UNDISCOVERED ANIMALS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3355, 3 January 1927, Page 2

UNDISCOVERED ANIMALS.

(By a Big Game Hunter.)

Incredible though they seem, experienced big game hunters do not disbelieve the curious native tales which tell of ferocious unknown monsters roaming the unpenerated wilds of Africa's forest, bush and swamp, and the project of a big game hunting expedition shortly leaving for the Congo to hunt what is said to be the prehistoric brontosaurus, a huge swamp animal weighing 20 tons, measuring 60 feet from nose to tad, with an elephant’s body, a hippo’s legs, a lizard’s head, and a long girulfe-like neck, is by no means fantastic. s This big unknown brute is probably file same as the famous giant lizard seen some years ago in South Africa, and for which Lewanika, King of the Zulus, kept a special warrior’s w r atch. In an official report to the British Resident he described its track as being “as large, as that of a full-sized,trek-waggon. from which the wheels had been removed,” and though he did not see the monster, his hunters did, and told of a creature ten times , bigger than a crocodile. A similar huge pachyderm like a gigantic hippopotamus, with rhinocerosjikc horns on its head, is said by many native tribes to live in Lakes Benguelo, Mweru, and Tanganyika, and was thougnt to bo the brontosaurus. A famous American scientific institution equipped an expedition to capture it; but a train smash postponed the attempt. An enormous brown and yellow creature, like a gigantic cobra, is the lau, another unknown monster, which not only natives but European hunters have averred seeing in the vast swamps of Lake i\o and the Mile Valley. Measuring 40 to iOO feet in length, the lau uas ix|n fought' while devouring native canoeinen, and it is said often to i,e Heard making a Joud booming cry at night. A ferocious undiscovered beast which 1 unions hunters have tried to capture is the Mandi bear, or, as natives call it, the clumiset, a creature half-bear, half-gorilla, which lurks in the dense forests of Kenya, prowling in native kraals and preying on cattle, goats, women and children. Its weird threetoed footprints belong to no known annual, but such great authorities as the late F. O. Selous and Capt. Blayney Percival, for 25 years Game Warden in Kenya, have asserted their belief in its existence. The ngoloko, a huge unknown ape, and the nunda, a gigantic cat, as big as a donkey, both of which prey on men and cattle, are other undiscovered beasts of’Africa, while from Java reports come of a bear-ape-man known as the sedopak, a beast with long hair, walking upright but swinging swiftly from trees by its arms, which also preys on men, but which has not yet been shot or caught, though often tracked. Strange unidentified beasts living in rocks and caves, walking like men, with red faces and bear’s hair, are still uncaptured in Thibet, where under the name of migu or snowmen, the Thibetans look on them as devils. When hunting in the wilds one is often asked by natives to trap or shoot strange beasts whose curious tracks fit no known animal. The npumasimba, a monster hunted but not captured, by the writer in Tanganyika, left tiro toe-prints of a man and the trefoil pugmarks of a lion; its victims included full-grown cattle, dogs, goats, and children, and the natives asserted that it was an unknown zinnvc or demon. Fear and superstition account for some such tales, but when one remembers that such a big and striking beast as the okapi remained undiscovered by white men until Sir Henry Johnstone captured it a few years back, it is not to be denied that othei unknown animals may still roam in queer corners of the world.