Igor Akimushkin - traces of unseen animals. Igor Akimushkin: Traces of Unseen Beasts Akimushkin Traces of Unseen Beasts

Career and finance 07.09.2019

Career and finance

Akimushkin I

Traces of unseen beasts

Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin

TRACES OF UNSEEN BEASTS

Giant birds lived on earth - growth more elephant! A water monster devouring hippos lives in the forests of the Congo... Zoologists of one expedition in Cameroon were attacked by a pterodactyl... The Saita Clara liner collided with a sea serpent in the ocean, and the Norwegian ship Brunsvik was attacked by a giant squid...

What is true here, and what is fiction?

If you are interested in zoological adventures and hidden secrets of the jungle, you will read the book "Traces of Strange Beasts" with interest. You will learn about dragons from Komodo, and about the terrible nunda (a cat as tall as a donkey!), about the fabulous phoenix bird and about how many new animals and birds have been discovered by scientists over the past half century, and what other unknown creatures are hiding in the wilds of the forest and sea depths our planet.

INTRODUCTION

In September 1957, Japanese zoologists examined a sea animal caught by whalers. The beast turned out to be a belt-toothed whale, unknown to science kind. Keith!

This find is symbolic. In the second half of the 20th century, when humanity, having created ultra-high-speed rockets, boldly rushed into the outer world, at home, on Earth, such oversights of "unnoticed" whales are suddenly discovered! As you can see, the animal world of our planet has not yet been explored as well as it is usually said. Over the past half century, the press has repeatedly informed readers about unknown birds, animals or fish found anywhere in the wilds of the rainforest or in the depths of the ocean. And how many major zoological discoveries have not been noticed by the general public at all! Only specialists know about them.

How to explain that nature still presents naturalists with unexpected surprises?

The fact is that there are many hard-to-reach places on Earth that are still almost not amenable to examination. One of them is the ocean. Almost three-quarters of the earth's surface is covered by the sea. About four million square kilometers of the seabed are buried in monstrous depths of over six thousand meters. Their gloomy confines, man-made fishing gear, have only been invaded a few dozen times. Do the math: approximately one deep-sea trawling per 40,000 square kilometers of seabed!

The incommensurability of these figures convinces us better than any words that the ocean depths have not actually been explored to this day.

It is not surprising, therefore, that literally every trawl lowered to a considerable depth necessarily brings animals unknown to specialists from the bottom of the sea.

In 1952, American ichthyologists were trawling in the Gulf of California and even here they caught at least 50 varieties of fish unknown to them. But a truly endless land of the most unexpected discoveries was discovered by Soviet scientists who penetrated the ocean depths with the help of the latest equipment of the Vityaz research vessel. Wherever they had to work: both in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans, they discovered unknown fish, octopuses, molluscs, and worms.

Even on the Kuril Islands, where more than one expedition had visited before, Soviet scientists (S.K. Klumov and his collaborators) made unexpected discoveries. Found on Kunashir Island poisonous snakes. Before that, it was believed that only non-poisonous snakes were found in the Kuriles. Here, previously unknown newts, tree frogs and land leeches of a very special kind were found.

Zoologists "Vityaz" extracted from the bottom of the sea even more unusual creatures - fantastic gonophores. These are animals that nature "forgot" to endow with the organs most necessary for maintaining life - the mouth and intestines!

How do they eat?

In the most incredible way - with the help of tentacles. The tentacles both catch food and digest it, and absorb the nutritious juices, which diverge through the blood vessels to all parts of the body.

Back in 1914, the first representative of the pogonophora was caught off the coast of Indonesia. The second was found in our Sea of Okhotsk 29 years ago. But for a long time scientists could not find a suitable place for these strange creatures in the scientific classification of wildlife.

Only the studies of the "Vityaz" helped to collect quite extensive collections of the most unique creatures. Having studied these collections, zoologists came to the conclusion that pogonophores do not belong to any of the nine largest zoological groups - the so-called types * of the animal kingdom. Pogonophores constituted a special, tenth, type. Their structure is so unusual.

*Most zoologists divide the animal world into the following types:

1) protozoa (amoebae, ciliates and other unicellular);

3) coelenterates (jellyfish, corals);

5) worm-like (bryozoans, brachiopods);

6) mollusks (snails, shells, octopuses);

7) arthropods (crayfish, spiders, insects);

8) echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins) and

9) chordates (ascidia, fish, frogs, snakes, birds, mammals).

Pogonophores are now found in all oceans, even in the Arctic. They are distributed throughout the world and, apparently, are not at all rare at the bottom of the sea. A. V. Ivanov, a Leningrad zoologist, to whom science is indebted for the most thorough studies of pogonophora, writes that these animals are extremely abundant in many of their habitats. "Trawls bring here a lot of populated and empty pogonophore tubes, clogging the trawl bag and even hanging on the frame and cable."

Why, until very recently, so many creatures did not fall into the hands of marine explorers? And it is not difficult to catch them: pogonophores lead a motionless lifestyle.

Yes, because they did not come across that scientists are only just beginning to really penetrate into the depths of the oceans and seas. Of course, many of the most amazing discoveries await us here. So far, only a small part of marine animals has been studied. The largest and most mobile inhabitants of the depths cannot be caught at all with the usual tools of fishing and expeditionary ships. Trawls, nets, nets are simply not suitable for this. That's why some researchers say: "In the ocean, everything is possible!"

There is another place on earth where promising opportunities open up before the naturalist from the very first steps. But to penetrate its secrets is no easier than to penetrate the ocean abyss. Not depths and not even transcendental heights protect this place, but completely different obstacles. There are a great many of them, and they are all dangerous.

In September 1957, Japanese zoologists examined a sea animal caught by whalers. The beast turned out to be a belt-toothed whale of a species unknown to science. Keith!

This find is symbolic. In the second half of the 20th century, when humanity, having created ultra-high-speed rockets, boldly rushed into the outer world, at home, on Earth, such oversights were suddenly discovered - "unnoticed" whales! As you can see, the animal world of our planet has not yet been studied as well as it is usually said. Over the past half century, the press has repeatedly informed readers about unknown birds, animals or fish found anywhere in the wilds of the rainforest or in the depths of the ocean. And how many major zoological discoveries have not been noticed by the general public at all! Only specialists know about them.

How to explain that nature still presents naturalists with unexpected surprises?

The fact is that there are many hard-to-reach, still almost impossible to explore places on Earth. One of them is the ocean. Almost three-quarters of the earth's surface is covered by the sea. About four million square kilometers of the seabed are buried in monstrous depths of over six thousand meters. Their gloomy confines have been invaded by man-made fishing gear only a few dozen times. Do the math: approximately one deep-sea trawling per 40,000 square kilometers of seabed!

The incommensurability of these figures convinces us better than any words that the ocean depths have not actually been explored to this day.

It is not surprising, therefore, that literally every trawl lowered to a considerable depth necessarily brings animals unknown to specialists from the bottom of the sea.

In 1952, American ichthyologists were trawling in the Gulf of California and even here they caught at least 50 varieties of fish unknown to them. But a truly endless land of the most unexpected finds was discovered by Soviet scientists who penetrated the ocean depths with the help of the latest equipment of the Vityaz research vessel. Wherever they had to work: both in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans, they discovered unknown fish, octopuses, molluscs, and worms.

Even on the Kuril Islands, where more than one expedition had visited before, Soviet scientists (S.K. Klumov and his collaborators) made unexpected discoveries. On the island of Kunashir found poisonous snakes. Before that, it was believed that only non-poisonous snakes were found in the Kuriles. Here, previously unknown newts, tree frogs and land leeches of a very special kind were found.

Zoologists of the Vityaz have recovered even more unusual creatures from the bottom of the sea - fantastic pogonophores. These are animals that nature “forgot” to endow with the organs most necessary for maintaining life - the mouth and intestines!

How do they eat?

Back in 1914, the first representative of the pogonophora was caught off the coast of Indonesia. The second was found in our Sea of Okhotsk 29 years ago. But for a long time, scientists could not find a suitable place for these strange creatures in the scientific classification of wildlife.

Only the studies of the Vityaz helped to collect quite extensive collections of the most unique creatures. Having studied these collections, zoologists came to the conclusion that pogonophores do not belong to any of the nine largest zoological groups - the so-called types of the animal kingdom. Pogonophores constituted a special, tenth, type. Their structure is so unusual.

Pogonophores are now found in all oceans, even in the Arctic. They are distributed throughout the world and, apparently, are not at all rare at the bottom of the sea. A. V. Ivanov, a Leningrad zoologist, to whom science is indebted for the most thorough studies of pogonophora, writes that these animals are extremely abundant in many of their habitats. “Trawls bring here a lot of populated and empty pogonophore tubes, clogging the trawl bag and even hanging on the frame and cable.”

Why, until very recently, so many creatures did not fall into the hands of marine explorers? And it is not difficult to catch them: pogonophores lead a motionless lifestyle.

It's about the tropical forest. Harsh Antarctica is famous for its inaccessibility. But in its snows, although with incredible difficulties, you can move around in specially equipped vehicles. In the rainforest, any all-terrain vehicle will get stuck at the very start.

A person here can reach the finish line using only the means of transportation given to him by nature. What trials lie ahead for him, we will learn from the next chapter.

Black nightmares and "white spots" of the jungle

The horrors of the "green hell"

“Someone said,” writes Arkady Fidler, “that for a person entering the jungle, there are only two pleasant days. The first day when, blinded by their bewitching magnificence and power, he thinks he has gone to heaven, and the last day when, close to madness, he flees from this green hell.

Why is the tropical forest so terrible?

Imagine a boundless ocean giant trees. They grow so closely that their tops are intertwined in an impenetrable vault.

Fanciful creepers and rattans entangled the already impenetrable jungle with a dense net. Tree trunks, knotty tentacles of vines are overgrown with mosses, giant lichens. Moss is everywhere - both on rotting trunks, and on tiny, with a "handkerchief", patches of land not occupied by trees, and in muddy streams and pits filled with thick black slurry.

Not a tuft of grass anywhere. Everywhere mosses, mushrooms, ferns, creepers, orchids and trees; the trees are monstrous giants and frail dwarfs. Everyone is crowding in the struggle for light, climbing on top of each other, intertwining, twisting hopelessly, forming an impassable thicket.

A gray-green twilight dominates around. There is no sunrise, no sunset, no sun itself in the sky.

No wind. Not even the slightest breath. The air is motionless, as in a greenhouse, saturated with vapors of water and carbon dioxide. It smells like rot. The dampness is incredible - up to 90-100% relative humidity!

And the heat! The thermometer during the day almost always shows 40 ° C above zero. Hot, stuffy, damp! Even the trees, their hard, like wax, leaves were covered with "perspiration" - large drops of thickened moisture vapor. Drops run one on top of the other, fall from leaf to leaf in a never-ceasing rain, drops ring everywhere in the forest.

