Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

Physical description: Serpentine. Sometimes
looks like a drifting log or floating island. Reddish
color. Head the size of a pig’s. Scales.
Clawed feet.
Behavior: Favors stormy weather. Creates a
big wake. Travels on land at night. Eats cattle.
Distribution: Selisbergsee, Canton Uri,
Switzerland.
Significant sightings: First reported in 1585
and last seen in 1926 by workers building a new
road.
Sources: Renward Cysat, Collectanea chronica
und denkwürdige Sachen pro chronica Luchernensi
et Helvetiae [1614], vol. 4 (Lucerne,
Switzerland: Diebold Schilling Verlag,
1961–1972); C. Kohlrusch, ed., Schweizerisches
Sagenbuch (Leipzig, Germany: R. Hoffmann,
1854); Josef Müller, Sagen aus Uri aus dem
Volksmunde gesammelt, vol. 1 (Basel,
Switzerland: Gesellschaft für Folkskunde, 1926).
Elephant-Dung Bat
Small, unknown Batof East Africa.
Physical description: Silver, brownish-gray fur.
Paler underparts. Very small wingspan, possibly
only 5 inches.
Behavior: Roosts on the ground in piles of
dried elephant dung.
Distribution: Marsabit Forest and Mount
Kulal, Kenya.
Significant sighting: Terence Adamson briefly
ran across this bat in the 1950s in two different
locations in Kenya.
Possible explanation: The small Horn-skinned
bat (Eptesicus floweri), suggested by Karl
Shuker, has a habit of roosting in acacia roots,
which are possibly comparable in texture to
dried dung. It is known in Mali and southern
Sudan.
Sources: John G. Williams, “An Unsolved
Mystery,” Animals 10 (June 1967): 73–75;
Karl Shuker, “A Belfry of Crypto-Bats,”
Fortean Studies 1 (1994): 235–245.
ELEPHANTS (Unknown)
There are three species of living Elephants
(Order Proboscidea): the African bush elephant
162 ELEPHANT-DUNG BAT
(Loxodonta africana), the African forest elephant
(L. cyclotis), and the Asian elephant (Elephas
maximus). DNA tests conducted in 2001 confirmed
that the two African species are genetically
distinct and probably diverged about 2.6
million years ago. Elephas evolved in Africa but
migrated to Eurasia around the same time.
Asian elephants are smaller, with humped or
rounded backs, smaller ears, and one finger instead
of two on the tip of the trunk.
The African bush elephant is the largest
known living terrestrial animal. The average
adult male stands 9 feet 10 inches–12 feet 2
inches at the shoulder and weighs 4.4–7.7 tons.
The largest specimen on record had a shoulder
height of 13 feet and an estimated weight of
13.5 tons; it was shot in Angola on November
7, 1974.
Though elephants are best known for their
elongated trunks, their earliest ancestors completely
lacked them. The hippo-sized
Moeritherium of the Late Eocene (35 million
years ago) had nasal bones placed far forward on
its face, indicating a lack of large muscles necessary
for a trunk. The identifying characteristics
of proboscideans are much less obvious and involve
particular skull and shoulder-blade features,
teeth with unique cusps, hind feet with a
specific ankle formation, and wrists with serial
bone arrangement. The earliest was Phosphatherium,
which weighed about 33 pounds
and stood 2 feet at the shoulder. Proboscideans
first evolved, probably in North Africa, near the
end of the Paleocene, 55 million years ago, from
primitive hoofed mammals called condylarths.
The best-known extinct proboscideans are
mastodons and mammoths, which were contemporaneous
in North America for about 4 million
years in the Pliocene and Pleistocene. American
Mastodons (Family Mammutidae) were
browsers that split off from the elephant family
tree in the Oligocene, nearly 30 million years
ago, while the Mammoths (Family Elephantidae)
were grazers with a slender build; a taller
skull; inwardly-curving tusks that projected well
below the horizontal; and flat, ridged teeth.
Mammoths died out relatively recently at the
end of the Pleistocene in both Eurasia and
North America. They are featured in about 400