Strange Mystery Monsters of the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest of South America is truly a marvel to behold. Covering most of the Amazon basin of South America, this basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2 (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 6,000,000 km2 (2,300,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest, much of it little explored by the outside world. It is the largest tract of rainforest in the world, holding unparalleled biodiversity and a multitude of species that have yet to even be discovered, and among these are said to be some truly monstrous mystery beasts, including giant snakes, giant spiders, living dinosaurs, and others. 

Perhaps one of the most infamous cryptid beasts said to wander the jungles of the Amazon is known as the Mapinguari, which translates roughly to “the roaring animal,” or “the fetid beast,” and it is also known by names such as capé-lobo (wolf's cape), mão de pilão (pestle hand), and pé de garrafa (bottle foot). Reported mostly from the dense mostly unexplored rainforests of Brazil and Bolivia, the Mapinguari is said to be a huge, sloth-like creature that stands over 6 feet in height, with reddish fur and wicked curved claws, is said to emit an ear piercing, bloodcurdling scream and to carry with it a fog of a nearly unbearable, staggering stench that purportedly disorients those who have a whiff of it. The creature is said to follow herds of peccaries, to avoid water and, while it mostly avoids humans, will bravely defend its territory if necessary. It is also said to have a hide so thick that it is essentially bulletproof.

The creature has long been reported by local tribes of the region, who say that it is mostly nocturnal and vegetarian, feasting on the innards of trees that it pulls apart with its massive claws. Although well-known to the natives of the region, the Mapinguari are also known from numerous reports from outsiders as well. In one such account from 1975, a hunter by the name of Mário Pereira de Souza was out hunting peccaries by the Jamauchim River when a shaggy creature with curved claws came stumbling towards him from the underbrush. The beast was said to have a stench so horrifically potent that it made him dizzy and had him reeling for days on end after the encounter.

In the late 1990s, hunter Manuel Vitorino Pinheiro dos Santos had been out hunting for white-lipped peccaries when he and his team smelled an odiferous, pungent stink, punctuated by a gurgling cry from the heavy underbrush not far from their position. Dos Santos allegedly immediately dropped the kill that he had been carrying and ran towards the nearby river in a panic, when he heard another more intense bellow from the jungle, which he said seemed to shake the trees themselves, followed by more such shrieks that seemed to get farther and farther away. Dos Santos claims he cowered chest-deep in water until he deemed the creature to be a safe distance away. He eventually saw the source of the strange noise and described the beast as looking like a hulking, armored bear-like body topped with the face of a monkey and enormous claws like those of an armadillo.

There have been some efforts in recent years to try and track down the elusive Mapinguari, such as an expedition led by David C. Oren, ornithologist and expert on Amazonian biodiversity at the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém. Oren has risked ridicule from his peers leading several expeditions into the Amazon looking for the creature since 1994, braving harsh conditions replete with stinging, biting insects, venomous snakes, parasites, deadly disease, nearly impenetrable jungle, and other hazards to try and hunt down the origin of the mystery. Although he has not seen one, he has uncovered nearly a hundred fairly convincing accounts of the creatures from local tribes. He has also managed to uncover clumps of hair, footprints, and scat samples of the alleged creature, none of which have proved to be conclusive.

There have been several theories on what the mysterious Mapinguari could be. One is that it is mere Amazonian folklore, and indeed the creature is heavily featured in myths of the region, which claim it is the spirit of a shaman who had found the forbidden secret of immortality and was subsequently punished by the gods to spend eternity in the body of a twisted beast. Other descriptions of the creature also point towards a purely mythical construct, such as depictions of it having only one eye, with a mouth in the center of its stomach, or feet that point backward. Those who put weight in the possibility of a real animal have pointed out that it could be a surviving population of extinct giant ground sloths such as Megatherium or Mylodon, which died out around 10,000 years ago. These were huge beasts that stood up to 10 to 20 feet high and which in many ways matched the descriptions of the Mapinguari, including the massive bodies, the ability to be semi-bipedal, reddish hair, and long, curving claws. This theory was embraced by the famed cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, who went into detail on it in his seminal work On the Track of Unknown Animals. Other theories suggest some type of surviving giant anteater or even an undiscovered large Amazonian primate.