Only by the river you can breathe freely. Having made a breach in the monstrous heap of living and dead trees, the river brings coolness and freshness to the musty abyss of wilds.

That is why all the expeditions that penetrated the wilderness of the rainforest went mainly along the rivers and along their banks. Even the Bambuti Pygmies, who, by all accounts, are better adapted to life in the wilds of the forest than other peoples, avoid going far from the river valleys, these "highways" of the rainforest. Wandering, so-called forest Indians, like the Campa tribe, also do not go far into the terrible "selva". In their movements through the forests of the Amazon, they generally follow the rivers and forest channels that serve as landmarks for them.

Introduction

In September 1957, Japanese zoologists examined a sea animal caught by whalers. The beast turned out to be a belt-toothed whale of a species unknown to science. Keith!

This find is symbolic. In the second half of the 20th century, when mankind, having created ultra-high-speed rockets, boldly rushed into the outer world, at home, on Earth, such oversights were suddenly discovered - "unnoticed" whales! As you can see, the animal world of our planet has not yet been studied as well as it is usually said. Over the past half century, the press has repeatedly informed readers about unknown birds, animals or fish found anywhere in the wilds of the rainforest or in the depths of the ocean. And how many major zoological discoveries have not been noticed by the general public at all! Only specialists know about them.

How to explain that nature still presents naturalists with unexpected surprises?

The incommensurability of these figures convinces us better than any words that the ocean depths have not actually been explored to this day.

It is not surprising, therefore, that literally every trawl lowered to a considerable depth necessarily brings animals unknown to specialists from the bottom of the sea.

In 1952, American ichthyologists were trawling in the Gulf of California and even here they caught at least 50 varieties of fish unknown to them. But a truly endless land of the most unexpected finds was discovered by Soviet scientists who penetrated the ocean depths with the help of the latest equipment of the Vityaz research vessel. Wherever they had to work: both in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans, they discovered unknown fish, octopuses, molluscs, and worms.

The zoologists of the Vityaz have recovered even more unusual creatures from the bottom of the sea - fantastic pogonophores. These are animals that nature “forgot” to endow with the organs most necessary for maintaining life - the mouth and intestines!

How do they eat?

Pogonophores are now found in all oceans, even in the Arctic. They are distributed throughout the world and, apparently, are not at all rare at the bottom of the sea. A. V. Ivanov, a Leningrad zoologist, to whom science is indebted for the most thorough studies of pogonophora, writes that these animals are extremely abundant in many of their habitats. “Trawls bring here a lot of populated and empty pogonophore tubes, clogging the trawl bag and even hanging on the frame and cable.”

Why, until very recently, so many creatures did not fall into the hands of marine explorers? And it is not difficult to catch them: pogonophores lead a motionless lifestyle.

A person here can reach the finish line using only the means of transportation given to him by nature. What trials lie ahead for him, we will learn from the next chapter.

Black nightmares and "white spots" of the jungle

The horrors of the "green hell"

Why is the tropical forest so terrible?

Imagine a vast ocean of giant trees. They grow so closely that their tops are intertwined in an impenetrable vault.

A gray-green twilight dominates around. There is no sunrise, no sunset, no sun itself in the sky.

Only by the river you can breathe freely. Having made a breach in the monstrous heap of living and dead trees, the river brings coolness and freshness to the musty abyss of wilds.

In the most remote corners of the rainforest, no human foot has yet set foot.

And these "corners" are not so small. For three thousand kilometers inland, from Guinea to the peaks of Rwenzori, the tropical forests of Africa stretch in a continuous array. Their average width is about a thousand kilometers. The length of the Amazonian forests is even more significant - over three thousand kilometers from east to west and two thousand kilometers from north to south - seven million square kilometers, two thirds of Europe! What about the forests of Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea? About 14 million square kilometers of land on our planet are occupied by impenetrable forest jungles, gloomy, stuffy, damp, in the green dusk of which "madness and horror lurk."

O Selva, wife of silence, "Mother of loneliness and mists"!

“What evil fate imprisoned me in your green prison? The tent of your foliage, like a huge vault, is forever above my head... Let me go, O eelva, from your disease-causing twilight, poisoned by the breath of creatures that agonize in the hopelessness of your greatness. You seem like a huge cemetery, where you yourself turn into decay and are reborn again ...

Where is the poetry of secluded groves, where are butterflies like transparent flowers, magical birds, melodious streams? The pitiful imagination of poets who know only domestic loneliness.

No nightingales in love, no Versailles parks, no sentimental panoramas! Here is the monotonous wheezing of toads, like the wheezing of those suffering from dropsy, the wilderness of unsociable hills, rotten backwaters on forest rivers. Here carnivorous plants litter the ground with dead bees; disgusting flowers shrink in sensual trembling, and their sweet smell intoxicates them like a witch's potion; the fluff of the insidious creeper blinds animals, the pringamosa burns the skin, the kuruhu fruit looks like a rainbow ball on the outside, but inside it is like caustic ash; wild grapes cause diarrhea, and nuts - bitterness itself ...

Selva, virginal and bloodthirsty-cruel, makes a person obsessive with the thought of imminent danger ... The senses confuse the mind: the eye touches, the back sees, the nose recognizes the road, the legs calculate, and the blood screams loudly: “Run, run!”

I do not know a more expressive description of the depressing impression that a virgin forest makes on a person! The author of this passage, Colombian Jose Rivera, knew well the "bloodthirsty, cruel selva." Participating in the work of the mixed border commission to resolve the dispute between Colombia and Venezuela, he spent a lot of time in the primeval forest of the Amazonian lowland and experienced all its horrors.

The contrast between this gloomy description of the rainforest and the delight in front of its beauties, which one often encounters in the pages of adventure literature, is striking. Frankly, we are more accustomed to enthusiastic stories about the nature of the tropics. Imagining a tropical forest, we usually recall pictures of the fabulous grandeur of virgin nature: a bizarre interweaving of vines, huge and bright flowers, sparkling like gems, butterflies and hummingbirds, painted like Christmas decorations, parrots and kingfishers. Everywhere the bright sun, wonderful colors, animation and sonorous trills. Beauty is enchanting!

That's how it is: in everything there is an abyss of beauty, but one should neither lie nor sit on this earth full of life. You can only keep moving.

“Try,” writes African researcher Stanley, “put your hand on a tree or stretch out on the ground, sit down on a broken bough and you will comprehend what power of activity, what energetic malice and what destructive greed surrounds you. Open a notebook - immediately a dozen butterflies land on the page, a bee spins over your hand, other bees strive to sting you in the very eye, a wasp buzzes in front of your ear, a huge horsefly scurries in front of your nose, and a whole flock of ants crawls to your feet: beware! The vanguards have already climbed to their feet, they are quickly climbing up, just in case they will launch their sharp jaws into your back of the head ... Oh, woe, woe!

Among other "troubles" this researcher mentions the pharaoh's louse, or, in the local language, the jigger. She lays her eggs under her big toenail. Its larvae spread throughout the body, "turning it into a cluster of purulent scabs."

A small bug also gets under the skin and pricks, just like a needle. Everywhere there are large and small ticks and land leeches that suck the blood of poor travelers, and there is "already little left of it." Countless wasps sting in such a way that they drive a person to a frenzy, and if they pounce with the whole flock, then to death. The tiger snail falls from the branches and leaves a "poisonous trace of its presence on the skin of your body, so that you writhe in pain and scream with a good obscenity." Red ants, attacking the camp at night, do not let anyone sleep. From the bites of black ants "you experience the torments of hell." Ants are everywhere! They crawl under clothes, fall into food. Swallow half a dozen of them - and "the mucous membranes of the stomach will be ulcerated."

Place your ear against the trunk of a fallen tree or an old stump. Do you hear the rumble and chirping inside?

They are busy, buzzing, eating each other countless insects and, of course, ants, ants of different breeds and sizes. The ants that live in this "realm of horrors" not only cause untold suffering with their bites. On the soil, strewn with the bodies of rotting trees and mosses, among the noxious fumes of the Amazonian swamps, millions of hordes of etsitons roam, locally called “tambocha”. As signals of fierce danger, the ominous cries of anteaters sound in the selva, warning all living things about the approach of the "black death". Large and small predators, insects, forest pigs, reptiles, people - all flee in panic in front of the marching columns of aetons. Many researchers have written about these voracious creatures. But the best description belongs again to José Rivera:

“His cry was more terrible than the cry that announced the beginning of the war:

Ants! Ants!

Ants! This meant that people should immediately stop working, abandon their homes, make their way to retreat by fire, seek shelter anywhere. It was an invasion of the bloodthirsty Tambocha ants. They devastate vast spaces, advancing with a noise reminiscent of the roar of a fire. Similar to wingless wasps with a red head and a thin body, they terrify with their numbers and their voracity. A thick, stinking wave seeps into every hole, into every crack, into every hollow, into foliage, into nests and hives, devouring pigeons, rats, reptiles, putting people and animals to flight ...

After a few moments, the forest was filled with a dull noise, like the roar of water breaking through a dam.

My God! Ants!

Then one thought took hold of everyone: to be saved. They preferred leeches to ants and took refuge in a small pool, plunging into it up to the neck.

They saw how the first avalanche passed. Like the far-flung ashes of a fire, hordes of cockroaches and beetles plopped into the swamp, and its banks were covered with spiders and snakes, and people disturbed the rotten water, scaring away insects and animals. The leaves seethed like a boiling cauldron. The roar of the invasion moved across the earth; the trees were dressed in a black cover, a movable shell that mercilessly rose higher and higher, breaking off leaves, emptying nests, climbing into hollows.

A river you can't swim in

In the "terrible selva" you can neither sit down nor lie down without precautions on the soft cushions of emerald mosses that cover the ground. It is impossible to swim here without great risk. Exhausting heat drives the inhabitants of the wilds under the shade of the river coolness. But fear of the dangers of the great river makes them hastily retreat, barely quenching their thirst with a few sips.

Numerous crocodiles and water boas are not yet the most dangerous creatures that live in the Amazon and its countless tributaries.

There are amazing fish that look like huge fat worms. These are electric eels. They hide at the bottom of quiet backwaters, and disturbed by a man or an animal, they throw lightning in all directions - one after another, electric discharges flash in the river. The voltage at the moment of discharge of the "electric fish" can reach 500 volts! A person, having received an electric crack, does not immediately come to his senses. And there were cases when people drowned in a shallow ford, running into an annoyed company of electric eels.

Live in the great Amazon and poisonous stingrays - typical, it would seem, marine inhabitants. In addition to the Amazon, they are no longer found in any rivers, but only in the seas.

The Araya stingray, as the Brazilians call it, has two serrated, poisonous stylets on its tail. It is very difficult to notice a stingray buried in the sand. Having received a blow with stilettos, a person jumps out of the water, spurred on by unbearable pain, like a fiery whip. And then he falls to the sand, bleeding and losing consciousness. It is said that wounds from poisoned araya stilettos are for the most part fatal.

