Monkeying around with mystery tales

A weekly appreciation of nature.

Sean Wood

PICTURE the scene: It is 1920 and you find yourself in the dense forests along the Venezuela-Columbia border.
The rain is battering heavily on the lofty canopy 100 feet above and the distant call of a howler monkey distracts you momentarily from your work as a geologist.
Unknown to you, there are a couple of watchers in the woods, and they are just about to approach you in a menacing fashion.
CRASH through the undergrowth they come, the 8ft male to the fore, with his partner at his side. What do you do? Shoot them of course Well, that is what Swiss geologist Francois de Loys did when the above scenario actually happened 81 years ago.
De Loys and his party were, to say the least, a little shocked. The anthropoid apes were new to science and have not been seen since.
The corpse pictured here is in fact the female - the geologists have quickly propped her up on a packing case to take a photograph.
When their expedition was completed, de Loy circulated the pictures to both scientists and the press to a mixed reaction.
Some heralded the discovery of a new species and it was named Ameranthropoldes loysi, because of its remarkable human lineaments, while others claimed it was nothing more than an overgrown spider monkey. In the ensuing years the photograph has been subjected to as much examination as the Turin Shroud and the jury is still out.
By now, some readers will be thinking this sounds a bit like that famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster. And that is exactly what it is, a puzzle, a mystery, a possibility. Does the Tasmanian tiger still exist or did Yorkshireman Wilf Batty kill the last one in 1936? Did Sir Peter Scott realise that his scientific name for Nessie, Nessiteras Rhombopteryx, was an anagram of 'monster hoax by Sir Peter S'?
And is the wonderful cine film of Bigfoot running through a forest clearing in North America nothing more than an elaborate prank by a man in fancy dress?
Would readers like to know the answer? I certainly would and I have to admit that I have been fascinated by the subject of cryptozoology - the study of 'hidden' animals - ever since I attended the annual conference of the International Society of Cryptozoology in 1987.
The society's leading light and first president, Bernard Heuvelmans, has just died at the age of 84. He combined boyish enthusiasm with scienfific thoroughness and right up to his death he continued to travel the globe looking for evidence of cyrptid species.
These induded the giant sloth, the infamous yeti, the terrifying kracken and that old favourite, the sea serpent. Heuvelmans and his ilk completely ignored the cynics and were able to cite an assortment of precedents to back up their claims. The okapi was only discovered in 1901, the giant Komodo dragon was believed to be nothing more than native suspicion until a western traveller spotted one in 1912, and then there is my personal favourite, the deep sea ceolacanth.
This prehistoric deep sea fish was pulled from a shark net off the coast of western Africa in 1938. Previously it was only known from fossils and thought to have become extinct millions of years earlier.

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Things that go "bloop in the dark sea

ANY READERS planning on swimming in the sea this summer please look away now.
Either that or ensure you carry some kind of electric marine cattle prod to ward off things from the deep!
To be more precise, things that go 'bloop' in the night have attracted the interest of marine biologists and crypto-zoologists from across the globe, ever since the mysterious sound was picked up by sensors originally put in place to monitor the movement of Soviet submarines.
The frequency of the acoustic signal resembles known marine animal-calls, it is however, much louder. So noisy is this unknown creature, that the calls have been detected by sensors three thousand miles apart. Even the largest whales cannot shout that loud.

Squid
There have been suggestions that a giant squid, like the one pictured here in an engraving by Edward Etherington in 1887, is responsible.
These almost mythical animals are believed to survive depths of up to three miles, but none have been caught alive. The largest dead squid measured 60ft, including the length of its tentacles, but it is almost certain that they can grow much bigger.
Some researchers think that the squid is unlikely to make a 'bloop' sound, but even then they qualify their comment with a 'you never know' rider.
Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, said in New Scientist magazine: "Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise. though you can never rule anything of it completely."
The signals, which were first picked up in 1997, have been recorded by listening stations hundreds of metres below the ocean surface. At this depth the sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the 'deep sound channel', a phenomenon where a combination of pressure and temperature combine to allow sound waves to keep on travelling.
The majority of the sounds detected have been identified as coming from whales, ships or earthquakes, but the 'bloop' has them all guessing.
It is refreshing to know that man has not conquered the denizens of the deep, and I am sure that there are still a great number of undiscovered creatures both in the oceans and on land waiting to be discovered.
Could the 'bloop' emanate from the fabled Kracken, the giant many-tentacled sea monster which gave many a Jack Tar nightmares? I'd like to think so, and woe betide any cynic who might deride this notion, because it is not a safe bet these days to say never.
Perhaps the most famous discovery in the past hundred years to confound the experts, was the ceolacanth, a large deep sea fish thought extinct for millions of years, until one was caught in a fishing net near the Comoros Islands in 1938.
And even in the late 20th century, mammals were being discovered on a regular basis, including a couple of large ungulates in the dense forests of Vietnam, a tree climbing marsupial in Australia and new species of dolphin in the Indian Ocean.
My guess is that we will keep discovering new species and I have to confess to being intrigued by mysteries like the 'bloop', and I never tire of the ongoing saga of the Yeti, Bigfoot and Nessie.
What do you think, is a monster to blame for the 'bloop'?
Or do you believe all these stories to be merely fanciful nonsense?

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