Another unusual mammalian mystery beast of the Amazon is what is called by the locals the Tapire-iauara, which is said to be an animal the same size as a cow, with red, gold, or black fur and a face that reminds people of a cat or jaguar. The large, drooping ears are cow-shaped, the legs are shaped like those of a donkey, and the animal appears to have hooves. The beast is described as being highly aquatic, mostly seen in water, and its glossy coat supposedly repels water like the feathers of a duck. These creatures are allegedly sometimes hunted by the natives, as they are seen as pests. 

Moving along with the menagerie of the weird, we come to giant snakes. Perhaps the most famous of these was the beast reported by the intrepid explorer and real-life Indiana Jones, Percy Fawcett, during his ill-fated excursion into the deepest Amazon looking for a lost city before mysteriously vanishing off the face of the earth. Scattered among his astute, detailed notes on comparatively more mundane matters are reports of acid-spewing ants, strange double-nosed jungle hounds, hairy hominids, and of course giant snakes. One of the more dramatic incidents among his records is that of his team encountering a colossal serpent far larger than any previously known to exist. Fawcett, who was renowned for his meticulous observations, claimed that they had shot the massive snake in 1906 as it pulled itself onto a muddy bank of the Rio Abuna and that the body measured an estimated 19 meters (62.5 feet) in length. Fawcett would say of it:

"We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water, and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet ... such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing the one shot by me. The Brazilian Boundary Commission.told me of one killed in the Rio Paraguay exceeding 80 feet in length!”

Fawcett also claimed that he had heard from natives and the Brazilian Borders Commission of even larger specimens of giant snakes measuring up to 24 meters (79 feet) long. The reports did not convince herpetologists at the time, and since the body was never brought back, we will probably never know how much truth the tale holds. This is by no means the only report of giant snakes in the Amazon, and indeed native tribes have long claimed that there lurk in these jungles snakes that reach incredible sizes of up to 37 to 50 meters (120 to 160 feet) in length, with heads up to 1.8 meters (6 feet) wide, dwarfing the largest known species of the region, the green anaconda. The natives call this massive creature the Yacumama, and it has also been called by other names such as the Sucuriju gigante, the Sachamama and the Camoodi, as well as the snake that “carries water with it.” In some reports, the Yacumama are described as having prominent horns on their head, and they are said to emit a thunderous booming sound during the wet season.

These tales of giant snakes are well entrenched in the myths and legends of the locals, and there are ancient Mayan cave carvings and paintings that depict giant serpents far larger than anything known. The serpents have long been said to engorge themselves with water, which they use to shoot forth powerful streams that are said to be used to knock prey from trees or stun it, as well as to aid in burrowing into the ground. They have long been said in folklore to knock down trees or even change the course of streams or small rivers.

Yet for all of the mythical imagery, the sightings made of such giant snakes by some explorers seem to be more than just folklore, and there are numerous sightings of these beasts made by those who would dare penetrate the uncharted wilds here. On 22 May 1922, a priest by the name of Father Victor Heinz was traveling along a meandering stretch of the Amazon River in a remote area of Brazil's Pará State when he and his expedition members allegedly spied a snake as “thick as an oil drum” coiled up and drifting downstream. It was reported that it was around 24.5 meters long (over 80 feet), possibly even bigger. Father Heinz would have another encounter with the monster in 1929 when he and his team passed by a colossal snake swimming through the river towards them that had extremely large eyes that glinted with light so brightly that they at first mistook them for lights on another boat.

Some reports detail not only sightings but actual specimens of the creatures that were killed. One such creature was said to have been gunned down in 1948, and this specimen was estimated as being around 35 meters (115 feet) in length. The serpent was apparently dragged by tugboat to the village of Manaos, near the Abuna River, where it was killed by gunfire. In the 1960s, another such specimen was captured and dragged along by a river boat after which it was killed by machine gun fire and dumped. This particular creature was mentioned in Tim Dinsdale’s 1966 book The Leviathans.