But not the araya stingray - the most dangerous river animal of the Amazon. And not the sharks that swim here from the ocean and get to the very head of the great river.

The true nightmare of these places are two small fish: pirayah and candiru. Where they are found in large numbers, not a single person in the most unbearable heat will dare even knee-deep into the water.

Piraia is no larger than a large crucian, but her teeth are sharp as a razor. In an instant, a piraya can bite a stick as thick as a finger, and will snatch off a finger if a person inadvertently sticks it into the water near the "red" piraya.

Attacking in flocks, pirayas tear out pieces of meat from the body of a swimming animal and gnaw the animal to the bone in a few minutes. A wild pig, escaping from a jaguar, jumps into the river. She manages to swim only a dozen meters - then the waves carry her bloodied skeleton. Bloodthirsty fish, tearing off the remains of meat from the bones, push it with their blunt muzzles, and the lifeless skeleton of a beast that has just been full of strength dances a terrible dance of death over the water.

It happens that a strong bull, attacked in the river by pirayas, manages to jump ashore: it looks like a skinned carcass!

Another dangerous fish in the Amazon is the candiru, or carnero, which is tiny and looks like a worm. Its length is seven to fifteen centimeters, and its thickness is only a few millimeters. Candiru in the blink of an eye climbs into the natural openings on the body of a bathing person and bites into their walls from the inside. It is impossible to pull it out without surgical intervention.

Elgot Lange, who lived twelve adventurous months in the Amazonian forests, relates that it was the habit of the forest dwellers, for fear of the candiru, to bathe only in special pools. A boardwalk is built low above the water. A window is cut through in the middle. Through it, the bather scoops water with a nut shell and, after a thorough examination of it, pours himself over himself.

Nothing to say - a fun life!

It's dangerous to sleep during the day!

Many beginners in the selva paid dearly for deciding to take a nap here in the middle of the day for an hour or two. Fearing ants, travelers settled in hammocks. But, alas! they forgot about the green flies "varega". A sleeping person is a godsend for them: Varega flies lay their eggs in his nose and ears. After a few days, larvae emerge from the eggs and begin to eat a living person. They disfigure the face, gnawing deep passages under the skin in the facial muscles. Most often they eat out the palate, and if there are a lot of larvae, then they eat up most of the face, and the person dies a painful death.

The sleeper will be protected from disgusting flies - he will be attacked by leeches. Water and land, they live everywhere here - in every puddle, in moss, under stones, fallen leaves, on bushes and trees. Land leeches crawl surprisingly fast. Feeling the prey, they greedily pounce on passing people and animals, sticking around their legs, neck, and back of the head. They crawl into the pharynx, and even into the trachea, to the sleeping person. Having sucked blood, the leech swells, closes the trachea like a cork, and the person suffocates.

Many other horrors await man in the "green hell" of the tropics.

I have not named even a third of dangerous animals, not a single deadly plant has been mentioned. And isn't that enough!

Think also of predatory animals, poisonous creatures - snakes, spiders, scorpions, millipedes, tsetse flies that devastate entire regions of Africa, South American bugs - carriers of a disease similar to sleeping sickness, vampires, ticks ...

Here, even ordinary rain often causes a painful fever to a person. Arkady Fidler experienced for himself that in the forests of Brazil it is necessary to avoid rain like fire. It quickly causes "severe headache, indigestion, fever and other ailments."

Stanley talks about the quick death from a cold tropical downpour of several of his porters.

But the most terrible scourge of the tropics is not predatory fish and ants, not poisonous reptiles, but invisible creatures: microscopic bacteria and bacilli, pathogens of dangerous diseases.

There are hundreds of them, studied, semi-studied and unknown to specialists. Malaria, sleeping sickness, its South American "sister" - Chagas disease, tropical amoebic dysentery, yellow fever, raspberry pox, yaws, black pox, elephantiasis, beriberi, black disease kalaazar, Pendin's ulcer, dengue fever, bilharzia...

Do you read everything!

Many of them don't effective means. The most "curable" tropical disease - malaria devastates vast areas of the globe, entire countries become uninhabited. More recently, in India alone, about 100 million people fell ill with malaria every year, and more than a million died! In parts of Africa, sleeping sickness kills up to two-thirds of the population during an epidemic. Over the past few decades, more than a million people have died from it.

That is why adventurers - travelers, hunters, athletes and even collectors and explorers in their travels in tropical countries avoid deadly wilds, damp and gloomy forests.

A rare explorer dared to go deep into the terrible selva. And who dared, he did not always come back.

Having spent several months in some “toldo” of a European settler or in a riverside village of Indians and having collected scientific material from the skins of shot animals and birds and insects caught in the light, zoologists hasten to leave the inhospitable region with its constant dangers and debilitating diseases, where nothing can be done. to lie down, not to sit down, not to take a nap in the cool shade, not to swim in the heat, where even the rain must be mortally afraid and where it is as easy to get lost as in the Egyptian labyrinth. Having gone deep into the forest for several kilometers, you risk never coming back. For several painful months spent here, the forest - a temple of fabulous beauty - becomes a "temple of sorrow", "mother of fogs and despair", "wife of silence". Quick, get out of here!

And the giant trees, whose power and severity awe even the first conquistadors, indifferent to human joys and fears, vigilantly stand guard, guarding the entrances and exits to the dwelling of still unknown secrets. There, behind the impenetrable wall of these silent guards, is the wild selva - the trembling heart of virgin nature.

"Newborn Species"

"Don't believe all the fantasy stories about the jungle, but remember that here even the most incredible stories can turn out to be true." Such advice is given to his readers by K. Winton in the book "Whisper of the Jungle". He devoted more than twenty years to the study rainforest South America. He returned to his homeland, in the USA, and delivered a series of lectures under a very unexpected title: “Hospitable Jungle”. He argued that the dangers of these places are greatly exaggerated by the authors of adventure literature.

In the book “Whisper of the Jungle”, K. Vinton tries to debunk the myth of the “inhuman selva”. But his arguments do not sound entirely convincing: exposing the sensations of unscrupulous writers, K. Winton describes only some of the dangerous animals of the Amazon. But even in his benevolent interpretation, the exploits of vampires, piray, candiru and other predatory creatures look quite creepy.

Candiru is not a myth. Candiru exist, K. Winton says, and really inflict a lot of torment on their victims. But these bloodthirsty "demons" can sometimes be expelled from a person's body with a cup of bitter jagua fruit juice, "which makes you terribly sick."

Winton and his companions had to go into the water up to their necks in some tributaries of the Amazon, and the pirahas rushed past, not paying attention to them. But the travelers met an Indian whose index finger had been bitten off by a pirayah while he was washing his hands in the river.

A mosquito net protects perfectly from blood-sucking bats, but the vampires managed, however, to drink a lot of blood from a traveler in Panama overnight. The man was so weak that he could hardly drag himself the next morning.

K. Vinton perfectly described the life of many inhabitants of the tropical forest. But he failed to prove his main thesis - about the hospitality of the jungle. It may be interesting for the reader to know how the book of K. Winton appeared. There was a second world war. American soldiers, who were sent to the countries of Central and South America under the plausible pretext of "defending the American continent", were afraid of the selva. They refused to go into the jungle. The army command asked the biologist C. Winton to read a series of lectures on the groundlessness of their fears. Winton did it. From the lectures, the book "Whisper of the Jungle" was born. Its author pursued a very specific goal - to show the tropical forest from the good side.

Our book has a different purpose. Readers will see further that some of the stories told in it require clarification. Why, for example, has it not yet been established with certainty whether the African "bear" or "marsupial tiger" actually exists? Why is the water mongoose, discovered more than forty years ago in the forests of the Congo, not caught?

The answer to these questions is the inhospitability of the jungle!

The main reason for the poor study of the tropical forest is the inaccessibility of its interior regions for extensive research. The arena of scientific research here is so vast, and nature is so diverse that short-term expeditions of individual enthusiasts who come here from time to time to collect zoological collections are not enough for a satisfactory knowledge of its innermost secrets. We need the joint and friendly efforts of hundreds of specialists from different countries and different professions, as in Antarctica!

Only such an organization of scientific work will give quick results and help reveal the exciting secrets of the "green continent". There are undoubtedly many more unknown creatures lurking in the rainforests.

After all, every year, and mainly in the tropics, zoologists discover more and more new animals. Every year, experts describe an average of about ten thousand new species, subspecies and varieties. Basically, of course, these are small animals - insects (half of all the latest zoological discoveries), mollusks, worms, small tropical fish, songbirds, rodents, bats.

True, some researchers, to put it mildly, rush to conclusions and take for the new kind some kind of animal already known to science, with only minor differences, so that the number of actual discoveries is much less than the indicated figure.

Over the past 60 years in various countries(mainly in tropical forests) large animals were also found - 34 previously unknown species and subspecies of animals and birds. Twelve of them belong not only to new species, but also to new genera, and one strange bird even to a new family; these animals, therefore, are endowed with very peculiar features and rather sharp differences from the species already known to science.

For greater persuasiveness, I will list these 34 species of newly discovered animals.

Monkey

1. Mountain gorilla. Discovered in 1903 in the mountain forests of Central Africa. The largest of the monkeys.

2. Dwarf gorilla. Described in 1913 by the American zoologist Elliot. It lives in the forests of the right bank of the lower reaches of the Congo.

3. Pygmy chimpanzee. Described by the zoologist Schwartz in 1929. In 1957, the German zoologists Tratz and Geck identified it as a special genus of great apes. Lives in the forests of the Congo.

4. Somali baboon. Opened in Somalia in 1942.

5. White-legged kolob, or silky monkey, from Fernando Po (an island in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of Cameroon). Described in 1942.

6. African forest or round-eared elephant. Discovered in 1900 by the German zoologist Machi in the forests of Cameroon.

7. Pygmy elephant. Described by the German professor Noack in 1906 (currently considered a subspecies of the forest elephant).

8. Swamp elephant. Produced in the forests of the Congo near Lake Leopold II. Described in 1914 by the Belgian zoologist Professor Schuteden (a subspecies of the forest elephant).

Rhinos

9. Sudanese white rhinoceros, or Cotton's rhinoceros. Discovered in 1901 by the English traveler Gibbons in the swamps of South Sudan. Later discovered in the forests of Uele (northeast of the Congo), it is considered a subspecies of the South African white rhino.

Other ungulates

10 "Forest giraffe" okapi. An unusual animal, close to the primitive giraffes that once lived throughout Africa and even in Western Europe. Discovered in 1900 in the forests of Ituri and other areas of eastern Congo.

11. Giant forest pig - the largest representative of wild pigs, combines the features of European wild boars and African warthogs. Discovered in 1904 in the mountain forests of Kenya.

