Out of The Dreamtime - Search for Australias Unknown Animals  Book Cover

Megalania SKeleton
Megalania Reconstruction © Rex Gilroy 2006

Reconstructed [cast] skeleton of a Megalania prisca Owen, on display at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane.

Photo Rex Gilroy 2006.

Read Excerpts From
Out Of The Dreamtime - The Search for Australasia’s Unknown Animals
by Rex & Heather Gilroy Copyright
© Rex Gilroy 2006

Preface
Monsters in Our Own Backyard

Out Of The Dreamtime
The Search for Australasia’s Unknown Animals
Book Contents
Dedications
Special Dedication
Dr Bernard Heuvelmans
Acknowledgements
Preface
Monsters in Our Own Backyard
Foreword
What is Cryptozoology?
Introduction
A Night in the Australian Bush
PART ONE
Setting the Scene. “In the Beginning”
CHAPTER ONE
Enigma of the Bunyip
CHAPTER TWO
Dawn Life of the Dreamtime
PART TWO
Enigmas Of The Insect/Spider World
CHAPTER THREE
Insect Mysteries
CHAPTER FOUR
Migration Mysteries
CHAPTER FIVE
Giant Spiders of the Australian Bush
PART THREE
Lions and Tigers of the Australian Bush
CHAPTER SIX
The Tasmanian Tiger – Lost
and Found
CHAPTER SEVEN
What is the Queensland Tiger
CHAPTER EIGHT
Australia’s Mysterious Marsupial Lions – Meat-Eaters of the Miocene
CHAPTER NINE
The “Australian Panther” – Big Cats of the Bushland
CHAPTER TEN
Living Mega-Marsupials?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Devil dogs of the Dreamtime
PART FOUR
Fishy Tales
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mega-Sharks of Oceania
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Coelacanth Found on an Australian Beach and other “Fishy Mysteries”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Menagerie of Monsters
PART FIVE
Reptilian Nightmares
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Giant Sea Serpents of Australasia
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Giant Snakes -Nightmares of the Bushland
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Crocodiles-Dinosaurian Man-eaters of Australia’s North
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Australia’s Lizard Giants
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Megalania – Mega Monitors of the Australian Bush
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Secret of Dinosaur Swamplands
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Beware of Burrunjors in the Bush
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Pterosaurs Over Australasia
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
New Guinea’s Fabulous Neodinosaurs
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Plesiosaur Mysteries of the South Pacific
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Australian Plesiosaur Mysteries
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Longneck Tales of the Georges River
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Search for the Hawkesbury River Monster
PART SIX
Feathered Giants
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Living Feathered Fossils
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Moas Survive in New Zealand?
The Search for the Scrub Moa
CHAPTER THIRTY
Giant Eagles of the Blue Mountains
PART SEVEN
Manbeasts of Australasia and Oceania
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Australia’s Unknown Miocene Primates
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Dawn Hominids of the Dreamtime
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Homo erectus and the Giants
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Gargantuan Hominids of the Dreamtime
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
The Hairy Man Dreamtime Australia
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Historical Accounts of the Yowie
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Hairy Men of the Blue Mountains
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
The Yowie-Hominid Mysteries of
the Australian Outback
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
In Search of Little Hairy Men
CHAPTER FORTY
In Search of the Rexbeast
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Hairy Devil-Men of Melanesia
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Moehau and Matau – Manbeasts
of Aotearoa

PART EIGHT
Conclussion

CHAPTER FORTY THREE
The Search for Mysterious Animals – Advice for Future Cryptozoologists.

Appendix
Save Our Butterfly Species!

Notes
Bibliography


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This book is about Impossible as well as Possible animals. ‘Impossible’ because they are species not supposed to exist, and ‘Possible’ because they are long-extinct species which may still be alive.
Sightings of such animals occur regularly throughout the world, in remote mountain ranges and forests, as well as in lakes, rivers and the ocean depths.