The reports are so numerous that there have been many attempts to try and track down such large mystery snakes in the Amazon. One monster hunter by the name of Mike Warner, along with his brother Greg Warner, spent much time in the rugged wilds of the Amazon, compiling hundreds of eyewitness accounts of giant snakes from locals, as well as taking photographs of areas where the snakes purportedly live. During his excursions, Warner allegedly photographed ditches left in the creatures’ wake, lagoons it formed near rivers, and even some of the massive snakes themselves. One photo in particular from 2009 allegedly shows a snake measuring a whopping 40 meters (131 ft) long and 2 meters (6 ft) wide.

Tales of monstrous snakes may or may not be linked to tales of a colossal worm-like or snake-like beast with smooth black skin or scales called the Minhocão. These creatures are said to measure around 20 to 50 meters (65 to 165 feet) in length and to lurk in dank, subterranean lairs, which they carve out themselves with their purported burrowing prowess. The Minhocão has been called everything from some form of giant snake to a type of massive worm.

Considering the largest snake known in the region, the green anaconda, is only known to be at most nearly 6.5 meters (22 feet) long, it is uncertain if any of the tales of truly monstrous snakes are real. There is some precedent for such an enormous snake in the fossil record, notably the prehistoric Titanoboa cerrejonensis, whose fossil remains suggest it grew more than 13 meters (42 ft) in length, making it the largest known snake to ever exist. Could one of these monsters still exist in the present day, or is this some new species or even a mere fabrication? No one really knows.

Also strange from Brazil is a bizarre water-dwelling beast called the Igpupiara by the natives, which translates simply to “the one who lives in the water.” These creatures are usually described as almost humanoid in nature, similar to the entities of mermaid legends, and are apparently quite aggressive, killing their victims through superhumanly powerful embraces that crush them to death. One account from 1583 given by the explorer Fernão Cardim describes them as follows:

They look like men of good stature, but their eyes are very hollow. The females look like women, have long hair and are beautiful: these monsters are found on the bars of sweet rivers.

Similarly there are tales of another aquatic or amphibious humanoid in the Amazon called the “Water Caboclo,” which is supposedly quite stout and muscular, with black leathery skin, membraned hands or fins, red flowing hair, and in some accounts only one eye in the center of the forehead. The creatures are usually said to be always angry and very aggressive, never hesitating to attack unprovoked, and their skin is impenetrable by bullets. The creatures are said to be so fierce that the natives of the region are known to leave out offerings to appease them. Is this all myth and folklore or is there perhaps something to it?

Moving on to the country of Columbia we have what seems to be something rather bizarre dwelling within the picturesque Lake Tota, which at around 21 square miles in area is the largest lake in the country. For centuries there had been spotted within this isolated body of water a creature known locally as the diablo ballena, or “Devil Whale,” which the area’s Muisca people regarded as a god. The creature itself is mostly described as “a big black snake, with eyes that shine,” and it is said in local lore to be the very entity that created the lake to begin with.

Early conquistadors began to site the monster as well, such as Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who said it was “a fish with a black head like an ox and larger than a whale,” and sightings continued from then onward. In 1823, French explorer Gaspard Théodore Mollien saw it, saying it was an “evil creature inhabits its depth in dwellings,” and in 1852 the writer Manuel Ancízar would call it “the freshwater devil.” To this day there are sporadic sightings of something strange prowling the depths here, although what that might be no one knows.

Perhaps even more bloodcurdling than the idea of giant snakes and aquatic beasts in the jungle is that of giant spiders. The Amazon has long produced reports of enormous arachnids shambling through the underbrush claimed to have 4 to 6-foot leg spans, bodies the size of dogs, and to possess potent venom that can kill even large animals such as horses in short order. Local tribes claim that these spiders dwell in subterranean networks of tunnels which open up into trapdoors in the forest floor, from which they creep forth to prey on anything they can catch, including sometimes human beings.