12. Mountain nyala, an antelope with spiral horns. - Discovered in 1910 in the mountains of Ethiopia. Its closest relative, the Mozambican nyala, lives in South Africa.

13. Golden takin, or "mountain buffalo", a strange hoofed animal, which in recent times close to the musk oxen of Greenland. Opened in 1911 in Tibet. Its relative, the gray takin, was described 60 years earlier, in 1850.

14. "Gray bull", or kou-prey. Opened in 1937 by the French zoologist Urbain in the forests of Cambodia, One of the largest wild bulls.

15. Black tapir of Sumatra. Described in 1936 by the Dutch zoologist Kuiper. A subspecies of the Indian tapir.

16. Argentine vicuña, a much larger subspecies of the common vicuña. Described by the German zoologist Krumbigel in 1944.

17. Fish-eating genet, or "water mongoose." Discovered by hunters in the Ituri rainforests (northeastern Congo). Described in 1919 by the American zoologist Allen.

18. Royal, or striped, cheetah. Produced in 1927 in Southern Rhodesia by the hunter Cooper, described by the English zoologist Pocock. The largest representative of cheetahs.

19. Hagenbeck's mountain wolf. Described in 1949 by the German zoologist Krumbigel from the skin and skull. According to local residents, lives in the Cordillera.

aquatic mammals

20. White dolphin. Discovered in 1918 by the American zoologist Miller in Dongting Lake in China.

21. Tasmcetus, or New Zealand whale (a new species and genus of the family of beaked whales). Described in 1937.

22. A new species of sea lion. Discovered in 1953 by the Norwegian zoologist Sivertsen in the Galapagos Islands.

23. Short-faced dolphin Ogneva. Discovered in 1955 by the Soviet zoologist M. Sleptsov in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. Some experts consider this species non-existent.

24. A new species of belt-toothed whale. Produced in 1957 off the coast of Japan, described in 1958 by the Japanese zoologist Dr. Nishivaki.

25. A new kind of crow. It was discovered in 1934 by the German ornithologist Stresemann in the forests of Queensland (a state in northeastern Australia).

26. African peacock. It was discovered in 1936 by the American ornithologist Chapin, first in the closet of the Museum of the Congo (in Belgium), then in the forests of Ituri and Sankuru (Eastern Congo).

27. Stresemann's Zavatariornis, a strange bird, the classification of which required the creation of a new family. Discovered in 1938 by the Italian Moltoni in South Abyssinia.

28. Horned gokko. Discovered in 1939 in the tropical forests of Bolivia.

29. Mayer's bird of paradise. Described in 1939 by the English zoologist Stonor.

30. New owl. Discovered in 1939 by the German zoologist Neumann on the island of Celebes.

31. Arbor of a special kind. Discovered in 1940 in the forests of New Guinea.

32. New trogon, a bird resembling a nightjar, but larger and more beautiful. Opened in 1948 in Colombia.

33. Petrel, Called "the last." Discovered in 1949 in the Pacific by the American ornithologist Murphy.

reptiles

34. Giant monitor lizard. Opened in 1912 on Komodo Island (Indonesia).

It is significant that 13 of the listed animals were discovered before 1925, and 21 - from 1925 to 1955. This suggests that the natural "hiding places" that hide unknown animals have not yet become scarce.

Here, for example, is the "non-decreasing progression" of ornithological discoveries over several post-war years. Three new bird species were discovered in 1945, seven in 1946, three in 1947, two in 1948, four in 1949, five in 1950, and five in 1951.

The largest specialist in animal taxonomy, the American zoologist Ernst Mayer, believes that more than 100 species of birds completely unknown to science live on earth. The number of undiscovered insects is incomparably greater - about two million!

Entomologists, apparently, still have a lot of work to do.

However, in any group of not very large animals - worms, sponges, crustaceans, mollusks - only about 60-50 and even 40% of all species existing on earth are currently open.

It is believed that the number of undiscovered amphibians, reptiles and mammals is much lower - only about 10% of the known number of species of these animals. But 10% is also a lot! This means that we can count on the discovery in the future of another 600 new amphibians and reptiles and 300 mammals. The vast majority, of course, will be frogs, newts, lizards, small rodents, bats and insectivorous animals.

Is there any hope to discover on earth not yet famous predators like a lion and a leopard? Or new great apes, antelopes, elephants, whales and other large animals?

We will look for answers to these questions in the following chapters of the book.

"Cousins" from the jungle

Pongo the elephant hunter

2400 years ago, the Carthaginian navigator Gannon brought strange news from a trip to the shores of West Africa. He reported wild, hairy men and women, whom the translator called "gorillas." Travelers met them on the heights of Sierra Leone. Wild "men" began to throw stones at the Carthaginians. The soldiers caught several hairy "women".

It is believed that the animals that Gannon saw were not gorillas at all, but baboons. But since then, the word "gorilla" has not left the lips of Europeans.

However, centuries passed, but no one else met the “hairy forest people” in Africa, no one heard anything about them. And even medieval geographers, who easily believed in people with “dog heads” and headless lemnias with eyes on their chests, began to doubt the real existence of gorillas. Little by little, among naturalists, the opinion was established that the legendary gorillas are just chimpanzees, "exaggerated" by rumor. And chimpanzees by this time were already well known in Europe. (In 1641, the first living chimpanzee was brought to Holland. It was described in detail by the anatomist Tulp.)

At the end of the 16th century, the English sailor Andrei Betel was captured by the Portuguese. For eighteen years he lived in Africa, not far from Angola. Betel described his life in the wild country in the essay "The Amazing Adventures of Andrei Betel", published in a collection of travels in 1625. Betel talks about two huge monkeys - engeko and pongo. Engeko is a chimpanzee, but Pongo is definitely a gorilla. Pongo looks like a human, but he can't even throw a log on a fire. This monster is a real giant. Armed with a club, he kills people and hunts ... elephants. It is impossible to catch a live pongo, and to find a dead one is also not easy, because pongos bury their dead under fallen leaves.

Bethel's incredible stories convinced few people. Few naturalists believed then in the existence of gorillas. Among the "believers" was the famous French scientist Buffon. He admitted that Bethel's stories may have a real basis. But the "unbelievers" considered the hairy ape-like people an impossible chimera, like those ridiculous monsters that adorn the pediments of Notre Dame Cathedral.

But in 1847, Dr. Thomas Savage, who lived for a year on the Gabon River (flows into the Gulf of Guinea south of Cameroon), published his scientific works in Boston. This was the first reliable description of the lifestyle and appearance of gorillas.

“A gorilla,” Savage wrote, “one and a half meters tall. Her body is covered with thick black hair. By old age, the gorilla turns gray.

These monkeys live in herds, and in each herd there are more females than males. Stories about how gorillas kidnap women and that they can put elephants to flight on occasion are completely absurd and groundless. The same feats are sometimes attributed to chimpanzees, and this is even more ridiculous.

Gorillas, like chimpanzees, make their dwellings - if they can be called dwellings - in trees. These dwellings consist of boughs, fitted among dense foliage to the forks of branches. Monkeys are located in them only at night. Gorillas, unlike chimpanzees, never run away from humans. They are fierce and easily go on the attack. The locals avoid confronting them and only fight in self-defense.

When attacked, males emit a terrible roar, which spreads far through the surrounding thickets. The gorilla opens its mouth wide when breathing. Her lower lip hangs down to her chin. Hairy folds of skin run up to the eyebrows. All this gives the gorilla an expression of extraordinary ferocity. Young gorillas and females disappear as soon as they hear the alarming cry of their leader. And he, emitting terrible cries, furiously rushes at the enemy. If the hunter is not quite sure of the accuracy of the shot, he lets the gorilla close and does not prevent it from grabbing the muzzle of the gun with its hands and putting it into its mouth, which these animals usually do, and only then pulls the trigger. A miss in all cases without exception costs the hunter his life.

The most surprising thing is that this very close to reality description of the gorillas was compiled by Savage only from the words of local residents. He himself did not happen to see a single living gorilla.

True, Dr. Savage brought back several gorilla skulls from Africa. From these skulls, together with Professor Wilman, he described in 1847 the gorilla as a new species of ape, calling it the "troglodytes gorilla" (Troglodytes gorilla). "Black troglodyte" (Troglodytes niger) was called at that time a chimpanzee. But four years later, in 1851, the French scientist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire proved that the gorilla was much more different from the chimpanzee than Savage and Wilman thought. He singled out the gorilla in a separate zoological genus and gave it the name Gorilla gorilla.

So, the shaggy forest monster, after centuries of doubts and disputes, was finally recognized by science.

Yet none of the zoologists have not yet seen living gorillas. And therefore, skeptics with a certain right could console themselves with the thought that perhaps a mistake had occurred: where is the guarantee that all the investigated skulls do not belong to an already extinct animal?

However, eight years after Savage's report, even the most hardened Thomas unbeliever could not make such a statement.

First European to kill a gorilla

In 1855, the famous traveler and zoologist Paul du Chaillu finally saw the mysterious gorilla.

Here is how he describes this momentous event.

“We saw an abandoned village not far from the camp. What looked like sugar cane grew on the places where the huts used to stand. I greedily began to break the stems of this plant and suck out the juice. Suddenly, my companions noticed one detail that excited all of us extremely. Uprooted sugarcane stalks littered the ground around us. Someone pulled them out and then threw them on the ground. Like us, he sucked the juice out of them. These were undoubtedly the footprints of a recently visited gorilla. The heart was filled with joy. My black companions looked at each other silently. There was a whisper: "Ngila" (gorilla).

We followed the trail, looking on the ground for chewed up pieces of cane, and finally came across the footprints of the animal so passionately sought. It was the first time I saw the footprint of such a foot, and it is difficult for me to convey what I experienced in those moments. So, every second I could find myself face to face with a monster, about the strength, savagery and slyness of which the locals told me so much.

This animal is almost unknown to the people of science. No white has ever hunted him. My heart was beating so loudly that I began to fear that his knock would reach the gorilla. Nerves tensed painfully.

Based on the tracks, we established that four or five apparently not very large gorillas had been here. Sometimes they moved on all fours, sometimes they sat down on the ground to chew on the sugar cane they carried with them. The pursuit became more intense. I must confess that I have never been more worried in my life than at this moment.

Having descended from the hill, we crossed the river along the trunk of a fallen tree and approached several granite rocks. At the foot of the cliff lay the half-rotted trunk of a huge tree. Judging by a number of signs, gorillas have recently sat on this trunk. We began to make our way forward with extreme caution. Suddenly I heard a strange, half-human cry, and after that four young gorillas rushed past us into the forest. Shots rang out. We chased after them, but they knew the forest better than we did. We ran to complete loss of strength without any results: dexterous animals moved faster than us. We slowly trudged to the camp, where frightened women were waiting for us.

Later, du Chail was more fortunate, and he shot several gorillas. Perhaps one of the most dramatic descriptions of the attack of an angry gorilla belongs to his pen.

