ShukerNature Himalayan Mystery

Sunday, 25 August 2013

LEGLESS IN NEPAL - A LIMBLESS HIMALAYAN CROCODILE DRAGON?

 

Nepal's limbless crocodile dragon (William M. Rebsamen)

As comprehensively documented in my latest book, Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), crocodilian mystery beasts come in all shapes and sizes and are of worldwide distribution. Yet few, surely, can be stranger than the giant limbless version reported from southern Asia as recently as 1980.

That was when Reverend Resham Poudal, an Indian missionary, was leading an entourage through a Himalayan jungle valley in Nepal. They came upon what seemed at first sight to be an enormous log, greenish-brown in colour, lying on the ground across their planned path – and then the 'log' moved! To the great alarm of everyone present, it proved to be a huge limbless reptile, whose scaly serpentine form blended in so well with the surrounding vegetation that when stationary, it did indeed look exactly like a log or fallen tree trunk.

Its eyewitnesses estimated the creature's total body length to be at least 42 ft, and approximately 6.5 ft in circumference, but most shocking of all were its jaws. For whereas those of true snakes, even massive ones, are relatively short in relation to their body, this mystery reptile's were extremely long, greatly resembling a crocodile's jaws. And although they were motionless, they were fully open, yielding a gape wide enough for a 6.5-ft-tall human to stand inside!

As I learnt from veteran cryptozoological explorer Bill Gibbons, who has also written about this bizarre cryptid, the entourage's native Nepalese members informed the Reverend that they considered these 'crocodile-snakes' to be dragons, but stated that they were only very occasionally encountered - and even when one was met with, it rarely moved. Instead, it would simply lie impassively with its monstrous jaws agape and wait for unsuspecting prey, usually water buffaloes, to approach, not seeing its enormous yet perfectly camouflaged form until it was too late. For as soon as a buffalo walked within range, the dragon's open jaws would seize it, and from those immensely powerful killing implements, brimming with sharp teeth, there would be no escape. In addition, the natives claimed that its eyes glowed like luminescent lamps at night (a feature also reported for anacondas and other very large snakes), which helped to lure prey.

But if such a remarkable creature as this truly exists, what could it be? Possibly an immense species of snake with unusually large jaws, or perhaps a gigantic legless lizard? Might it even be a unique limbless species of terrestrial crocodilian, highly specialised for this cryptic, motionless lifestyle? Whatever it is, it certainly does not match the appearance of any reptile currently known to science.

This ShukerNature blog post is excerpted from my newly-published book Mirabilis:A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (Anomalist Books: New York, 2013), which is available as a hard-copy paperback book and also as a Kindle e-book.

 This may not be transparently obvious to everybody but the creature that is described here is really the same thing as the Buru, the Buru being a creature that is alternately described as having four limbs like a crocodile but also as being limbless like a sepent. The size as reported here is comparable to the clearly identical Bu-Rin of Burma, said to be 50 feet long and limbless (but also seen swimming in the water only and so the legs could be missed. In this case the creature was well-camouflaged and hard to discern from the vegetation, well covered by vegetation as well, so the legs could conceivably be missed.
The story of "we thought it was a log until it moved and then we saw it was a big snake" is a popular legend found in many places, including several different parts of Indonesia and including also many parts of Latin America. Of course selecting only one telling of the legend as a report is analogous to singling out one report of The Phantom Hitchhiker and treating the story as a real event unrelated to the dozens of other other near-identical retellings of the same story.
Personally I think estimations of lengths up to 50 feet or more are only exaggerations. Heuvelmans allows a length of up to 25 feet for this species and this blog has had an ongoing disputation over that point. The more exaggerated accounts allege that such creatures (called Nyans) can eat whole elephants and so the stories of buffalos marching into its open jaws are right in line with that. (The bestiary dragons which attack elephants come out of this legend) The legends of larger creatures undoubtedly originate in sightings of wakes-in-the-water and an early publication of the reports notes a distinct resemblance to Scandinavian sea-serpent reports. Because of this there is at least the sound suggestion that some of the reports are actually referring to giant eels instead.  All of this has also been mentioned on this blog before.


The Buru of Assam as illustrated by Neave Parker of the British Museum (Natural History)
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/art-themes/20thcentury/more/iguanodon_more_info.htm

The Giant Salamander Theory at Loch Ness

This is mostly here as a footnote. At the time that the "Monster" was breaking into news in 1933, local fishermen, boat-workers, dockmen and sailors allowed there had been scuttlebut there was a "Salamander" in the Loch which had been told of from time to time. Rupert T Gould eventually came to the theory that the Loch Ness Monster was a gigantic longnecked newt, which can be related to Charles Gould's earlier theory that the Sea-serpent was a giant salamander, citing the Chinese giant salamander as the model to build the theory on.
The earliest photo of the Loch Ness Monster was taken in 1933, the year the Monster started making headlines, and it was taken by Hugh Grey. The image is owned and copyrighted by the Scottish Daily Record. Several commentatos have said that it is an animal which resembles a Japanese Giant salamander, taking the head end to be to the right and the tail to the left (Reverse of Ted Holliday and other serious Loch Ness Researchers, who believe the left hand side to show the Loch Ness Monster's long thin neck) The current status of the photo is as it is marked on the site where I got this copy of the photo:

Image status: HOAX Photographed by Hugh Grey in 1933 this image might look like a flipper splashing in the water but is actually a blurry picture of a dog swimming along with a stick in its mouth.