So persistent are the rumors of these massive giant spiders that there have been several notable excursions into the rainforests in an attempt to document them. In 2008, the TV program MonsterQuest sent a team led by tarantula expert Rick C. West, along with experienced Amazon guide Juan Carlos Ramirez, into the remote wilderness of Venezuela, near the Columbian border along the Orinoco River, to an area thick with such giant spider reports. Immediately upon arriving at the remote village of San Rafael de Manuare, the team was already hearing terrifying tales of the monstrous spiders. One villager explained that he had seen a spider that was as big as a man when reared up, which had scurried into the village one evening to drag off a dog into the jungle. Although West was skeptical, the guide, Ramirez, was confident that the man was telling the truth, and that the locals knew the area's wildlife well enough to not misidentify something else for a giant spider. The team pushed on to the village of Pandari, where they also heard stories of a giant spider that had whisked away a village child. So frightened were the Pandari villagers of monster spiders that they had even designed their huts to have dense thatched roofs that came to the ground to protect tem from the roving creatures.

Intrigued, the team went about scouring the surrounding jungle for any sign of these creatures, and it did not take them long to find an unusually large spider lair, into which they placed a camera to see what dwelled within. The camera revealed an extremely large tarantula, which they removed and found to be one of the largest ever found, although nowhere near the reported sizes of the mystery spiders said to drag off dogs and people. The specimen was kept for study but did not offer any proof to support the village tales. Ultimately, after 3 days of slogging through a nearly impenetrable, mosquito-choked jungle, the team was unable to find any evidence of spiders of the reported vast sizes. Another expedition followed in 2011, this time led by British cinematographer Richard Terry, for the TV show Man v Monster, but this team too could find no evidence of the fabled giant spiders.

Although the idea of such mammoth spiders may seem like a stretch of believability, there have been cases of spiders that, while not dog-sized, are shockingly large nevertheless. A few years ago, entomologist Piotr Naskrecki, of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, made the news when he found a massive, “puppy-sized” spider while studying insects in the rainforests of Guyana. The massive South American Goliath bird-eater spider was a foot long (0.3 meters) and so large that Naskrecki at first thought the creature was a possum or a rat. The entomologist said of his encounter:

“I could clearly hear its hard feet hitting the ground and dry leaves crumbling under its weight. I pressed the switch and pointed the light at the source of the sound, expecting to see a small mammal, a possum, a rat maybe. And at first this is what I thought I saw—a big, hairy animal, the size of a rodent.”

The South American goliath bird-eater is so named for its purported habit of eating birds, which in reality it only rarely does, and can measure nearly a foot long and weigh up to 6 oz. (170 grams). They are so large that they make sounds when they walk, which Naskrecki describes as sounding like “horse hooves.” While they may not really eat birds so much as their name implies, they will eat pretty much anything they come across that they can take down, including other arthropods and vertebrates such as lizards, frogs, and rodents. When threatened, the goliath bird-eaters can eject tiny, harpoon-shaped bristles, which burrow into the skin and can be fatal to small animals such as rodents and are incredibly itchy and irritating for larger animals and humans. While these spiders are certainly enormous, are there even larger ones out there that dwarf them? At this point it remains a mystery but the tales still come.

Adding to the menagerie of strange beasts said to lurk in the Amazon jungles is what can only be described as full-blown living dinosaurs. From the most isolated areas of the Amazon have come sporadic reports of large, reptilian creatures said to resemble sauropod dinosaurs, similar to Africa’s famous Mokele Mbembe. One such report is that of explorer Leonard Clark, who while traveling up the Perene River in Peru encountered natives who told him of a large, dinosaur-like creature that lived in the jungles there. The descriptions and pictures drawn by these natives described something very reminiscent of the dinosaur Diplodocus.

Another account of Amazonian dinosaurs comes from, who else, Percy Fawcett. Fawcett claimed that a close friend of his had seen the head and neck of a dinosaur-like creature coming from the water of a river on the border between Brazil and Bolivia in 1919. The friend said it highly resembled the long-extinct Apatosaurus. The creature in this case was said to emerge from underwater and swim about languidly for a time before submerging again with a terrific splash.