“Suddenly, the bushes parted - and in front of us was a gigantic male gorilla. He walked through the thicket on all fours, but, seeing people, he straightened up to his full height and began to look defiantly at us. I will never forget this sight. He was about two meters tall, his body was huge, his chest was powerful, his arms were large and muscular. His wildly blazing eyes gave a demonic expression to his expression, something that could only be seen in a nightmare; thus stood before us this lord of the African forests. He showed no fear. He beat his chest with powerful fists, expressing his readiness to join the fight. His chest hummed like a drum, and at the same time he roared, flames literally radiated from his eyes, but we did not retreat, preparing for defense.

A hairy crest rose on the monkey's head; the comb now blossomed, then bristled again; when the gorilla opened its mouth to bark, huge teeth were visible. The gorilla took a few steps forward, paused, let out a menacing roar again, advanced further, and finally froze six meters away from us. When she snarled again and thumped her chest in fury, we fired. The gorilla fell prone, uttering a groan that was as much human as animal."

Now no one doubted that strange four-armed monsters live in Africa. The area of their distribution coincides with the zone of tropical rainforest. At the end of the last century, it was found that gorillas live in the west of tropical Africa, in countries located on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea from eastern Nigeria to Cameroon and Gabon. Therefore, these gorillas were called coastal. In the very west of the Congo lives a closely related species, the so-called red-headed gorilla.

Old man from Kivu

In 1863, the London Geographical Society received a strange telegram: "Neal is all right." The telegram surprised not only telegraphers: it excited the entire scientific world of Great Britain. Members of the London Geographical Society immediately understood what the telegram was about. Three years ago, English travelers John Speke and Augustus Grant went deep into Africa in search of the source of the Nile.

And now a telegram is received from Speke; "Neal is fine." This means that the age-old mystery is solved. Speke and Grant penetrated into the fairyland of the "Mountains of the Moon", in which, according to rumors, the White Nile is born, and discovered its origins.

In the same year, 1863, Speke recounted his adventures in a two-volume book, The Discovery of the Sources of the Nile. A year later, he died in a hunting accident in England.

The brave explorer in his short life (he died 37 years old) managed to make many important geographical discoveries. He brought back from his travels information of interest to zoologists. But at first they were not given due importance. After all, Speke reported neither more nor less, but about a terrible shaggy monster that lives in the mountain forests of Rwanda. This monster "hugs women so tightly that they die." The Negroes called him "ngila" and said that the animal looked like a man in its appearance, but he had such Long hands that it can grab an elephant across the belly. Who could believe it? Moreover, gorillas - the only creatures that could be classified as a fantastic "ngila" - lived far to the west.

It was known that their area of distribution did not extend east beyond the westernmost regions of the Congo. Therefore, Speke's message was ignored by zoologists. And in vain!

In 1901, the German mammal specialist Machi looked with surprise at the gigantic monkey skin that Captain Beringe brought from the shores of Lake Kivu (located north of Tanganyika). It was a ngila, a mountain gorilla. Machi described it in 1903, naming it in honor of Captain Bering - Gorilla beringei.

The mountain gorilla is even more powerful than its cousins from the forests of the Gulf of Guinea, the coastal gorillas. The growth of large males reaches two meters (and in exceptional cases even 2 meters 30 centimeters), and the weight is 200-350 kilograms. The chest girth of an old male mountain gorilla is 1 meter 70 centimeters, the girth of the biceps is 65 centimeters, and the arm span reaches 2.7 meters!

This is almost enough to grab a small elephant across the torso.

Tourists, hunters, hunters of animals who flooded Central Africa after the First World War, dreamed of getting not only antelope horns, but also the scalp of the “old man from Kivu”. “The mountain gorilla,” wrote the “great scarecrow” Ackley, “along with elephants and lions, has become “fashionable game”. The beating of gorillas must stop immediately.”

Few people have studied the life of these monkeys in the wild. Even dead gorillas rarely fall into the hands of scientists. Meanwhile, the number of gorillas is rapidly declining. In March 1922, the mountain gorilla reserve was finally established. Several thousand of these four-armed giants now live in the forests on the slopes of the mountains of Mykeno, Carisimba and Visoke (Kivu region).

pygmy gorilla

It turns out that there are pygmy gorillas. But almost nothing is known about them.

The skins of pygmy gorillas occasionally end up in museums from the collections of hunters, but none of the zoologists have ever seen the animals themselves. Dwarf gorillas have been discovered in the "jungle" ... of natural science museums. The world's largest specialist in monkeys, the American zoologist Daniel Elliot, studied the museum collections of great apes. Among them, he found several strange skeletons and skins. Without a doubt, they belonged to adult gorillas, but very small in stature: the length of the male dwarf from crown to heels is 1 meter 40 centimeters (the average height of a chimpanzee). The color of the skins is dark gray with a reddish-brown tint on the head and shoulders.

According to the labels on these interesting finds, it was established that pygmy gorillas live in forests along the banks of the mouth of the Ogooue River (Gabon). Nothing more is known about them.

In 1913, in a three-volume description of monkeys, Elliot spoke about his discovery. He named the pygmy gorilla Pseudogorilla mayema. Its other scientific name is Gorilla (Pseudogorilla) ellioti.

16 years after the discovery of Elliot, the German Ernst Schwartz also examined the collections of monkeys collected in the Museum of the Congo (in Belgium). Among the exhibits belonging, according to museum catalogs, to various varieties of chimpanzees, he found many very fragile and small bones.

Schwartz thought he was dealing with a pygmy chimpanzee and named it Pan satyrus paniscus in 1929.

Later, several more of these monkeys were brought alive to Europe and America, and other scientists got acquainted with them. The structure of the skull, skeleton, musculature and coat of the chimpanzee dwarf was studied in 1933 by Coolidge, in 1941 by Rode, and in 1952 by Miller. Freshkop (1935), Huck (1939) and Urbain (1940) wrote about his behavior and lifestyle. Some scientists (Coolidge, Huck, Miller, Freshkop) proposed to isolate the pygmy chimpanzee in separate view. Others thought it was just a subspecies of the common chimpanzee.

But it turned out that neither one nor the other was right. A sad incident at a German zoo prompted two zoologists to take a closer look at pygmy chimpanzees. As a result, they came to the conclusion that these undersized chimpanzees were not chimpanzees at all, but a completely special and new to science genus of anthropoid apes, as independent as, for example, the genus of gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and gibbons.

It is worth talking about this discovery in more detail.

Bonobo is our new relative

In the German city of Hellabrunner, not far from Munich, during the raids of American aircraft in 1944, many great apes died in the zoo. The poor animals died not from wounds and contusions, but from ... fear. The hellish rumble of artillery, exploding bombs and landslides brought them into indescribable horror. In a panic, they rushed around the cages, announcing the deserted park with heart-rending cries.

Zoo scientists, counting their losses the next morning, found that all the dead monkeys are distinguished by a fragile physique and belong, as they believed then, to a pygmy variety of chimpanzee. In life, they were shy creatures, they shunned the big monkeys.

Scientists were amazed that only pygmy chimpanzees died from the nervous shock experienced during the bombing. Why did their larger brethren take the same events rather calmly? After all, not a single large chimpanzee died during the bombing.

Apparently, this is no accident. Scientists began to take a closer look at the monkeys, which until now were mistakenly considered pygmy chimpanzees. Pay attention to the cries of these monkeys. The zookeeper assured scientists that small and large chimpanzees do not understand each other, they, according to him, “speak” different languages.

Small chimpanzees are very mobile, friendly and sociable. They constantly "chat" with each other. The vowels "a" and "e" are heard in their cries. Monkeys accompany their "speech" with lively gestures.

Large chimpanzees are gloomy and unsociable. Their voice is deaf, and other vowel sounds are heard in their cries: “o” and “u”. Sometimes, especially when angry, large chimpanzees squawk. Rushing at each other, they bite, scratch. Fighting monkeys try with their strong arms to pull the enemy closer and grab him with their teeth.

Small chimpanzees rarely get angry, rarely quarrel and fight with each other. And in a fight, they never bite, but only reward each other with cuffs, “box”. Monkeys have weak fists, so they prefer to strike with their heels.

And a few years ago, in 1954, German scientists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Geck published an interesting paper. As a result of their observations and studies of other zoologists and anatomists, they came to the conclusion that the monkeys that died during the Hellabrunner bombardment are not a pygmy variety of chimpanzees, but a very special species and genus of great apes (Bonobo paniscus), they differ so sharply from all other monkeys and their psyche, and behavior, and anatomy. Scientists have given the new genus the name "bonobo" - as the locals call these monkeys in their homeland in the Congo. Congolese distinguish bonobos from chimpanzees and other local representatives of the monkey breed.

So, the family of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom - the great apes - has replenished with one more new member. So far, there have been three true great apes - the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the orangutan. Now there are four of them.

People often ask: which of the monkeys is closest in structure to humans? It is difficult to give a definite answer to this question. According to some signs - a chimpanzee, according to others - a gorilla, according to others - even an orangutan. But the amazing thing is that the newly discovered bonobos in a number of ways, especially in the structure of the skull, seem to be closer to humans than all other monkeys!

The bonobos have a rounded, capacious skull, without the highly developed superciliary ridges and ridges that disfigure the head of a gorilla and chimpanzee. In all other monkeys, the muzzle strongly protrudes forward, while the forehead is slightly convex, steeply sloping back, as if cut from front to back. In bonobos, the forehead is more developed, its bulges begin immediately behind the superciliary arches, and the muzzle protrudes slightly forward. The back of the head of the bonobo is also rounded and gently convex.

In bonobos, zoologists have also noticed such “human” features: small ears, narrow shoulders, a slender body and not a wide-legged, but a narrow neat foot. In bonobos, perhaps the only representative in the animal kingdom, the lips are not black, but reddish, almost like those of a person.

And another amazing feature. Great apes move on the ground on bent legs, while leaning on their hands. When walking, bonobos also rely on their hands, but, like a person, they completely straighten their legs at the knees.

Where do our new relatives live? Where are they from? Bonobos live, as far as it is now known, in the western regions of the Congo Basin, in dense primeval forests. Few large animals have managed to adapt to life in the gloomy and damp wilds of the interior of the rainforest. Therefore, bonobos have few dangerous enemies. Chimpanzee monkeys too forest dwellers, but they still prefer to stay closer to the edge of the forest.

Two more new monkeys

In 1942, the German trapper Rue caught a monkey in Somalia, whose name he could not find in any of the manuals. The German zoologist Ludwig Zhukovsky explained to Rue that the animal he had caught was still unknown to science. This is a baboon, but of a special kind. L. Zhukovsky gave him the name Papio ruhei, which is - Rue the baboon.

