Rare Diamonds Lost: Extinct Species
Endangered and extinct cryptids you’ve never heard of
It’s often said that the ocean remains the last frontier to be explored, with the Earth and her various land formations having been largely combed over and pored through by frontiersmen, biologists, scientists, and the like.
We’d like to think we know almost all there is about the world around us. That line of thinking even applies to the moon, which now has both American and Chinese flags notched firmly into its alien soil (if you believe we went to the moon— which I do).
Barren, icy deserts like Antarctica shouldn’t be forgotten either. Staunch researchers do valuable work there in stints of almost two years in treacherous weather conditions, and that’s without the possibility of rescue for many months should a catastrophe arise. At least eleven children have been born on this iceberg of a continent, so we rationalize that there can’t be too many unexplored places with hidden treasures left.
At least, it’s what we tell each other.
Yet while we may believe we’ve exposed all that there is, the fact remains that desert, jungle, mountainous, and unfamiliar woodland terrain still blanket millions of miles of the planet. That’s likely sometimes lost on people who happen to live in smaller countries, provinces and prefectures. Think about it: do you live in the forest or the mountains, or have you been lucky enough to be able to visit these landscapes and appreciate their true scale? I have a few friends who do, but the majority of us live in suburbs, urban cities, or areas of the country in which travel to more remote areas isn’t affordable. Due to the current pandemic, tends of millions have been restricted to their homes, making any kind of travel unfeasible in the near future.
My family and I have lived in rural Ohio for most of our lives, surrounded by farms, cud-crunching cows, and rows upon rows of all the corn a person/feedlot could wish for.
Yet in all that time, my family and I have never had a chance to go camping or hiking. We’ve never experienced for ourselves the sheer expanse that remains tantalizingly close, yet ever out of reach. As a result of that, we haven’t been able to really appreciate what could still be hiding beyond every ridge, every mountain-range, every outcrop and in undiscovered caverns or mines.
I’ve seen deer and the odd grass-snake, and my husband Mike tells the tale of a coyote that just trotted down Carson Road one evening, as casually as if it had been doing so for years. But we’ve never seen bears or cougars, let alone any creature as exciting as a cryptid [which has, at long last, earned its justified place in the dictionary].
Tales of cryptids both enamor and frustrate me. I’ve been told at least three first- and second-hand cryptid stories, and yet as much as pine after them, at no time has a cryptid ever chosen to grace me with a peek.
Consider Alaska and all of its uncharted-ness, or the forestry and wild inhabitants of America’s national parks. In South America, there are still large swaths of land which remain ‘untouched’ and have never seen modernity.
Indigenous tribes in these areas have been matter-of-factly reporting the presence of cryptids for centuries, but this may be changing. Due to equal parts of political unrest, colonialism and plundering from both the West and far East of Africa’s natural resources, long-established tribes and their cryptid neighbors have been fading into obscurity. So, in the spirit of trying to preserve what historical accounts are still left, I’ve collected a brief summary of some unusual cryptids around the world, most of which by now are likely extinct.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has the second-largest rainforest on Earth, spanning six countries and more than forty different tribes. The Congo, in fact, is home to about a quarter of all the rainforest that’s left, and somewhere in all of that forest once dwelt a particularly nasty cryptid which the natives called the miga, meaning ‘water-lion’.
The miga, which was also reported in areas of Guinea and the Central African Republic, was less of a lion than it was some sort of peculiar fish or cephalopod. It was said to have had tentacles in its head and would hide among rocks and crags, stealthily planning to attack passing canoes and excavate its human prey.
While dates and more definitive characteristics have been lost to history, the miga attracted the attention of late cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. He seemed to think that the miga was a misplaced West African manatee, which could in theory have strayed from Senegalese or Angolan waters. Given the docile nature of manatees, which are exclusively vegetarian foragers, it’s unlikely that the miga was a manatee or sea-cow. Researcher Marc Micha hypothesized that the ‘tentacles’ growing from the creature’s head could have been catfish barbels, but as there is little else in the way of details in ‘The Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology’, we’ll likely never know whether the miga was an anomalous octopus or an oversized, agressive, man-eating catfish.