-And I am OK with that: Obviously Hugh Grey started out with what he had intended as a harmless, rather foolish and obvious joke and then he got stuck with journalists that wanted to take the photograph as serious eveidence.

In this case however there is more to the story of the salamanders even after we have done with the photo. One part of it is that the same sort of Giant Salamanders as seem to be involved in some Tatzelwurm stories (The bigger, fatter, fourlegged kind as per Ulrich Magin) seem to turn up in Britain and the Baltic region being described as "Lake Monsters" and "Alligators" and they seem to go back into prehistory in some of the local "Dragon" representations carved in stone: they are also represented in Folklore such as Ted Holiday uses to support his theories. They are said to grow up out of little worms or caterpillars and that probably means the tadpoles, and they are said to be slimy with a caustic secretion. That part is what I count as the determining characteristic of the type.

On page 126 of Rupert T. Gould's Loch Ness Monster a discussion of possible identifications mentions the following passage:

Salamander

The suggestion that X might be some species of giant salamander "indigenous to Loch Ness and its rivers" was made by Lt-Col. W. H. Lane, Glenmoriston, in a letter to the Inverness Courier (10.x.33). While pointing out that the largest living variety is a native of Japan (Although specimens have been obtained in China), he stated that he had shot what he believed to be a creature of the kind in the Chin Hills district of Burma.

"X" is the way Gould refers to the Loch Ness Monster in the book, which he believes to be an individual creature about 40 feet long and he does not think that Grant's sighting is the same because the size is much smaller. Which leaves him in a quandry, actually. Lane also has the references to the Chinese and Japanese Giant salamanders reversed but both were poorly understood at the time. However, more pertinent is the fact that he claimed to have shot one in Burma, which is either a new species or a new and unexpected range extension of the Chinese species. And Richard Freeman had suggested to me back in 2005 that the Assamese Burus might be salamanders of this type. The immediate problem with calling the Burus amphibians or fishes is the fact that they are described as having a flexible neck which can be stretched out and withdrawn, and a forked tongue, and that these are important features of the type. Therefore they are most probably large monitor lizards and reptiles. However I told Richard at the time that I did not think that giant salamanders were necessarily NOT present in the area or even unlikely. So here is a report of something of that same nature in an adjoining region. Going on such limited information it is difficult to say how large a population might be involved r how large the range, but it does seem that Giant salamanders also inhabit parts of highlands South Asia as well as the regions further North (Richard Freeman is also my source of information about Giant salamanders living in Southern Siberia)

Tim Dinsdale also mentions that W.H.Lane had produced a booklet in defense of his theory, in which he assumes that Loch Ness was connected by a large drainage system to the major rivers in Europe at the time when the bed of the North sea was above water, connecting the "Monster" to other creatures in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, which he also thought were giant salamanders, and to the site of the "Homo Diluvi Testis" fossil. Neither Gould nor Dinsdale believed in the theory but Dinsdale allowed it was a pretty piece of writing in The Leviathans (AKA Monster Hunt)

As to Gould's monstrous dilemna, let us hypothesize along with him that at the time of the initial outbreak of reports, most of the reports really were of one creature about 40 feet long. We shall call her "Mama." Since Grant's creature was 15 to 20 feet long and less than half that, we can cll that one "Junior" (Or "Baby Dumpling" if you want the proper contemporary flavour). Mama is then Gould's "X" and while Junior is "Not-X" is still of the same kind,an immature one. Which is what Oudemans said. At this time either the really big one that Torquil MacLeod saw was not around yet or else he had not yet grown to his full size. So currently, being as frugal as we can about the number of creatures present, I think we have only two or three creatures in the Loch at the same time. In the beginning there were only two and a decade or two later a bigger one came around, for about a decade. One by one they either left again or died off. Dinsdale could have logged Junior's trip out the River Ness during one spate about 1936 and when a "Twenty-foot-long" monster was seen headed out to sea: it was probably longer at full length under water but that is still a good match. There is also a report of a larger monster headed in towards the Loch, a couple of decades later, and that could have been the younger "Big Daddy" making his way into the Loch. And ordinarily each of these creatures was called "Black" in colour, so it is difficult to find out what their true colouration would be. But the main idea would still be, only a few individuals in Loch Ness and each individual only temporarily.

Best Wishes, Dale D.