I doubt that there are few lay people who have never heard of such mysterious creatures as Scotland’s notorious “Loch Ness Monster”; the Yeti [“Dweller among the rocks”] of the Himalayas; or ‘Bigfoot’ of North America. Or, the giant snakes of the Amazon jungles; and the Mokele-mbembe of the Congo, giant dinosaur-like reptiles of pigmy folklore and now the subject of serious scientific attention.

These are but a few examples of the more famous ‘unknown’ animal species believed to exist throughout the world. There have already been a great many books and magazine articles written, about these and other strange creatures reported seen in remote corners of our planet. Yet these publications, with few exceptions, have left out one vast region of the world. It is a region which has for too long been overlooked and ignored by researchers of zoological mysteries; Australia, and its neighbouring islands.

rex & Heather Gilroy

Heather & Rex Gilroy.
Photo © Greg

And yet, this region holds a great many zoological mysteries. For, while everyone has heard about the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, Bigfoot etc - how many overseas readers have heard of the Yowie? Much has been written about England’s mystery panthers and pumas [actually escaped illegal pets] but few overseas publications have given much attention to the giant “Australian Panther”.

Scotland’s ‘Nessie’ is known worldwide, but how many Australians have heard about their own ‘Nessie’, the Moolyewonk, or Mirreeula of Aboriginal folklore? Giant sea and lake-dwelling creatures are to be found in the Australasian region that could quite easily rival ‘Nessie’ in scientific interest once they became better known.

Overseas mysteries such as the Yeti, ‘Nessie’, Mokele-mbembe etc, are interesting, but I do not feel they are as fascinating as the many animal mysteries to be investigated within the Australasian region. They are all here, the ‘extinct’ Tasmanian Tiger, the “Australian Panther”, Giant Australian Monitor Lizard, giant snakes, giant sharks, giant eagles and more. They are the “Monsters in our own back yard”, our very own Australasian ‘unknown animals’ begging to be recognised and investigated.

There remains only the equally enigmatic ‘Bunyip’, that most fabulous of all ancient Australian Aboriginal animal traditions to be mentioned. And he deserves pride of place, for in the course of this thesis he holds an important place in the unravelling of the many mysteries to be revealed in this book.

No part of this publication including all photographs and illustrations may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review, written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

PART ONE

SETTING THE SCENE
“IN THE BEGINNING”.
__________

CHAPTER ONE
Enigma of the Bunyip

Out of the mists of the Dreamtime they come - the monsters of Australian Aboriginal folklore. Half-man, half-animal. Giant plodding beasts; horned and hairy. Reptilian-skinned creatures more akin to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World than anything constructed by scientific knowledge. Water-dwelling, forest-dwelling creatures. Giant reptiles; giant birds; giant kangaroos - and giant men - a whole menagerie of seemingly improbable creatures which were both feared and respected by the early Aborigines, who fervently believed in their existence.

Yet of all these creatures, none was more fearful than that most fabulous of all Australian ‘monsters’, known collectively among the Aborigines as the Bunyip; a creature of many terrifying forms certain to put the chill of death up the spine of any Aboriginal whenever its name was mentioned. The name ‘Bunyip’ means ‘devil’ or ‘spirit’ to the Aborigines, but the Bunyip traditions seem to have been confined to the south-eastern region of Australia, where the creature took a variety of forms, both real and mythical. It was undoubtedly the mythical aspect of the Bunyip traditions that was primarily responsible for European scepticism about the creature, from the early days of settlement of the 19th century.

Certainly there were some truly unbelievable bunyips; sometimes monstrous man-eating, night-dwelling beasts, all of which were invented by the elders to keep children in check and ensure they did not stray too far from camp alone. And yet, beyond the campfire, out there in the forests and water courses, there did in fact lurk some truly fabulous, although very real ‘bunyips’; some of monstrous proportions. To gain a better understanding of the problem, it is my intention to deal with each of these ‘real’ bunyips in detail.