Second on the map comes a personal favorite enclave— Australia— and its legend of an enormous serpent the likes of which we may never see again. Australian indigenous peoples called this snake the mindi, and vast stretches of the Land-Down-Under’s deserts were its abode for centuries.
Encountering the mindi in her natural environment would have been mercifully rare for the Aborigines, who would have been familiar with the caverns in which she laid eggs and steered clear of her. As to the Western immigrant mindset of the time, I imagine that after the shock would have come the bullets, as that was the unfortunate method frontiersmen used to bring cryptids to their ends.
The mindi was not venomous, but that was hardly a comfort. She measured anywhere from 18 to a full 30 feet in length; furthermore, she was a constrictor and preferred to ambush emus, which she would crush and then swallow. According to natives, the mindi spread disease and could kill a person with a single glance, though she has not been spotted in nearly a hundred years. Right now, the largest snake in the region is likely the diamondback python, which has been measured at fifteen feet and can also be found on the coast of New South Wales.
The largest river in the United States is the Missouri river, which spans more than a half a million square miles.
The Algonquin peoples who hunt, traverse, and fish the Missouri River speak often of a creature they call the ‘Misiganebic’ [an Algonquin word meaning ‘great serpent’]. This aquatic cryptid was described as bearing an equine-like head and mane, which fits the bill of similarly-reported water cryptids like Ogopogo and Chessie. Unlike the miga and mindi, the misiganebic stands a chance to have survived; other serpents like it are still seen in Canadian waters to this day, and to a lesser extent in the Great Lakes. Whatever the misiganebic ‘is’ may either still be pairing up and reproducing, or have been survived via an ‘aquatic’ cousin due to the variety of sightings that still trickle in.
In the 1600–1700s, Ojibwan peoples reported to French and American colonialists that many lakes in Ontario, Canada were home to a terrible cryptid they dubbed the ‘mi-ni-wa-Tu’, or ‘river monster’. Far from exhibiting a more docile temperament like the equine-like serpents, the mi-ni was a horrible creature to come across and seemed to be in a zoological league of its own. Allegedly it had the body of a bison, reddish hair, and a flattened, beaver-like tail. What’s creepier still: the mi-ni also had a serrated back and a single white horn jutting from its forehead.
It might be easy to dismiss this last creature as a sort of animal-god or something legendary, but in doing this research I learned something interesting. A strikingly similar creature, called the ‘mishipizhin’ (or ‘great lynx’ in the Ojibwan language) was also reported in Lake Superior. The mi-shi also had a serrated ridge on its back and white horns on the forehead.
These two strikingly similar descriptions imply that communities in both geographical locations were seeing the same animal, or a relative thereof. Oftentimes when I’m wondering whether a cryptid seems too far-fetched to exist, I play a mental game in which I try to imagine the weirdest-looking animals that are already known to science.
For instance, there’s the narwhal. No scientist worth their weight in gold would ever reasonably believe in cetaceans with lovely, ivory-spiraling horns in their skulls if we didn’t already know of them. Narwhales are essentially swimming unicorns, and yet we are conditioned from infancy to recognize that it’s a perfectly legitimate creature.
In the same vein is the recently-discovered okapi (once dismissed by skeptical Westerners), the hodge-podge of features that make up the platypus, and the endearing pangolin, which a shocking amount of people have never heard of. And to think about it, how many people would actually believe that giraffes were a creature of the current age if they didn’t already populate the African savannah? The neck of a giraffe can extend seven feet — what other known mammal has comparable anatomy? We are conditioned to recognize this ecclectic-looking animal from the moment we take our first steps. In actuality, the giraffe is a lovely, miraculous being, which most certainly does not deserve to languish in some zoo or have its body manipulated for a selfie by the tourists who pay to be able to kill them.
In my dreams, I often find myself canoeing somewhere exotic and seeing, instead of an angry hippo or crocodile, the elegant, 7-foot neck of an aquatic reptile rise slowly from the depths, looking down on me while while I sputter open-mouthed with only a set of oars as protection. Thousands of people have come across creatures such as these, some of them even able to snap a grainy photo or heavily-pixelated video clip, but I have not been as fortunate.
I can only imagine it in stories.
Sources: CNN, Britannica, Wikipedia, A-Z Cryptozoology, BBC, Coast to Coast Radio
