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

Above: Profile view of a male Stag Beetle, displaying its characteristic fearsome-looking horns. Specimen from the Rex Gilroy insect collection. Photo copyright © Rex Gilroy 2006.

Right: Rex Gilroy is used to ‘creepy-crawlies’ such as stick insects, which are quite harmless to humans! Photo copyright © Rex Gilroy 2006.

Rex Gilroy and Stick Insect On His Shoulder
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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Dedication

This book is affectionately dedicated to my loyal, supportive and dedicated wife, and Number One researcher and fieldworker, Heather. This book is also affectionately dedicated to my late father W.F. [Bill] Gilroy [1904-1996], whose tales of his native Scotland and the Loch Ness Monster, led me, from about the age of five [!] to my lifelong research of the natural sciences and the fields of Cryptozoology and relict hominology, which has resulted in this book.

PART TWO

ENIGMAS OF THE INSECT/SPIDER WORLD
__________

CHAPTER THREE
Insect Mysteries

Before advancing on to those larger than life forms with which Cryptozoologists are normally concerned, let us digress to the study of Entomology, which concerns itself with the fascinating world of insects, spiders and their kin. Why insects and spiders in a book on Cryptozoology, you might ask? Because the place that these creatures occupy in the world of living things is important, as most plants and animals are affected in some way by their presence.

Furthermore, no other class of animals is so intimately involved in the intricacies and complexities of the biological world as are insects and spiders. With the exception of ground-dwelling, cave-dwelling species, both these life forms are primarily terrestrial in habitat and found in just about every environment. My main reason for including these creatures in this book is to reveal information certain to surprise many readers, for as with larger animals still being discovered by scientists, not a year passes that as many as several thousand new species of insects and spiders are, it is estimated, being discovered and named worldwide, which means there are well over one million identified species in the world today!

They too therefore have their own “unknown animals” and they are not all small creatures by any means, for I am about to introduce to YOU giant butterflies and moths, dragonflies and stick insects, and spiders that are the stuff of nightmares. Other mysteries of this hidden world will also be examined, which I have studied in the course of a lifetime of collecting and studying these fascinating creatures. The details of the early evolution of insects and spiders are shrouded in the mists of the beginning of life on Earth.

This is partly due to the fact that the earliest insects [which were wingless] and spiders were small, fragile creatures that disintegrated long before they could become fossilised; and in part to the almost total absence of rocks that contain fossils of the land animals from the period when insects and spiders were beginning to appear. Scientists believe that it is quite probable that some of the early members of the Trilobites, marine arthropods found in Cambrian period rocks at least 570 million years ago, were allied to the ancestral insects.

The Trilobites survived for some 140 million years before dying out, but the span of their existence largely covers the long, blank period of insect evolution. Then in the Devonian period, around 400 million years ago, spiders and wingless insects, together with millipedes and mites made their first appearance. It is in rocks of the Carboniferous period, which followed the Devonian around 350 million years ago, that we find the first winged insects, and from a study of these scientists have identified a number of well-differentiated orders.

There are many highly varied insect fossils from the Permian period, which succeeded the Carboniferous around 250 million years ago. They occur abundantly worldwide, and include remains of some truly fantastic species that reached sizes unthought of in modern insects. As early as the Carboniferous period the precursors of our modern dragonflies had evolved, often of gigantic sizes of at least a metre in wingspan, perhaps more. Stick insects were not much different in gigantic size by today’s standards.

There are some species of large butterflies and moths that today give us a hint of possible larger ancestors of the past. Extending far back to the appearance of the first winged insects, when butterflies and moths diverged from a common ancestor. Of these, the Queen Victoria Birdwing, Ornithoptera victoriae [female] of the Solomon Islands, and the female Atlas Moth of far north Queensland, measuring up to 30cm in wingspan, are the largest known butterfly and moth species on Earth [the males of both species are smaller in size.

A word about Birdwings. These often indescribably beautiful butterflies, with their metallic greens, blues, yellows and gold wing markings rival the metallic blue [often large] Morpho butterflies of South America. Their reflecting colours are the result of the minute scales covering the wings, which in this case produce a waxy sheen, reflecting the sunlight. The wing scales of non-reflecting butterfly and moth species often includes many strikingly beautiful species in their own right, even though the scales making up the wing patterns of these species lack the waxy sheen.

The Birdwings form the three basic genuses within the family Papilionidae; these being Trogonoptera, Troides and Ornithoptera. Trogonoptera and Troides species occur throughout the India and island south-east Asia region, the Troides extending to New Guinea where the genus Ornithoptera covers Melanesia and Queensland with one species, the smallest, the Richmond Birdwing, being found in the Tweed Heads-Clarence River district of far north-eastern NSW.

All the Queensland-NSW Ornithoptera are known for their metallic green winged males, the females [which are larger than the males] having non-reflecting wings with colour markings of greys, blacks and whites. The Birdwing Butterflies are practically all Aristolochia feeders in the larval stage while a few species also feed upon allied plants.

The much larger Cairns Birdwing, Ornithoptera priamus euphorion has a range extending from Mackay to Cooktown, beyond which the Cape York Birdwing, Ornithoptera priamus pronomus extends to Thursday Island. In recent times the race O.P. macalpinei has been identified from the Claudia River to the McIlwraith Range, Silver Plains and Coen-Cape York Peninsula region.

All are large, metallic green-winged male and larger grey/black/whitish female creatures. For example, the Cairns Birdwing male’s wing expanse is up to 12.5cm, that of the female being 15cm. The New Guinea Birdwing, Ornithoptera priamus poseidon is even larger, particularly in the female, while in the Solomons, the equally large Ornithoptera urvillianus, whose male possesses metallic dark blue, rather than green markings, dominates the jungle glades.

I mention these beautiful insects because of their great sizes in relation to the more generally smaller species around them. It seems incredible that other Ornithopterids of this size could escape scientific discovery, even on isolated Melanesian islands or in the well-trodden parts of the New Guinea continent where Entomologists have been collecting and identifying insects since the 19th century, yet this could still very well be the case. It is not at all beyond the realms of possibility that some hitherto unknown, perhaps even larger species could await discovery, hidden is some restricted, out-of-the-way corner of any one of the Melanesian islands, or high up in the vast mountainous interior of the New Guinea continent, still largely inaccessible to researchers.

The discovery of a hitherto unknown insect [or spider] species can be just as important and exciting a discovery to an Entomologist as a new reptile or mammal species is to a zoologist. All are part of the whole, and of equal importance to our knowledge of the countless life forms with which we share this planet.

Consider the emotions of Alfred Russell Wallace, when on the island of Batjan in 1859, he
discovered the New Guinea Birdwing butterfly:


“The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable and none
but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced
when I at length captured it.
On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart
began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much
more like fainting than I had done when in apprehension of immediate
death. I had a headache for the rest of the day, so great was the
excitement produced by what will appear to most people
a very inadequate cause.”

Cryptozoologists who overlook the Arthropoda - the Order of creatures to which insects, spiders and their kin belong - miss much. As an Entomologist myself, and having spent most of my life collecting and researching these creatures, in the course of which I have formed a collection gathered from throughout Australia and worldwide, numbering many thousands of specimens, I am able to draw upon my own personal field experience and knowledge, in the inclusion of these all-too-often overlooked “unknown animals” in this book.

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