, according to his belief in what those creatures are, it would have been a modern-day armoured archaeocete - however, we nowadays know that such beasts never existed, as they were merely artefacts caused by archaeocete fossils being fiound in association with scales from other, unrelated creatures.) Conversely, I believe that if the leviathan is either a sea serpent or a myth inspired in part by sightings of one, then it is more likely to be a living mosasaur.

Mosasaur - could a modern-day species explain the leviathan? (Tim Morris)

Indeed, this identity uniquely combines all of the leviathan's features - its scaly body, elongate shape, shining eyes (typical of many large reptiles), powerful neck, fins, great size (as with the tylosaurs), large plentiful teeth, and smoking nostrils (as with the whale identity, no doubt a reference to the spouting of water displaced from around its nostrils when exhaling underwater). Yet only a complete specimen can conclusively test this hypothesis.

"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?", asks Job (41:1). Judging from science's singular lack of success in securing the carcase of any type of genuine water monster via any of the traditional means utilised in capturing aquatic animals, the answer to this question would appear, quite definitely, to be no! Clearly, then, it is time to develop a different means of obtaining such evidence - one commensurate with the sophisticated technology now available for scientific research - for until such evidence is obtained, all of the leviathans documented by water monster chroniclers down through the ages will continue to remain an abiding mystery.

In 1886, Charles Gould passed the following remarks in his book Mythical Monsters:

"Let the relations of the sea-serpent be what they may; let it be serpent, saurian, or fish, or some form intermediate to them; and even granting that those relations may never be determined, or only at some very distant date; yet, nevertheless, the creature must now be removed from the regions of myth, and credited with having a real existence, and that its name includes not one only, but probably several very distinct gigantic species, allied more or less closely, and constructed to dwell in the depths of the ocean, and which only occasionally exhibit themselves to a fortune-favoured wonder-gazing crew."

It is a sad reflection of zoology's longstanding disinterest in the subject of water monsters that those words are as relevant today as they were more than a century ago.

'Destruction of Leviathan' (Gustave Doré, 1865)

This is an excerpt from one of my books-in-progress, The Creatures That Time Forgot: Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors

DRAGONS OF BABYLON, AND DINOSAURS IN THE BIBLE

The dragon of the Ishtar Gate (Vorderasiatisches Museum)

In the summer of 1983 I visited the Vorderasiatisches Museum, part of Berlin's Staatliche Museums, to gaze upon one of the most spectacular monuments from ancient history - the magnificent Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Many other visitors were also peering intently at this marvellous edifice, sumptuously decorated with life-like depictions of various animals, but to me it had an extra significance - for out of all of the people there, it is possible that I alone realised that we could well be looking at the portrait of a living dinosaur!


IN SEARCH OF THE SIRRUSH

During his reign (605-562 BC), King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia in Mesopotamia oversaw the creation of his empire's capital, the holy city of Babylon, dedicated to Babylonia's supreme deity - Marduk. Babylon was encircled by huge walls, wide enough for chariots to be driven along their summits, and pierced by eight huge gates. The most magnificent was the Ishtar Gate, through which visitors passed in order to enter the city.

Befitting such an important edifice, the Ishtar Gate was a spectacular sight, comprising a colossal semicircular arch, flanked by enormous walls and leading to a breathtaking Processional Way, along which visitors walked to reach the city's religious centre. The gate, its walls, and the procession walls were covered by a brilliant panoply of highly-glazed enamelled bricks, yielding a backdrop of vivid blue for numerous horizontal rows of eyecatching and very realistic bas-reliefs of animals. On the gate and its flanking walls, six rows of fierce grey bulls alternated with seven rows of grim golden dragons, and along the processional walls were two rows of haughty marching lions, but the most important member of this trio of mighty beasts was the dragon - for this was the sacred beast of Marduk.

