SEARCH OF UNKNOWN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 10 (Supplement)

SEARCH OF UNKNOWN.

GIANT LIZARDS FOUND.

OTHER DISCOVERIES POSSIBLE

(By F. B. FORESTER.I

The discovery -within the last few years of the ferocious lizard, first described by Sir Alan Cobham and known since as the Komodo Dragon, has done much towards strengthening the theory of those who hold that many new species of living creatures remain still to be discovered. One cannot but draw a somewhat startling inference from the finding of these giant carnivorous lizards. If, in the island of Komodo, near the coast of Java, a spot so insignificant as to be unmarked, or at least unnamed, on most maps, there could live unknown until the last few years a whole colony of these savage monitors, creatures capable of killing and devouring horses aud reaching, when full "iown, a length of at least 13 feet; why, Tn the dense unexplored swamps of Central Africa, hundreds of square miles in extent, and the desolate regions and trackless forests of South America, should there not exist other and more gigantic creatures, such as are declared by the natives to be there, though as yet unknown to science? When it does not seem to be known if New Zealand, tiny by comparison, possesses a native < or not, or if the reputedly extinct bird, the notornis, still exists in Fiordland, surely such a possibility almost becomes a probability. So with regard to these unexplored regions of Africa and South America. Of late years so persistent and convincing has been the evidence coming to hand respecting thd existence there of strange monsters that more than one expedition has set out with a view of ascertaining if these rumours have any truth in them, or are to be dismissed as mere travellers' tales. Of these expeditions the most important is that which started for the heart of unknown Africa nearly two years ago. Another, leaving civilisation more recently, had as its goal Mount Roraima, a strange flattopped mountain in the north of Brazil, said to be part of a geological fault, most difficult of access, and tenanted, according to native accounts, by strange creatures unknown elsewhere. Surely coincidence alone did not lead Conan Doyle to locate his "Lost World" in this very regiou. Stories of the Natives.

Now to glance at some of the evidence based upon which the expedition to Cen! tral Africa set out. For at least 30 years African natives have been positive in their assertions that in the great, unexplored swamps of Northern Rhodesia there does exist some gigantic creature, either a survival from past ages, or a species as yet unknown to scientists. Certain drawings on the walls of caves depicting this monster bear out this statement, and it is significant that in all descriptions given there is always the small head set upon a long and comparatively slender neck, the powerful tail and other features characteristic of the dinosaurs, those terrible monsters from the age of reptiles. To these assertions it may be objected that native stories are not always to be relied upon, yet it will hardly do to reject their evidence too | off-handedly. But the evidence of white men is not

wanting. The hunter, Selous, than whom surely there are not many greater authorities in African lore, believed in the possibility of the existence of this monster. So, too, did the hunters, Burns and Defriis, one of whom claims to have seen, in a small lake on the upper Kafue River, a massive bulk in the water, which it was impossible to mistake for a hippopotamus. More recently a gigantic creature was seen by the prospector Cornell in the Orange River, swimming upstream against a powerful current. Within the last 18 months, too, statements have been made to the experts at South Kensington Natural History Museum to the effect that the writers declare that they have, in the African jungle, actually seen dinosaurs alive. To all such statements, however, the polite but firm rejoinder has been made: The dinosaur became extinct 15 millions of years ago and there is no.t the slightest possibility of its being alive at the present day. Yet, may it not be suggested that, in making so positive an assertion, these experts had lost sight of two important facts—the existence of the tuatara and the recent discoveries on the Colorado River, U.S.A. Probably, too, these people may not have used the word dinosaur in the strictly scientific sense. What in all probability they did Bay was that in the dense swamps and jungles of Central Africa they had seen some enormous creature, of a type hitherto unknown to them; and this, so far from being impossible, has been, in the evidence coming to hand, regarded as so far possible that, as already stated, an expedition has started to search for it. The Curious Tautara.

Take the evidenec of the tautara next. Here is a reptile, true lizard it is not, the sole living creature possessing the vestige of a third eye, an animal which should have been extinct 10 millions of years ago, yet it lives 011, as it was then, and has been of reported to be even increasing in numbers. Following up this line of reasoning, then, it would be no more strange that a reputedly extinct saurian, such as the brontosaurus, should be still living in the extensive unexplored swamps of Central Africa, than that the tuatara a living fossil, should still survive in- these islands of New Zealand. For evidence has recently come to hand, in the remarkable rock carvings on the Colorado River, showing so life-like a representation of a dinosaur as to prove beyond doubt that the farback artist, whoever he was, must have seen the creature alive to represent it as he did. This discoverey, as its finders claim, proves that the dinosaurs, instead of being extinct when man appeared on earth, must have been for a time at least contemporary with him.

This being so, then, is it altogether inconceivable or impossible that, some few individuals escaping from among the hordes of dying monsters that perished on the drying up of the swamps round Lake Tanganyika, should have made their way to the solitudes of the immense Rhodesian swamps, there to survive for countless ages, their descendants, possibly, existing in those remote regions to the present day? Conjecture, it may be, but at all events coniecture not without some basis of fact.

"A white spotted lion, and an enormous lake-inhabiting monster" —such, according to the English papers, are the avowed objects of the expedition that set out nearly two years ago. We have the tuatara, though we do not always recognise all that he stands for; the last year or so has brought to light the Komodo dragon, a creature armed with terrible claws and approaching as closely to a carnivorous dinosaur as need be. Who is to say what gigantic unknown monster the unexplored swamps of Africa may have yet to show us?