Perhaps the best-known bunyips were those that inhabited swamps, billabongs and watercourses. Of these aquatic bunyips, the most famous appears to have been a great lumbering, wombat-like beast which the Aborigines claimed inhabited the forests, wading about the swamps and billabongs where it fed upon vegetable food. Despite the fact that the existence of the Bunyip was first learnt from the Aborigines by our early pioneers, the Bunyip did not at first gain the attention of the press of that period. All this changed after 1821.

It was in November of that year that the explorer, Hamilton Hume, while searching the shores of Lake Bathurst near Goulburn, in southern NSW sighted what he later described as “something like a Hippopotamus or Manatee” wading about in the lake. Upon his return to Sydney he gave an account of his sighting at a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Australia. The Society subsequently offered Hume a reward of 300 Pounds for the capture of the creature, or else its head, skin or bones. Although Hume led another expedition to the lake, he failed to find any further trace of his mysterious animal.

Aborigines had reported seeing similar creatures in other lakes and swamps all over Australia, as we will learn in a later chapter. The Question is: had Hume seen an animal which at that time had not yet been identified by science? In those days nothing was known about Australia’s fossil past, and it was not until 1838 that a few teeth and a jaw fragment of a large marsupial were found. It took until 1893 for the first foot bones of the same animal to be unearthed. From these scant remains the creature was named Diprotodon optatum, meaning “the ‘southern’ animal with two forward-projecting teeth”.

Diprotodon was the first fossil mammal identified from Australia. Later, in 1953, Professor Ruben A. Stirton of the University of California, discovered a Diprotodon ‘graveyard’ in the dry north-west of South Australia, which contained up to 1,000 skeletons of these marsupials in an excellent state of preservation. At least a further 100 complete skeletons of the Diprotodon have been unearthed from the salt Lake of Callabonna, South Australia. These fossils show the Diprotodon stood up to 3m in length by 2m in height at the shoulder. Their skulls are up to 90cm in length, making these animals larger than the rhinoceros. Could this have been the mystery animal described by Hume?

If indeed a Diprotodon, then Hume saw an animal which current scientific textbooks claim died out at least several thousand years ago, following the close of the last Ice-Age. A study of the Ice-Age and its effects upon the Australian environment and animal life of that period is pertinent to our investigation of the ‘believable’ Bunyip and the many other unknown animal species to be discussed in this book, and this will be done at some length anon. However, for reasons to be discussed later, the climate became warmer, ushering in the retreat of the southern Australian ice-sheet.

The interior dried up and the vast networks of lakes, swamps, rivers and forests gradually vanished, turning the landscape into a vast wasteland creating a drought that lasted several thousand years. As the means for their survival vanished, so the animal life would have vanished accordingly, which scientists argue, was hastened by the hunting activities of Stone-Age Man. Yet the moister eastern Australian mountain ranges, with their vast expanses of forests and well-watered valleys would have offered ideal protection from the severe conditions of the interior, and it is therefore no surprise to find that the majority of modern-day unknown animal sightings reports emanate from these ranges.

Aboriginal legends over a wide area of inland South Australia told of a large reptilian water-dwelling bunyip that used to devour unwary lubras and piccaninnies as they waded about the lakes and swamps that covered much of that region in the long ago ‘Dreamtime’. Early settlers scoffed at these tales, even though Aborigines pointed to an ancient rock engraving at Panaramittee in the Flinders Ranges, which they said described the Bunyip’s head. The carving is very detailed, showing the skin pattern of a crocodile’s head, including the eyes and nostrils. Since the 19th century scientists have unearthed fossil remains from that region which show that crocodiles were indeed living in the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre district in late Pleistocene times.

Besides Diprotodon-type bunyips that inhabited the Victorian lakes, Aborigines also spoke of another, more terrifying bunyip of reptilian appearance which they called Whowhie, and who wandered the land eating all who happened to cross his path. They spoke of Whowhie as being at least 9 metres in length and from 1.2 to 1.5 metres tall when standing on all fours, with a goanna-type head and big jaws from which it flashed a tongue of fire [a common description for the forked tongue of monitor lizards].

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