Following the eventual fall of Babylonia, its walls and gates became buried underfoot, and their glory was hidden for many centuries - until 3 June 1887 when German archaeologist Prof. Robert Koldeway, during a visit to the site of Babylon, found a fragment of an ancient blue-glazed brick that stimulated his curiosity and led to a full-scale excavation beginning in 1899. Three years later, the animal-adorned Ishtar Gate rose up from the dust of the past like a cobalt phoenix, revealing its bulls, its lions - and its exalted but enigmatic dragons.

Most commonly referred to as the sirrush or mushrushu (two different transliterations of an Akkadian word loosely translated as ‘splendour serpent’), the Ishtar dragon was a source of great bewilderment to Koldeway. For whereas archaeologists were well aware that the depicted appearance of all other seemingly fabulous, mythical animals in Babylonian tradition had changed drastically over the centuries, depictions of the sirrush (as also present on seals and paintings predating the Ishtar Gate by at least a millennium) had remained the same - just like those of real animals, like the lion and bull. Did this mean, therefore, that the sirrush was itself a real-life species? But if it was, what could it be?

Certainly, it did not - and still does not - resemble any animal known to be alive today. After all, what modern-day species has a slender scaly body, with a small head bearing a pointed horn (or a pair - the Ishtar sirrush is only depicted in profile) on its forehead and ringlet-like flaps of skin further back, a long slender neck, a pair of forelimbs with lion-like claws, a pair of hindlimbs with eagle-like claws, and a long tail? Some authors have suggested a giant monitor lizard, but the sirrush’s horn(s), ringlets, and extremely long neck contradict this identity.

Boldly, Koldeway announced in 1913 that the creatures to which the sirrush most closely corresponded in his opinion were the dinosaurs. Moreover, he deemed it possible that in order to explain the unchanging nature of sirrush depictions, and also various mentions of dragon-like beasts in the Bible, some such creature must have been kept within one or more of Babylon's temples by the priests of Marduk. By 1918, he had refined his belief, identifying the ornithischid dinosaur Iguanodon as the closest fossil relative of the sirrush. If, however, the sirrush was truly a creature of historic, rather than prehistoric, times, where had it originally come from - there is no evidence that giant reptilians were ever native to Mesopotamia - and how could it have evaded scientific detection?

This mystery greatly intrigued cryptozoological investigator Willy Ley, who suggested that the only locality from which such a creature could have been originally transported to Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar but yet remain wholly unknown to modern-day science was Central Africa, and in his book Exotic Animals (1959) he recalled various accounts concerning the mokele-mbembe and other swamp-dwelling dinosaurian beasts reported from this portion of the Dark Continent. In addition, when Schomburgk returned to Europe from Central Africa during the early 20th Century with tales of living dinosaurs, he also brought back a glazed brick that he had found there - a brick just like those in the Ishtar Gate. Is this where the far-travelling ancient Babylonians had obtained them, along with stories - and perhaps even the successful capture from time to time - of real-life dragons?

Others have since expanded upon Ley's views, and the prospect that the sirrush was a living dinosaur has gained interest, but opinion as to the precise type of dinosaur has moved away from Iguanodon toward a sauropod dinosaur, notwithstanding the sirrush's horn(s).

Initially, the sirrush is hardly reminiscent of such creatures. If, however, the Chaldean artists responsible for the Ishtar Gate bas-reliefs and other sirrush portrayals had not actually seen a living sauropod with their own eyes but were relying solely upon descriptions of one, then it is not too difficult to accept the resulting sirrush as nothing more dramatic than a distorted depiction of a sauropod, no doubt embellished by its creators' imagination.


BEL AND THE BEHEMOTH

One Biblical reference that inspired Koldeway's belief in the onetime existence of a real-life sirrush maintained by Babylon's temple priests is an episode documented in the Apocrypha concerning Daniel, who, after discounting an earlier deity as nothing more than a brass idol, was shown a mysterious creature housed within the temple of the Babylonian god Bel, and which was venerated by the fearful populace.