As recently as 1995, some geology students in the Sinorca Mountains of eastern Brazil studying quartz deposits claimed to have seen two huge dinosaur-like beasts which were described as being 30 feet long, with massive bodies, 8-foot long tails, and 6-foot long necks topped by sauropod heads. The creatures were allegedly swimming about in the Paraguaca River, in a very remote area not usually visited by outsiders.

Perhaps related to these mysterious dinosaurs is a creature of the Amazon waterways known as the Holadeira, which is said to be a water-dwelling beast somewhat similar to the more famous Loch Ness Monster of Scotland. The creature was most famously spotted by Jeremy Wade, of the TV program River Monsters, who saw it not once, but twice. Wade first saw the mysterious creature in 1993 as he was searching the Amazon for its elusive pink river dolphins. During the encounter, Wade claimed that he saw the jagged back of a massive animal break the surface of the murky water about 100 feet from his boat. Wade even managed to get a photo of the creature, which was looked at by experts who concluded that it could be a river dolphin, but no one could explain the strangely shaped fin protruding from its back.

Intrigued, Wade returned to the area to find further evidence of the creature, and during this time he collected various accounts from locals who had also seen it and called it the Holadeira, which means “saws.” On this excursion, Wade got another glimpse of the creature, this time seeing its actual head. Wade claims that it did indeed seem to be a river dolphin, but differed dramatically in that it possessed a jagged, bumpy dorsal fin, which was startling to Wade, who is quite familiar with what the pink river dolphins look like. One theory about what the creature could be is simply an individual whose dorsal fin has been damaged by a boat or fishing nets, but the jagged pattern seems too neat for that. It could also be a genetic birth defect or mutation. Or perhaps it is a completely new species of river dolphin that is currently unknown to science.

When talking about supposed living dinosaurs in the Amazon, we perhaps inevitably come back to the explorer Percy Fawcett Among the many strange creatures he supposedly encountered out in the wilds, including cyanide-shooting millipedes, acid-spewing ants, double-nosed dogs, cat-dog hybrids, and giant snakes and giant spiders, it also seems that he may have very well seen and heard of actual living dinosaurs out there in the badlands of those murky unexplored jungles. Some of these accounts were told to him by others, such as an account he wrote of in a letter in 1919, in which he writes of a strange, dinosaur-like creature supposedly lurking in the jungles of Bolivia, saying:

“A friend of mine, a trader in the rivers and for whose honesty I can vouch, saw in somewhere about Lat. 12 S. and Long. 65 W. [Bolivia-Brazil borderland] the head and neck of a huge reptile of the character of the brontosaurus. It was a question of who was scared most, for it precipitately withdrew, with a plunging which suggested an enormous bulk. The savages appear to be familiar with the existence and tracks of the beast, although I have never come across any of the latter myself...These swamps over immense areas are virtually impenetrable.”

Fawcett made another brief mention in his many notes of something very strange, large, and seemingly very much like a dinosaur in the wilds of Bolivia, of which he wrote:

“Some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps - possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal - huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.”

It is maddeningly brief and lacking in detail, which was a bit odd for Fawcett, who normally went to great lengths to take meticulous and detailed notes during his expeditions. There is also the fact that this creature, whatever it was, is mentioned nowhere else in his journals and is not brought up again, making it frustratingly unclear as to what exactly he saw out there in those uncharted jungles. Percy also at several points mentions hearing from natives of enormous, mysterious tracks along the Acre River, near where the borders of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil collide, although these people had never actually seen the elusive creature that had made them.

Another early explorer of South America who wrote of possible living dinosaurs in the region was a German by the name of Franz Herrmann Schmidt, who in October of 1907 was exploring the inhospitable Peruvian interior along with a Capt. Rudolph Pfleng and some native guides. Upon coming to a valley they claim that they found an area along the Solimes River to be oddly devoid of any water animals such as alligators and aquatic snakes, or indeed any life at all, and they came across some unusual massive footprints in the mud. The guides reportedly became quite upset and agitated at this discovery and warned them to head back, but they camped there anyway. The next day fresh tracks were purportedly found along the river near the camp, and Pfleng announced that he had decided that he was going to follow them to see where they led. Shortly after this, there was a commotion in the jungle as the monkeys and birds screamed and shrieked and a large dark shape crashed about in the brush, which sent one of the spooked Indian guides scurrying for safety in one of the canoes. Schmidt would write of the bizarre incident:

“One of the excited Indians began to paddle the boat away from the shore, and before we could stop him we were 100 feet from the waterline. Now we could see nothing and the Indians absolutely refused to put in again, while neither Pfleng nor myself [sic] cared to lay down our rifles to paddle. There was a great moving of plants and a sound like heavy slaps of a great paddle, mingled with the cries of some of the monkeys moving rapidly away from the lake.... For a full 10 minutes there was silence, then the green growth began to stir again, and coming back to the lake we beheld the frightful monster that I shall now describe.

The head appeared over bushes 10 feet tall. It was about the size of a beer keg and was shaped like that of a tapir, as if the snout was used for pulling things or taking hold of them. The eyes were small and dull and set in like those of an alligator. Despite the half dried mud, we could see that the neck, which was very snakelike, only thicker in proportion, was rough knotted like an alligator's side rather than his back.

The animal saw nothing odd in us, if he noticed us, and advanced till he was no more than 150 feet away. We could see part of the body, which I should judge to have been eight or nine feet thick at the shoulders, if that word may be used since there were no forelegs, only some great heavy clawed flippers. The surface was like that of the neck.”

It is all rather dramatic and harrowing enough to be sure, but it got even more so when Pfleng whipped his rifle up and took a shot at it, as it seems humans are wont to do when facing the unknown, which ricocheted off of its bony head. Schmidt also fired at it, and this time hit it in the base of the neck, which also seemed to have little effect. According to Schmidt’s account, they then began unloading their weapons on the massive creature in unison, which sent it fleeing into the muddy water. Schmidt would say of what happened next:

“As quickly as we could fire we pumped seven shots into it, and I believe all struck. They seemed to annoy the creature but not to work any injury. Suddenly it plunged forward in a silly clumsy fashion. The Indians nearly upset the dugout getting away, and both Pfleng and I missed the sight as it entered the water. I was very anxious to see its hind legs, if it had any. I looked again only in time to see the last of it leave the land -a heavy blunt tail with rough horny lumps. The head was visible still, though the body was hidden by the splash. From the instant's opportunity I should say that the creature was 35 feet long, with at least 12 of this devoted to head and neck.

In three seconds there was nothing to be seen except the waves of the muddy water, the movements of the waterside growth and a monkey with its hind parts useless hauling himself up a tree top. As the Indians paddled frantically away I put a bullet through the poor thing to let it out of its misery. We had not gone a hundred yards before Pfleng called to me and pointed to the right. Above the water an eighth of a mile away appeared the head and neck of the monster. It must have dived and gone right under us. After a few seconds' gaze it began to swim toward us, and as our bullets seemed to have no effect we took flight in earnest. Losing sight of it behind an island, we did not pick it up again and were just as well pleased.”

It is certainly a very spectacular account, made all the weirder as it appears within the pages of an otherwise rather nondescript, even dull account of the expedition that is all rather credible and ordinary for the most part. It has been suggested that perhaps this report was an addition slipped in later or that Schmidt just made up the story to liven things up, but there is no way to tell. It remains another lost historical account buried in a forgotten explorer’s notes, with no way of checking its veracity and forever to linger in the realm of speculation.

What was going on here? Another case of someone firing upon a mystery monster comes from 1921 when a Brazilian Indian named Alvaro Mesquita supposedly came across a dinosaur-like beast on the shore of a swampy lake between the Rio Purús and the Rio Juruá. He fired at it with his rifle and the creature disappeared into the jungle. He would later be shown pictures of various dinosaurs and claim that what he had seen resembled a Camptosaurus, a type of a genus of plant-eating, beaked ornithischian dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic period. The report is brief and lacks detail, so it is hard to know what to think. 

Although according to these reports they failed to slay the alleged savage beasts, there have been other instances when a dinosaur of some sort was supposedly killed. A very dramatic report from the 19th century was included in an 1883 issue of Scientific American, in an article titled “A Bolivian Saurian,” in which the Brazilian Minister at La Paz, Bolivia, claimed that a very odd beast had been shot and killed in a remote area of the Beni River. The article would say of this:

“The Brazilian Minister at La Paz, Bolivia, had remitted to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Rio photographs of drawings of an extraordinary saurian killed on the Beni after receiving thirty-six balls. By order of the President of Bolivia the dried body, which had been preserved in Asuncion, was sent to La Paz." The "monster" was reported to be twelve meters long (39 ft) from snout to point of the tail, which latter was flattened. It’s head resemblance the head of a dog and its legs were short, ending with formidable claws. The legs and abdomen sported a kind of scale armour, and all the back is protected by a still thicker and double cuirass, starting from behind the ears of the anterior head, and continuing to the tail. The neck is long, and the belly large and almost dragging on the ground.”

The bizarre report is somewhat plausible as it appeared in a mostly respectable publication rather than on just a slow news day, giving it a bit of weight. The question is, what was this creature and where did the carcass go? Or was it all a hoax? No one really knows. Other explorers would encounter similarly bizarre beasts in the years after. Less than a decade after Fawcett’s doomed expedition there was an account from 1931 by explorer Harald Westin, who claimed to have seen a 20-foot-long serpentine reptile like a snake but with stumpy legs along Brazil's remote Rio Marmore. Then in 1946, there was the account of explorer Leonard Clark, who was traveling up Brazil’s Rio Perene when he reportedly heard from the region’s natives of a type of large, long-necked animals in the area that fed on plants.

Such strange accounts have persisted up into more recent years as well. In 1975 a Swiss businessman visited the Amazon and became acquainted with a local guide by the name of Sebastian Bastos, who spoke of immense long-necked beasts similar in appearance to dinosaurs that were known by the natives and which lurked in deep parts of rivers. Bastos would claim that one of his canoes had actually been destroyed by one of these monsters. Between the years of 1977 and 1980, Silvano Lorenzoni claimed in a series of articles that there had been spotted “plesiosaur-like things” in a lake atop a high plateau called Auyantepuy, in southeastern Venezuela. He also said that such plateaus had produced other reports of enormous reptilian creatures like something out of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but his claims are all rather vague. Also as recently as 1995 was an account given by a group of geology students who came across two huge 30-foot-long creatures with long necks wading in the Paraguaçu River in the Sincora Mountain range of eastern Brazil.

More recently in the 1990s, there are a few cases of supposed living dinosaurs in the Amazon. In early 1995, a party of geology students in eastern Brazil's Sincora Mountains allegedly glimpsed two massive creatures 30 feet long and with 8' necks, fearsome heads, and 8' tails, bathing in the shallows of the Paraguaçu River, on the Orobo Plain. There were also numerous reports from the 90s a pack of small, Allosaurus-like animals prowling a tributary of the Amazon that were described as being only a few feet in height, bipedal, and very vicious. 

With its vast expanses of little-explored jungles and isolated remote areas, the Amazon seems like just the sort of place where one might expect to find living dinosaurs and other assorted mystery beasts. Yet, among all of these reports there is very little evidence at all other than witness testimony and the nature of such sightings is so sporadic that we are left to wonder just what these people saw, if they indeed really saw anything at all. We are left to merely speculate on these scattered accounts and wonder if the lost worlds of South America hold beasts from another age, still looming over the landscape as they did millions of years ago. Only the trees and the jungle creatures that crawl, skitter, and squirm through the trees and swamps know for sure, whispering among themselves the answers we seek.