In the same year, another German zoologist - Dr. Ingo Krumbigel - studied the collections of mammals collected in the forests of the island of Fernando Po (in the Gulf of Guinea, not far from Cameroon). The island is small: its area is 2100 square kilometers. But it is quite densely populated: more than 20 thousand people live here.

A variety of animals live in the forests of the island. Back in 1838, the English naturalist Waterhouse compiled a detailed list of all the four-legged and feathered inhabitants of Fernando Po.

But neither Waterhouse nor other researchers who visited the island after him noticed the most, perhaps, conspicuous animal here!

Krumbigel, sorting through the collections from Fernando Po, discovered in them a strange black and white skin of an unknown monkey; Waterhouse never mentioned her. And the monkey is painted very noticeably - like a milestone! Her body is black, and her arms, legs and crest on her head are white.

Could it be, Krumbiegel asks himself, that the black-and-white monkey species did not exist in Waterhouse's time? It developed later, after Waterhouse's trip to Fernando Po, "budding off" from some local species of monkeys, for example, from black kolobs.

However, this is unlikely.

Krumbigel named the monkey he discovered Colobus metternichi - Metternich's colob.

Kolob, or silky monkeys, nature has endowed with many unique qualities.

They feed exclusively on plant foods, mainly tree leaves. A huge stomach, like that of a cow, is divided into three sections. In the complex labyrinths of the stomach, woody leaves are ground and digested. This low-nutrient food kolob can eat an incredible amount - 2.5 kilograms in one meal. But she herself usually weighs about 7 kilograms! Having eaten to satiety, the animal hangs on a bough and freezes in a sleepy slumber, slowly digesting its lunch. However, if necessary, the kolobs move very quickly. They live in the uppermost "floor" of the rainforest. To go down, kolobs jump from the tops of huge trees directly to the lower boughs, flying a distance of tens of meters.

The body of some silky monkeys is surrounded on the sides (from the front to the hind legs) by a thick fringe of long white hair. At the end of the tail, the hair forms a magnificent fan.

The fringe and fan are not decorations, but wonderful adaptations for gliding flight. When the monkey jumps from the top of the tree long hair inflate like a parachute and support it on the fly.

Kolobs are the only monkeys whose beautiful skins are hunted by fur merchants.

But getting them is not easy. Kolobs live in virgin forests, on the tops of giant trees. Some species of silky monkeys are known to science only from a few skins bought by travelers from local hunters.

How long have yetis been caught?

Sixty-two years ago, in 1899, Weddell, one of the first Europeans to enter Tibet, described in his book "In the Himalayas" strange, human-like footprints that he encountered in the high snowfields at the Donkyala Pass. Since then, almost every expedition to the Himalayas has brought reports of hairy ape-men living high in the mountains. Sherpas - Nepalese highlanders - call these fantastic animals yeti.

At first, no one wanted to believe that humanoid creatures could live in the barren snows of the highest thorny ridge in the world. But more and more convincing, it would seem, facts accumulated. They saw and photographed footprints of the yeti more than once, as if they heard their cry. Maybe these are large upright apes, something like "snow gorillas"?

People who do not believe in the existence of Bigfoot, in polemics with his supporters, usually resort to the following argument:

If Bigfoot exists, they say, why can't they still catch him. Catch, catch - and no results.

But the fact is that until very recently, no one made any attempts to catch the mysterious yeti, and for a very simple reason - no one believed in him!

Although zoologists heard about the Yeti more than 60 years ago, the first expedition to look for it was organized only in 1954.

In the spring of 1957, the American expedition of Tom Slick began to work in Nepal. In 1958, a Scottish expedition joined it, and in 1959 another American hunting party. More and more new expeditions are storming the Himalayan heights, and perhaps the elusive yeti will be caught. Of course, if it exists. And this is exactly what many zoologists doubt very much. The issue was complicated by the fact that certain circles in the United States hastened to take advantage of an interesting scientific problem for very unseemly purposes. As some Indian newspapers reported, not all American expeditions in the Himalayas are engaged in the search for Bigfoot. This is only a pretext used by them to penetrate into the border regions of Nepal with the People's Republic of China. Indeed, it is strange that there are no publicly available publications about the work of some "scientific" expeditions that have visited Nepal in recent years. Where and how they conducted their work is shrouded in obscurity.

Readers will remember that a few years ago, American "explorers" used an even more ridiculous pretext for border reconnaissance: they were looking for Noah's Ark on the slopes of Ararat!

All this is very unpleasant. It is not easy now to understand the problem of the Yeti - what is true, what is false - in a tangled mess of contradictory myths, facts and political intrigues.

Are there great apes in America?

Readers who are a little familiar with zoology will say - why this question? After all, it has long been established that there are no great apes in America and never have been: in none of the American countries, despite careful searches, fossil remains of anthropoids (that is, great apes) have been found.

Nevertheless, some scientists claim that in South America, in the virgin forests of the Amazon and Orinoco, great apes live. They even say that once such a monkey fell into the hands of researchers. That's how it was.

In 1917, the Swiss geologist Francis de Loy and a group of comrades delved into the vast tropical forests of the Sierra Perilla mountain range (along the border of Colombia and Venezuela).

Three years full of adventures were spent by travelers in the wilds. Finally, exhausted by hardships, they went to the Tarra River (a tributary of the Catatumbo, which flows from the southwest into the Gulf of Maracaibo). Here, on the banks of the river, they met strange animals. One day we heard noise and screams. Jumped out of the tents; two large, malevolent monkeys advanced towards them, waving their arms and uttering a "war cry". They walked on two legs, were very angry, broke branches and threw them at people, hoping to drive the uninvited aliens from their possessions.

The travelers wanted to shoot the male that was the most aggressive. But at the decisive moment, he hid behind the female, and she got all the bullets.

The killed monkey was put on a box, propped up with a stick on its chin to keep it in a sitting position, and photographed.

De Lua claims that this amazing monkey did not have a tail. In her mouth, he allegedly counted not 36, like all American monkeys, but only 32 teeth, like anthropoids.

The monkey was measured: its length was 1 meter 57 centimeters.

They removed the skin from her, dissected the skull and lower jaw. But, alas! In the hot climate of the tropics, the skin soon deteriorated. Lost somewhere in the wilds of the forest and the jaw of a monkey. The skull was preserved the longest, and, perhaps, it would have been brought to Europe if it had not come to the cook of the expedition. The cook was a great original: he decided to use the skull of the most unique monkey as ... a salt shaker. Undoubtedly, this is not The best way conservation of zoological collections. Under the influence of dampness and salt, the skull fell apart at the seams, and unlucky collectors decided to throw it away.

Bad examples are contagious

Worst of all, Montandon and de Lois found followers who resorted to crude forgeries to breathe new life into the myth of the American Pithecanthropus.

In 1951, Courteville, a Swiss explorer of South America, published a book in France. In it, he recounts his encounters with huge tailless monkeys in the forests of the same area in which de Loy wandered, and even gives a photograph of a strange creature, which he calls "Pithecanthropus". This "Pithecanthropus," writes Dr. Euvelmans, "is a shameless fake."

A photo of the Lua monkey sitting on a box was taken, cut into pieces and reassembled in a different position against the backdrop of a virgin forest, but in such a way that it was now clearly visible that the animal had no tail.

The drawing of the “Pithecanthropus” made by Courteville on wrapping paper is no more credible. According to Euvelmans, the creature drawn by Courteville looks more like a young gorilla than a Lua monkey, the combined photograph of which is placed on the following pages. There are many biological absurdities in the description of the animal allegedly encountered by Courteville.

Kurupira, maribunda, pelobo - who are they?

Hoaxes and fakes by unscrupulous researchers have done great harm to the prestige of the Lua monkey. Meanwhile, photography is an indisputable proof of its real existence. In the photo we see a very large monkey, similar to a coat, but unknown to zoologists.

Rumors of such monkeys are common throughout the Amazonian forests. The first explorers of South America, Alexander Humboldt and Henry Bates, reported about the forest "people" covered with wool, whose customs are very reminiscent of the habits of large monkeys.

Bates, for example, talks about the mysterious forest creature curupira, which is very afraid of the Brazilian Indians. “Sometimes he is depicted as something like an orangutan covered with long shaggy hair, living in trees. In other places it is said that he has legs split at the bottom and a bright red face. He has a wife and children. Sometimes he goes out to the plantations to steal cassava."

Bates says that the curupira is revered as a goblin. However, spirits do not steal cassava!

Recently, gold diggers, who penetrated the endless forests through which the Araguaia River hardly makes its way, were frightened by a terrible roar that was heard in the depths of the wild selva. The next morning they found their horses dead: each had its tongue torn out. On the wet sand near the river, frightened people noticed a trace of huge "human" legs 21 inches long (52.5 centimeters).

This case is reported by the English naturalist Frank Lane. The story, however, resembles the plots of fantastic stories.

However, what do we know about the life of the gigantic completely unexplored forests of the mysterious Mato Grosso, the western state of Brazil?

The eastern border of Mato Grosso runs along the Araguaia River. Maybe some unknown monkeys live there, as big and strong as gorillas. There has long been talk of American "gorillas". Missionaries from the Amazon reported them even before Savage described African gorillas.

On the Yucatan peninsula (in Mexico), archaeologists have found strange stone statues, very similar to ... gorillas. Recently, among the rock sculptures of South America, figures have been found that even resemble elephants, lions and other African animals. However, this does not yet prove that the animals that served as models for local sculptors really live (or lived in recent times) in the forests of America.

Surprising finds rather testify to cultural ties between the peoples of America and Africa that existed long before the discovery of the New World by Europeans.

And yet, rumors about great apes allegedly living in the wilds of South America do not stop to this day. Bernard Euvelmans collected many reports of various pelobo, mapinguari, pedegarrafa, maribunda and other strange "humanoid" creatures that, according to South American legends, live in the rainforests of Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Bolivia.

Of all the reports, the stories of de Vavrin, the newest explorer of South America, have the greatest scientific value. In his book Wild Animals of the Amazon, published in Paris in 1951, he writes:

“I have heard more than once about the existence of great apes in the vast forests in the north of Mato Grosso, on the watershed between the Amazon and Paraguay basins. I didn't see them myself. But everywhere in the local forests one can hear many stories about them. There are even more persistent rumors in the Orinoco Basin.

These monkeys are called maribunda. Their height is about 1 meter 50 centimeters. A local resident from the upper reaches of the Guaviare told me that he raised a maribunda cub in his home. It was a very friendly and funny animal. But when he grew up, he had to be killed, because with his pranks he began to cause a lot of damage.

The cry of the maribunda is very reminiscent of a human voice. Wandering in the thicket of the forest, I myself more than once mistook it for the call of the Indians.

Once, in the upper reaches of the Orinoco, the maribunda sowed panic in de Wavren's camp. The porters mistook their cries for the battle cry of the warlike Guaharibo Indians.

Maybe the maribunda are Lua monkeys?

There are no sufficient grounds for such an assertion. The “case” of the mysterious monkey photographed on a kerosene box has not been finally resolved. Only one thing is clear: this is not a great ape.

In the depths of the selva, researchers are still waiting, apparently, for exciting encounters with these unfriendly animals, which are known to us so far only from the “portrait”.

Why is it important?

The capture and study of the Lua monkey is of interest not only from a purely biological point of view.

Now, when the final collapse of colonialism is approaching and the bastions of the centuries-old slavery of the oppressed peoples are crumbling, the colonialists do not disdain any means to stifle the powerful upsurge of the national liberation movement in the countries of Asia, Africa and America. By falsifying science, the ideologists of colonialism and the preachers of the most rabid racism are trying to justify their predatory plans in the eyes of public opinion with the help of far-fetched "theories".

The most reactionary of the bourgeois scientists have come up with numerous hypotheses of ologenism, polygenism, dichotomism, and similar fabrications. Their authors are different, but the goal is the same - to create the appearance of evidence that a person allegedly descended from different ancestors. Modern peoples inhabiting various continents and islands are not siblings by blood and origin, as science has long established, but, you see, completely different types and even supposedly the genera of living beings. Different origins obviously imply different abilities. Therefore, according to the racists, some peoples, the higher ones, are called upon by nature itself to dominate the earth, while others, the lower ones, are doomed to slavery and extinction due to their initial inferiority.

For the defenders of this cannibalistic concept, the American great ape would be an invaluable find. After all, no traces of the presence of great apes have yet been found in America - neither today nor in the distant past. Racist theories that Native Americans are descended from native anthropoids are up in the air. For a long time already, reactionary anthropologists have seized on every excuse, inventing all sorts of American apes and "Pithecanthropes" to fill this gap in their fabrications. The case of the Lua monkey is not the only one.

The scandalous incident with another American "anthropoid" happened even earlier, in 1922. In the ancient layers of the land of Wyoming (a state in the western United States), a molar tooth of a fossil great ape was found - at least this is how the largest American paleontologists defined this find. It was a grandiose sensation that shook the entire scientific world. The “primitive member of the human family,” as some American zoologists called the hypothetical owner of the tooth, was called Hesperopithecus. The German reactionary scientist Franz Koch hastened to record Hesperopithecus as the ancestors of the Aryan race, which, of course, must have a special origin.

But, as expected, more thorough studies have shown that the notorious tooth does not belong to an anthropoid, but ... to a wild fossil pig from the prostenops genus (pig and human molars are very similar).

What a scandal! “In the ancestors of the Aryan race,” writes Professor M. F. Nesturkh, “there was a fossil North American pig.”

But the lesson did not go to the benefit of charlatans from science. Seven years after Hesperopithecus, the "ameranthropoid Lua" and its modified version in the work of Courteville were invented. There will obviously be other fakes.

There is, however, no doubt that neither the Lua monkey, nor other mistakenly described American "anthropoids", such as Hesperopithecus or the homunculus of the Argentine paleontologist Ameghino, actually belong to the great apes. It can be considered proven that the ancestors of the Indians relatively recently, approximately 25 thousand years ago, moved to America from Asia through the isthmus that connected ice age Chukchi Peninsula and Alaska. There was no independent center of human origin in America.

It is possible that in the same eventful era, after man, herds of bison and mammoths, another mysterious creature moved from Asia to America - the brother of the Bigfoot.

Here's what they say about him.

"Goblin" from Arroyo Bluff

August 27, 1958 Gerald Crewe got ready for work. He worked as a tractor driver on the construction of a new freeway in Humboldt County (far northwest California).

His path lay through the Arroyo Bluff valley. All around was a wild, uninhabited area - stony placers and coniferous forests on the slopes of the mountains.

Having washed himself in the river, near which the builders' camp was located, J. Crew went to his tractor and suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.

Still - after all, he stumbled upon the traces of ... a "snowman", who, as they say, wanders in the snows of the Himalayas!

But California is here - a country of fashionable resorts, orange plantations and the largest film studios in the world ...

Gerald Crew, when he came to his senses, measured the prints of huge bare feet left on clay soil by an unknown creature. Forty centimeters - the length of the foot! And the step length is 115-175 centimeters.

The tractor driver ventured to follow the trail for some distance. The tracks descended almost from a steep slope (about 80°!), went around the workers' settlement and disappeared into the forest behind the hill.

J. Crewe had previously heard from his comrades about the same strange and huge footprints seen on the banks of the Mad River (flows into Pacific Ocean north of Humboldt Bay).

In September 1958, the mysterious creature reappeared near the workers' camp. The wife of one of the craftsmen wrote a letter to the local newspaper The Humboldt Times:

“There are rumors among the workers that the Man of the Forests exists. What did you hear about it?"

The letter was printed in the newspaper. The editors began to receive letters from other readers. Many of them claimed that they saw with their own eyes the "Paton" - this is how the shaggy giant was dubbed here.

By this time, J. Crew once again encountered mysterious footprints in the Arroyo Bluff valley and made plaster casts of them. The Humboldt Times placed photographs of these casts on the front page. The material was reprinted by other newspapers. A hail of letters, telegrams, questions rained down from all over the world.

Scientists also became interested in strange events. American zoologist and paleontologist Ivan Sanderson arrived at the scene. He questioned eyewitnesses, examined the plaster casts and found out a number of new interesting circumstances. He reported on the collected information in several articles. One of them was published in the Cuban magazine "Boemia" (in the first issue of 1960).

Here is what Ivan Sanderson managed to establish.

The entrepreneur who took the contract for the construction of the freeway at first thought that one of the local residents was intimidating the workers in order to interfere with the construction of the road. However, this hoaxer possessed, apparently, superhuman strength. He took, for example, a steel barrel with diesel fuel with a capacity of 250 liters from a warehouse and threw it into a remote gorge. Then he dragged a steel pipe and a wheel from an excavator into the forest. Ray Wallace, an entrepreneur, hired two detectives. They had to track down and catch the intruder.

Believing that time is money, Ray Kerr and Bob Briton got bloodhounds and immediately began to search. But the task turned out to be not so simple, and the detectives began to seriously think that if their affairs continued in the same way, they would have much more time than money.

But then one day in October 1959, after sunset, two Sherlock Holmes were returning from another search raid.

Suddenly, on the side of the forest road, they noticed a shaggy humanoid creature. It was "paten"! In two leaps he jumped the road and disappeared into the bushes.

The dogs that the detectives set out to follow him have gone missing. They say that later they found their gnawed bones in the forest.

It is said further that a married couple flew their own plane over this area. There was still snow in the mountains. The couple, although they were busy with each other, however, noticed something below: a huge shaggy giant who walked barefoot in the snow, leaving a long string of footprints behind him.

A lady and her daughter met two Patons in the Hupa Valley. And in August 1959, two local residents again saw traces of monsters 23 miles north of the new freeway. They even found their wool, which stuck in tufts to the branches of fir trees and to the bark of pine trees at a height of about two meters from the ground. The length of the hair was different - from 2 to 27 centimeters.

Under the trees they found the Paton's lair, where he spent the night. It was built from moss and branches. Paton stripped moss and lichens from trees.

Humboldt Times correspondent Betty Allen was talking to local Indians.

Holy God! they were surprised. “Have the whites finally found out about this!”

There used to be more Patons in these places. It is said that once they even allegedly attacked a mining village near the Clear River (southwestern Oregon), ravaged a warehouse with food supplies and killed three workers. During the gold rush of 1848-1849, crowds of adventurers who swept into California exterminated and drove many Patons into the distant forests. Very few of them survived.

What conclusions can be drawn from these reports? Ivan Sanderson asks.

The time has passed when zoologists unanimously ridiculed a fantastic hairy figure that unexpectedly appeared on the icy peaks of the Himalayas, like a ghost from the distant past of our planet.

Strange reports of all sorts of "wild people" are now coming from the most unexpected places - from Malaya, Indonesia, northwestern China, from Mongolia, from the Pamirs, from Transbaikalia, even from the Caucasus, and, finally, from California.

The scientists who have been investigating this highly interesting problem have found "traces" of the wild man even in ancient literature and medieval manuscripts of Western Europe.

It seems that quite recently, some 400-500 years ago, these alleged great apes were very widespread. Invention firearms marked the beginning of their mass extermination.

It is possible that the stories about various kinds of almesty, almas and kaptar, which can be heard from the inhabitants of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Mongolia, are belated memories of bygone times, when these "goblin" of flesh and blood lived side by side with man.

It is also possible that in some secluded corners they have survived to this day. Northwestern California and southwestern Oregon are one of the possible habitats for these unknown creatures that could have moved here during the Ice Age from Asia, since no anthropoid fossils have been found in America.

“In the vicinity of Arroyo Bluff,” writes Ivan Sanderson, “strange things certainly happen. Some mysterious creature manages to move steel barrels of oil, iron pipes and wheels from place to place. It easily climbs steep slopes, growls loudly and leaves forty-centimeter tracks.

There can be no doubt that these traces really exist. They were not fabricated by any hoaxer: there is fairly strong evidence against this.

The extreme northwest of California covers over one hundred square miles. Until very recently, this area was uninhabited. The territory is covered with dense and impenetrable forests and is not accessible for aerial observation (except for the highest mountain peaks).

These places have not been explored by anyone. Not even detailed maps have been drawn up. In the very center of civilization there is a completely wild place and, probably, an unknown and mysterious creature lives there.

However, not all American zoologists agree with Ivan Sanderson's opinion that "there is sufficient evidence" that the Paton tracks were not fabricated by a hoaxer.

I have before me a letter just received from the American Museum of Natural History from Dr. Joseph Moore, who writes that he and his colleagues are examining the Arroyo Bluff Bigfoot reports with great skepticism.

Materials received by the museum from California provide "sufficiently strong evidence only that this is nothing more than a joke, and we refrain from discussing them for the time being."

Nevertheless, Tom Slick, the organizer of the American Himalayan Yeti expeditions, decided to try his luck in California. Recently he was in Moscow and said that he sent specialists to Arroyo Bluff for reconnaissance.

Agogwe - "snow men" of Africa

One of the unresolved mysteries of the African wilds, writes the British naturalist Frank Lane, are small forest "men" - agogwe.

Strange creatures do not exceed four feet (about 1 meter 20 centimeters) in height, their whole body is covered with red hair, their face is monkey, but they walk agogwe on two legs like people.

Agogwe live in the depths of impenetrable forests. Even an experienced hunter has little chance of seeing them. It only happens once in a lifetime, locals say. Rumors about agogwe spread over a territory of more than 1000 kilometers - from southwestern Kenya to Tanganyika and further to Mozambique.

European travelers also report about small forest "men". Captain Hichens, an official of the British administration in Kenya, for a long service in Africa, collected a lot of information about the mysterious, unknown to science animals, in the existence of which the locals believe. In the article "African Mysterious Animals", published in 1937 in the English scientific journal "Discovery" ("Discovery"), he writes about agogwe:

“Several years ago I received a hunting mission to shoot a man-eating lion in the forests of Issur and Simbiti on the western edge of the Vembara Plains. Once, when I was waiting in ambush for a cannibal in a clearing in the forest, two small brown creatures suddenly came out of the forest and hid in a thicket on the other side of the clearing. They looked like tiny men about four feet high, walked on two legs, and were covered with red hair. The local hunter accompanying me froze with his mouth open in surprise.

This is agogwe,” he said when he came to his senses a little.

Hichens spent a lot of wasted effort to see the little "men" again. But it's easier to find a needle in a haystack than a nimble beast in this impassable thicket!

Hichens assures that the creatures he saw were not like any of the monkeys he knew. But who are they?

A few years earlier, the Journal of the Natural Science Society of East Africa and Uganda published the following report: “The natives of the Kwa Ngombe region claim that their mountains are inhabited by buffaloes, wild pigs and a tribe of little red “men” who jealously guard their mountain possessions. Old Salim, a guide from Embu, said that once with a few companions he climbed high into the mountains. We reached almost the very top, a cold wind was blowing here. Suddenly, a whole hail of stones rained down on the hunters from above. They took to their heels. Looking back, old Salim saw two dozen little red-haired "men" who threw stones at them from the top of a sheer cliff.

Here are other stories about the little red-haired "men" of Africa.

One traveler saw them from a ship sailing off the coast of Mozambique, in the company of baboons. Another met in the depths of the same country a whole family of agogwe: mother, father and cub. The local hunters accompanying him strongly protested when he wanted to shoot one of the Lilliputians.

Have you heard, - his squire asked the hunter Kotney, - about the little men who live on May? About little people who are more like monkeys than people?

And he told how his father was once captured by the "dwarves" of May, when he was tending sheep on the slopes of Mount Longonot. Missing one sheep, he followed its bloody trail. Suddenly, out of nowhere, strange little creatures surrounded him, shorter than the “forest people” (that is, pygmies), they did not have tails, but they looked more like monkeys jumping through trees than people. Their skin is as white as the belly of a lizard, but their face and body are overgrown with long black hair.

With the help of his spear, the shepherd got rid of the dangerous society of militant "gnomes".

The most striking thing is that the little forest "men", as rumor draws them, are very reminiscent of extinct monkeys, well known to paleontologists ...

500-800 thousand years ago, small hairy "men" really lived on the plains of South Africa. In small groups, they wandered along the river valleys, hunted hares, baboons and even antelopes, which were rounded up by the whole "society". Baboons and antelopes were killed by hairy "little men" by breaking their skulls with sharp stones.

In 1924, limestone workers in the eastern Kalahari found the fossilized skull of one of these prehistoric monkeys. Since then, anthropologists have studied dozens of their skulls, teeth, and bones.

South African biologist Raymond Dart, after examining the first find from the Kalahari, called the fossil "little men" Australopithecus ("southern monkeys"). They were amazing monkeys! They lived on the ground, walked only on two legs and had almost human body proportions.

Their teeth were more human than monkey. Even in terms of brain size, they were closer to humans than to monkeys. In a five-year-old Australopithecus cub, the capacity of the skull was 420, and in adult Australopithecus, 500-600 cubic centimeters - almost twice as much as that of a chimpanzee, and no less than that of a gorilla! But Australopithecus were much smaller than these monkeys. Their growth did not exceed an average of 120 centimeters, and their weight - 40-50 kilograms.

Some scientists even suggest that Australopithecus spoke and knew how to use fire. Therefore, they consider them the most ancient ancestors of man.

“But,” writes M. F. Nesturkh, “there are no facts in favor of such an assumption. There is no reason,” he says, “to consider these monkeys as our ancestors.”

Are australopithecines really extinct, some romantic zoologists ask? Perhaps the rumors about the “May gnomes”, about the forest “little men” agogwe owe their origin to Australopithecus that survived in the wilderness of virgin forests? Persecuted by their stronger and more developed "cousins" - the people of the Stone Age, they could hide from their persecution in the impenetrable thicket and on the tops of the mountains, which in Africa are completely uninhabited and rarely visited by people: it is too cold for an African. After all, something similar happened, apparently, with " Bigfoot" in Asia.

Leopard hyena, donkey-sized cat and marsupial tiger

Wolf or mongrel

Predatory animals are better known to people and better studied than monkeys. After all, a person often had to fight against predators, protecting his livestock and his life from their attacks. Willy-nilly, he studied his enemies well.

Cattle breeders and hunters of all countries are well aware of the habits of predators of their homeland. Therefore, it is predatory animals that are most difficult to escape the attention of naturalists. And yet, even in the world of predatory animals, zoologists sometimes expect surprises.

One of the latest "surprises" is a mountain wolf from the Cordilleras of South America. The history of its discovery is replete with unexpected discoveries and bitter disappointments.

In 1927, the director of the Hamburg Zoo, Lorenz Hagenbeck, the son and successor of the work of Karl Hagenbeck, bought the skin of some unknown wolf in Buenos Aires. The man who sold it said it was a "mountain wolf" killed high in the Cordillera. None of the experts could establish which animal this skin actually belongs to. She traveled for a long time from one museum in Germany to another and finally ended up in Munich.

After 14 years, she was seen here by a great connoisseur of mammals, Dr. Krumbigel. After much deliberation, he decided that the skin, apparently, belonged to some kind of mountain variety of the maned wolf. The maned wolf lives in the desert plains of Paraguay, Bolivia, northern Argentina and southern Brazil. It was also discovered relatively recently and is still poorly understood. It has very long legs and ears, and a small mane grows on the scruff of the neck and on the back. It is known that the maned wolf hunts at night, mainly on various small animals, it also feeds on fruits.

The skin of an unknown beast brought by Hagenbeck after researching Krumbiegel was included in the catalog of the Munich Museum under the name "maned wolf mountain race".

A few years later Hagenbeck was back in Argentina. In some market, he saw three more of the same skins; but for rare skins they asked too much, and he did not buy them.

Around the same time, Dr. Krumbigel, looking through his old notes, remembered that in one of the collections of South American mammals he had somehow found the skull of a wolf, unlike any of the species known to science. An old work describing the signs of a strange skull, which the scientist found in his archives, made him very happy. He realized that he had finally received the key to unraveling the mystery of the ill-fated skin from the Munich Museum, which, as he himself knew very well, had been inaccurately determined by him.

In 1949, Krumbigel published a paper in which he reported on the results of his research: the skull and skin belong to an animal of a special species and genus. He named it Dasycyon hagenbecki. Dazition is close to the maned wolf, although it is very different from it. It is larger (the length of the skin with a tail is two meters), more squat and stocky, with short legs. It has small rounded ears and a very thick and long coat. On the back, the hair reaches a length of twenty centimeters! The fur of the Dazicyon is dark brown, and that of the maned wolf is yellow-red, like that of our fox. The maned wolf lives in the open plains, while the Dazition lives in the mountains.

None of the Europeans has yet seen this beast, either alive or dead. He was described and "attached" to science, so to speak, in parts - according to the skin and skull brought to Europe at different times.

However, in recent years, voices have been heard among specialists denying the real existence of the wolf described by Krumbigel. Opened in such an “extravagant” way, the beast, in their opinion, is simply a feral mongrel. In the latest guide to South American mammals ("Catalogue of South American Mammals"), published in 1957, the dasition is not mentioned among the wild inhabitants of this continent. I wrote, asking for clarification, to the Argentine Museum of Natural History. The opinion of prof. A. Cabrera was such that Hagenbeck's Dazition was not a mountain wolf, but a shaggy feral dog, something like a Scottish Shepherd Collie; first she fell into the hands of the flayers, and then to the Munich Museum. Professor A. Cabrera is the largest contemporary mammal specialist in South America.

But Dr. Krumbigel is also a world-famous scientist. He argues that if he could be mistaken, then only about the origin of the skin, but not the skull, which bears clear signs that have nothing to do with the canine genus.

Unfortunately, it is now impossible to verify the correctness of its definition: the skin of the dazition may still be kept in the museum, but the skull was lost during the war. So this dispute can be resolved only by future researchers who will have to re-extract a trophy priceless for science - the skull of a Cordillera mountain wolf or ... a feral mongrel from the slums of Buenos Aires.

End of free trial.

... Giant birds lived on earth - larger than an elephant! A water monster devouring hippos lives in the forests of the Congo... Zoologists of one expedition in Cameroon were attacked by a pterodactyl... The Saita Clara liner collided with a sea serpent in the ocean, and the Norwegian ship Brunsvik was attacked by a giant squid...

What is true here, and what is fiction?

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Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin

Traces of unseen beasts

INTRODUCTION

In September 1957, Japanese zoologists examined a sea animal caught by whalers. The beast turned out to be a belt-toothed whale of a species unknown to science. Keith!

This find is symbolic. In the second half of the 20th century, when mankind, having created ultra-high-speed rockets, boldly rushed into the outer world, at home, on Earth, such oversights were suddenly discovered - "unnoticed" whales! As you can see, the animal world of our planet has not yet been explored as well as it is usually said. Over the past half century, the press has repeatedly informed readers about unknown birds, animals or fish found anywhere in the wilds of the rainforest or in the depths of the ocean. And how many major zoological discoveries have not been noticed by the general public at all! Only specialists know about them.

How to explain that nature still presents naturalists with unexpected surprises?

The incommensurability of these figures convinces us better than any words that the ocean depths have not actually been explored to this day.

It is not surprising, therefore, that literally every trawl lowered to a considerable depth necessarily brings animals unknown to specialists from the bottom of the sea.

In 1952, American ichthyologists were trawling in the Gulf of California and even here they caught at least 50 varieties of fish unknown to them. But a truly endless land of the most unexpected finds was discovered by Soviet scientists who penetrated the ocean depths with the help of the latest equipment of the Vityaz research vessel. Wherever they had to work: both in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans, they discovered unknown fish, octopuses, molluscs, and worms.

Zoologists of "Vityaz" have extracted even more unusual creatures from the bottom of the sea - fantastic pogonophores. These are animals that nature “forgot” to endow with the organs most necessary for maintaining life - the mouth and intestines!

How do they eat?

Pogonophores are now found in all oceans, even in the Arctic. They are distributed throughout the world and, apparently, are not at all rare at the bottom of the sea. A. V. Ivanov, a Leningrad zoologist, to whom science is indebted for the most thorough studies of pogonophora, writes that these animals are extremely abundant in many of their habitats. “Trawls bring here a mass of populated and empty pogonophore tubes, clogging the trawl bag and even hanging on the frame and cable.”

Why, until very recently, so many creatures did not fall into the hands of marine explorers? And it is not difficult to catch them: pogonophores lead a motionless lifestyle.

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