"And in that same place there was a great dragon or serpent, which they of Babylon worshipped. And the king said unto Daniel, Wilt thou also say that this is of brass? Lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh; thou canst not say that he is no living god: therefore worship him. Then said Daniel. I will worship the Lord my God: for he is a living God. But give me leave, O king, and I shall slay this dragon without sword or staff. The king said, I give thee leave."

True to his word, Daniel accomplished his vow - via the unusual if effective expedient of choking the creature to death by forcing lumps of bitumen, hair, and fat down its throat - a brave act if genuinely faced by a conflagrating dragon, but one that will not endear him to cryptozoologists if it is ever shown that his adversary was nothing more rapacious than a morose mokele-mbembe a long way away from its home amid the Congolese swamplands.

Another biblical monster that has never been satisfactorily identified with any known animal alive today is the behemoth, which is described in the book of Job (40:15-24) as follows:

"Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
Lo, now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
He is the chief of the ways of God; he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.
Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.
He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.
The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.
Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.
He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares."

Over the centuries, four principal identities have been touted by theological and zoological scholars - the ox, Nile crocodile, elephant, and hippopotamus. Least popular is the ox - apart from its herbivorous nature, it has no similarity to the behemoth. Only the New English Bible supports the crocodile's candidature - certainly, the concept of a vegetarian crocodile is an implausible one, to say the least. The elephant's supporters are also few - only Prof. George Caspard Kirschmayer in Un-Natural History of Myths of Ancient Science (1691) and Dr Sylvia Sikes in The Natural History of the African Elephant (1953) have seriously attempted to link the two great beasts with one another.

The most popular and (until recently) most favourable pairing of the behemoth has been with the hippo - whose cavernous mouth, prodigious drinking capacity, mighty build, sturdy skeleton, swamp-dwelling lifestyle, herbivorous diet, and status as the largest animal native to the Bible lands compare satisfactorily with the behemoth - but not conclusively. How, for example, can the hippopotamus "moveth his tail like a cedar"? This description implies a very long, powerful tail - not the puny, inconspicuous appendage sported by the hippo.

And then came a late entry in the identity stakes - a living sauropod. As veteran cryoptozoologist Prof. Roy Mackal, seeker of the elusive Congolese mokele-mbembe during the 1980s, persuasively pointed out in A Living Dinosaur?, not only the description of the behemoth's tail but also all of the features hitherto likened to the hippopotamus are equally applicable to one of these giant vegetarian dinosaurs. Moreover, the great size attributed to the behemoth, while far exceeding that of the hippo would be much more compatible to a sauropod of mokele-mbembe proportions. Compare the Bible's description of the behemoth (given above) with Mackal's defence of his sauropod identity for it (given below), and judge for yourself.

"The behemoth's tail is compared to a cedar, which suggests a sauropod. This identification is reinforced by other factors. Not only the behemoth's physical nature, but also its habits and food preferences are compatible with the sauropod's. Both live in swampy areas with trees, reeds and fens (a jungle swamp). Indeed, the identification of the biblical behemoth as a sauropod dinosaur provides excellent correspondence between the descriptive features in the biblical text and the characteristics of these dinosaurs as inferred from the fossil record."

Equally interesting concerning this sauropod link is that the book of Job was written sometime between 700 and 2000 BC, thereby considerably predating the Ishtar Gate's depictions of the sirrush. Clearly, then, the gate did not inspire the behemoth account - instead, this was based upon something very large and visually impressive that was known in the Middle East long before the birth of Nebuchadnezzar.

Initially, the Bible must seem the last place where zoologists would expect to find details of living dinosaurs - but if living dinosaurs (or travellers' reports of them) were known in this region of the world at this particular time in man's history, the Bible is unquestionably the first place where zoologists should look for evidence of their existence.

Perhaps now, then, thanks to a long-overdue cryptozoological scrutiny of this ancient treasure trove of natural history lore, the vital evidence has at last been disclosed.

This is an excerpt from one of my books-in-progress, The Creatures That Time Forgot: Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors