The Neodinosaur Files: Papua New Guinea
Dinosaur cryptids of Papua New Guinea & the Bismarck Archipelago
(Some brief housekeeping before I begin the essay- firstly, I apologize for the long hiatus. I actually had to scrap the essay I originally had planned, because the words just weren’t coming. On top of that, the recent Foofaraw in the East regrettably was a great distraction to my attempts to pick a new topic. Anyway, we will be resuming a regular posting schedule now.
Second, I’ve begun a new publication- Whatever Blues. I will infrequently post short fiction there, whenever my muse decides to strike. Nothing will change about this blog, still gonna post biweekly, I just don’t want to have a mishmash of fiction and nonfiction cluttering the same blog. This past week I spent three days feverishly writing and editing Perihelion, a short story about a man and his dog facing the end of the world. Like the essays here, it is totally free to read, so if that interests you check it out and sub!)
Papua New Guinea is a strange place. It’s the second largest island in the world, centered in a massive archipelago between major industrial countries like Australia and China, yet it remains woefully unexplored. Lying east of Wallacea- the biogeographic borderlands between the Eurasian realm of placental mammals and the Australasian marsupials and monotremes- its fauna is firmly marsupial, with some odd, human-introduced exceptions like fallow deer and singing dogs. It also has one of the most diverse ethnic makeups in the world, with over one-thousand unique languages. The island is one of the few places in the world where cannibalism is still practiced by the primitive tribes of the highlands, and there remain dozens of uncontacted peoples in the extremely remote western half of the island.
Thus, it makes perfect sense for there to be something prehistoric lurking in the isolated Papuan jungles. There are reports of immense reptilian monsters prowling the forests and swamps, creatures of a bygone era that seem to have clung to life in this tropical refugia, outstaying their time on Earth by millions of years. Dinosaurs, some claim. Perhaps the very last heirs of that lost kingdom of reptiles. The haunting echoes of their ancient roars carried yet through the valleys on a Mesozoic wind…
We’re going to be discussing cryptozoology today. Two cryptids from Papua New Guinea that are reported to be living dinosaurs- or, as they are formally known in cryptozoological circles, “neodinosaurs”. Their assignment as dinosaurs is tentative and based solely on eyewitness testimony, as we have no other evidence for their existence. There are no photographs, no videos, no bones, not even casts of footprints. So, their true identity is really up for speculation. They are claimed to be dinosaurs, but we don’t actually know what they are, if they really do exist.
We will not be trying to “debunk” these creatures here, despite the paucity of hard evidence for their existence. I think large, undiscovered animals could certainly exist in a place as remote as New Guinea. But… I don’t believe they are dinosaurs. I wish they were, and who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t love for there to still be living dinosaurs1 running around in the remotest corners of the world? But, alas, there is very little convincing evidence2 favoring the survival of dinosaurs past the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. That said, in each of these cases I will suspend my own disbelief in neodinosaurs to explain more thoroughly why these creatures could not be the dinosaurs they are claimed to be, even assuming those species were still alive. I’ll also offer my own speculative, hopefully more plausible explanations for their identities.
If you believe in the neodinosaur phenomena, that’s fine! Read on, and even if you disagree with me, at least you’ll get a fresh perspective. And if you don’t believe in cryptids at all, that’s fine too! Just suspend your disbelief for twenty minutes or so and treat this as a fun little exercise in speculative evolution- a look at “what might have been” rather than what might still be.
With all that said, let’s begin.
The Doren
Lake Murray is the largest lake in Papua New Guinea, with a convoluted coastline stretching over 1,243 miles. A fractal maze of bayous make the shoreline a veritable labyrinth of inlets and peninsulas. The region is sparsely populated, with only about five-thousand people living along the lakeshore and in the surrounding one million hectares of virgin forest. Stilted villages punctuate the shoreline, and dugout canoes remain the only viable means of transportation between the isolated communites.
But the people are not alone- these dendritic lagoons are said to be home to a monster.
Creatively known as the Lake Murray Monster, this cryptid is supposedly gigantic:
On December 11, 1999, villagers travelling in a canoe reported seeing the creature wading in shallow water near Boboa. The following day, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor [Joseph Yup] and a church elder say they saw the animal not far from the first sighting. The creature was described as having a body ‘as long as a dump truck’ and nearly two metres wide, with a long neck and a long slender tail. It was walking on two hind legs ‘as thick as coconut palm tree trunks’, and had two smaller forelegs. The head was similar in shape to a cow’s head, with large eyes and ‘sharp teeth as long as fingers.’ The skin was likened to that of a crocodile, and the creature had ‘largish triangular scoops on the back.'
The Independent PNG, December 30, 1999
Despite its name, the Lake Murray Monster- Murray, for short- is not really a lake monster. Only a few villagers have ever actually seen it in the secluded lake. More commonly, hunters have run into it in the rivers and swamps that feed into the lake, where they report it swimming and catching large fish.
This, as far as I can tell, is the only major sighting of Murray that has been reported, apart from a sighting by a man playing tennis in June, 2013, which had no further detail provided. But there are several other, far more detailed accounts of similar creatures on the neighboring island of New Britain. Due to the similarities between them, we’re rolling them up into one and considering them the same creature.
In 2004, a report came in near Kokopo, the provincial capital of East New Britain, where villagers claim to have been terrorized by a 3-meter tall monster; a horrible thing with grey scales, a dog-like head, and a crocodilian tail. One local, Christine Samei, told reporters that the creature’s torso was as thick as a 900-liter water tank. She was also brave enough to go seek out the creature herself: “I heard the people talking about it and went there to see for myself. It’s a very huge and ugly looking animal.”
The beast’s lair was supposedly in the ruins of Rabaul, a city which was buried by a volcanic eruption in 1994 and has since been largely reclaimed by swamps. In addition to terrorizing the population, the creature was alleged to have killed and presumably eaten three dogs. Locals began arming themselves with machetes and forming militias to fend off the creature. To their credit, the local police took these reports seriously and sent out six officers armed with M16 rifles to hunt down and kill the monster. They didn’t find it, of course.
Another sighting came from West New Britain in November 2010. This time, the creature is referred to as the Doren. Pastor Ken-John was relieving himself in an outhouse- the worst possible place to have a close encounter with a cryptid!- at the Tabernacle of Worship Church, when he witnessed the Doren’s head and upper torso loom out of the jungle foliage a scant one meter away. Ken-John said the creature was medium-brown in color, and he described the head as looking like an airplane’s nose. The interviewer, Brian Irwin, didn’t ask what specifically he meant by this, but assumed he was referring to an airliner, not a needle-nosed fighter jet. Pastor Ken-John was shaken but unhurt in the incident.
The Doren is very well-known by locals, who were able to provide detailed descriptions of its behavior. For most of the year, the Doren lives a semiaquatic life by the beach, coming ashore during high tide and traveling back out to sea at low tide. It leaves distinctive 25cm footprints in the sand. While at first glance the tracks appear similar to tridactyl theropod footprints, there appears to be a fourth toe curved away from the rest in the rear.
During the wet season, the Doren migrates inland along a creek up to the mountains. It’s been observed eating crabs and digging up vegetable gardens near the church- the locals speculate that it’s looking for worms and bugs to eat, since it doesn’t usually eat the crops it unearths.
Most tantalizingly, the creature is specifically said to travel on four legs when walking, but when running it moves bipedally, and is able to run faster than a human can run.
First of all, let me say this- I love the amount of detail here. Cryptozoology is usually a murky field, with some cryptids only being fleetingly sighted one or two times over the years, but the Doren has a treasure trove of information about its diet, its migratory habits, its different styles of locomotion- we don’t even know this stuff about Bigfoot, which is far and away the most popular cryptid ever.
Now, to explain what in the world these creatures are. I got most of my research on these cryptids from Young Earth Creationist sources, which do have a vested interest in proving dinosaurs still exist, and which is reflected in their reporting. That said, I don’t dislike Creationists- though I disagree with them wholeheartedly on religious and scientific grounds- because they bring a lot of interesting discussion to the table, such as this. Nobody else bothered to report on these creatures. If it wasn’t for Genesis Park and Creation.com, we likely would never have known about these reports.
Genesis Park sent a team to Lake Murray in February 2015 to investigate the monster there. They brought a dinosaur book with them to show the locals, but initially they didn’t ask about Murray at all. Instead, they asked about local wildlife in general, and showed pictures of different animals to see what kinds of animals live there. They also showed pictures of hippos and pterosaurs as a “credibility check.” Sure enough, people began talking about the Lake Murray Monster unprompted, describing it as outlined above.
After the subject of Murray was broached, the Genesis Park investigators brought out the dinosaur book, and the locals identified two dinosaurs in particular as being most similar to the monster- Tyrannosaurus and Ceratosaurus. Ceratosaurus was the more popular choice for overall anatomy, but the witnesses said Murray lacked the dinosaur’s head crests, instead possessing the flat, unhorned head of Tyrannosaurus.
Brian Irwin, writing for Creation.com, likewise visited New Britain and collected interviews with locals- including Pastor Ken-John- about the Doren, and he came to the conclusion that the Doren might be the early dinosaur Herrerasaurus, which he suggests had a similar quadrupedal walk/bipedal run method of locomotion.
None of these dinosaurs are likely candidates for the Doren. First of all, none of them were quadrupedal walkers that raised themselves bipedally to run. In the case of Herrerasaurus specifically, this is a common, outdated misconception. All three of these theropods were agile, obligate bipeds that could not move quadrupedally if they wanted to. They also were not semiaquatic swamp dwellers- they show all the adaptations of cursorial land predators that hunted large, terrestrial prey.
Tyrannosaurus specifically is a very bad candidate. It wasn’t a fish-eater; fossil coprolites attributed to tyrannosaurs are full of hadrosaur bone fragments, not fish scales. But more importantly, there were never any tyrannosaurs in the southern hemisphere! That half of the world, at the time part of the splintering supercontinent Gondwana, was cut off from the northern hemisphere during the Mesozoic, and Australasia specifically was biogeographically isolated even from the rest of the Gondwanan realm by the south pole. We discussed this at length in a previous series of essays about Cretaceous Australia.
Thus, in order for the Doren to be a late-surviving tyrannosaur, it would have to have been of Eurasian origin, somehow managing to cross the Wallace Line into New Guinea, while no placental mammals were able to follow. This is unlikely at best, so we can throw this hypothesis out the window.
Ceratosaurus, while it may superficially resemble the Doren, is actually an even more unlikely candidate due to chronological issues. It last shows up in the fossil record 145 million years ago in the Tithonian epoch, the very last stage of the Jurassic, and its family doesn’t seem to have lasted much longer, with the last known ceratosaurid, Genyodectes, living in Argentina during the early Cretaceous, 112 million years ago. And Herrerasaurus died out before the end of the Triassic, 228 million years ago. This is an inconceivably long period for a species to exist in stasis despite vast changes to its environment and accompanying faunal assemblages.
There is a fallacy among cryptozoologists that you can just pick and choose any dinosaur from the entire Mesozoic if its general description fits that of a purported neodinosaur. This simply isn’t so- the Mesozoic was a whole geological era, spanning 186 million years. Untold millions of species arose and fell in this vast chasm of time. If we are to assume a cryptid in our day and age is a dinosaur, it would necessarily need to belong to a family that made it to the end of the Cretaceous and survived the KT extinction. Neither Ceratosaurus nor Herrerasaurus ever came close to the finish line. This isn’t troubling if you’re a Creationist who believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old- they simply think every dinosaur species existed simultaneously, alongside mammoths and ground sloths and deer and eurypterids and tigers and anomalocarids. But here, we accept the general consensus about the age of the Earth and Darwinian evolution, so this explanation doesn’t suffice.
An abelisaur such as Carnotaurus or a megaraptoran like Australovenator could serve as more likely candidates for the Doren. Dinosaurs of these groups did make it to the end of the Cretaceous and did live in Australasia. At first glance, abelisaurs look particularly promising, being descended from the ceratosaurs the Doren closely resembles.
But the reported attributes of the Doren don’t match with these dinosaurs either. Neither group had forelimbs that were useful for quadrupedal locomotion- megaraptorans had extremely specialized hands designed for stabbing and holding prey, while abelisaurs had laughably vestigial arms. Indeed, it’s been speculated that if the KT extinction never happened, abelisaurs may eventually have lost their diminished arms entirely. Abelisaurs in particular are probably the worst candidates for the Doren, despite their ceratosaur ancestry. They had prominent horns on their very short, squat heads, quite unlike the dog- or cow-faced countenance of the Doren.
So we can discard all of the proposed dinosaurian identities for the Doren. Where does that leave us? What else could this creature be?
One would be tempted to suggest Megalania, the giant Pleistocene varanid. Megalania is usually considered an Australian creature, but it is known from Papua New Guinea as well; during the last ice age, New Guinea was joined to Australia, forming a larger continent known as Sahul, so animals could walk between them.
Megalania has also been proposed as an explanation for a very similar cryptid from northern Australia called Burronjor, and has allegedly been sighted many times over the years. However, for the Doren, it’s unlikely. Megalania- now formally classified as Varanus prisca, but we’ll continue using the better-known name- is easily identified as a giant lizard, whereas the Doren is described as possessing more crocodilian features.
Megalania was also a quadruped, incapable of running bipedally. Its closest living relative, the Komodo Dragon, is able to rear up onto its hind legs to fight, but its front legs are the same length as the back legs. Additionally, despite its huge mass, Megalania was a very squat animal. In normal quadrupedal locomotion, even the largest size estimates place Megalania’s height nearly level with the average human waist. So it’s definitely not tall enough to be the Doren.
The teeth are another issue- when Komodo Dragons open their mouths, their needlelike teeth are completely concealed by their gums. In contrast, the Doren has extremely visible teeth, each tooth as long as a human finger. So it’s clearly not Megalania, regardless of whether or not that animal is still kicking around somewhere.
Instead, I propose that the Doren is a crocodilian. Specifically, a mekosuchine related to Quinkana.
Quinkana was a very large crocodilian that lived in northeastern Sahul as late as the Pleistocene. The most recent species, Q. fortirostrum, is believed to have gone extinct around 40,000 years ago, but it’s only known from fragmentary remains so it could theoretically have persisted longer, especially in the isolation of New Guinea.
Quinkana is believed to have been primarily terrestrial. The waterways of Sahul were already clotted with three other species of crocodilian, which Quinkana would have had to compete with; it would make more sense for it to leave that fiercely contested arena and exploit an empty niche, that of an active pursuit predator. Its serrated teeth also strongly suggest that it was a terrestrial hunter, with similar dentition present in Komodo Dragons and theropod dinosaurs.
It was also gigantic. Standing as the second largest terrestrial predator in Pleistocene Australia- after Megalania- Quinkana is believed to have weighed at least 440lbs and could have measured anywhere between 10 and 30ft long. The uncertainty is due to a total lack of postcranial remains. One particularly large tooth from a specimen found in King Creek, Queensland suggests that the creature may have grown to double the size of these estimates.
At first glance, Quinkana would certainly look the part of an antediluvian thunder lizard. It would have stood upright- though not as erect as a theropod dinosaur, with its legs splayed out somewhat due to constraints on crocodilian hip anatomy- and been a capable runner. Yes, a trained biologist would be able to identify Quinkana as a crocodilian with no issue, but if you or I saw a fleeting glimpse of it through the dense jungle foliage, we could be forgiven for thinking we’d just seen an honest-to-God dinosaur.
Identifying the Doren with a relic population of Quinkana or a related mekosuchine species is far more plausible than it being a dinosaur.
The gap in the fossil record is considerably shortened from 66 million years to a mere 40,000.
The cryptid’s crocodilian features- the tail, the scales, the scoops on its back- are all accounted for, due to it being a crocodilian.
The odd appearance of the footprints- three toes together with a fourth splayed out from the rest- squares with crocodilians, which exhibit this exact pattern on their feet.
Its long teeth would be easily visible to eyewitnesses, since crocodilian teeth are not concealed by lips or gums. Perhaps they weren’t really as long as fingers, but one could be forgiven for thinking they were in a moment of terror upon seeing this thing!
The full skull of Quinkana isn’t known, but the fragments we have suggest that its head wasn’t as elongated as that of a regular crocodile, possibly fitting with the Doren’s cow- or dog-like head.
The Doren’s immense size is explained. A 10-30ft length puts it in the range of a dump truck’s size. Quinkana also stood upright, so while not three meters tall, if the largest size estimates are accurate it may have been able to look a man in the eye. And if it reared onto its hind legs, it certainly would have appeared to be over three meters tall.
Additionally, while Quinkana may not have been three meters tall, a two or two-and-a-half meter height could theoretically have been attainable for a mekosuchine, given the gargantuan size attained by their South American cousins, the sebecids. Sebecids were a branch of crocodyliforms more distantly related to living crocodilians, and they were terrifyingly massive. The sebecid Barinasuchus was the largest land predator since Tyrannosaurus rex, with a massive skull converging in size with the tyrannosaur Daspletosaurus. That’s right- in the Cenozoic, the so-called age of mammals, the largest land predator to date was a reptile. So while Quinkana isn’t known for certain to have grown as large as Barinasuchus, we can’t rule out the possibility of a mekosuchine getting that big either.
The only thing not accounted for by this explanation is the creature’s apparent bipedalism, and its shorter forelimbs. Quinkana is generally depicted as quadrupedal, running on four legs to pursue prey in the savannas of northern Sahul. Usually the depictions run like the one below:
This is a fine depiction, if we assume Quinkana was wholly quadrupedal. But we don’t know that it was. As stated earlier, there are no postcranial remains from any species in the Quinkana genus. If we get very speculative for a moment, there’s a possibility that Quinkana was not quadrupedal, or at least not wholly so.
The Eocene crocodyliform Boverisuchus was extremely similar to the later Quinkana, being a terrestrial croc that ran down prey, killing with serrated teeth. It too appears to have left the water to avoid competition with three other crocodyliforms. But unlike Quinkana, there are robust postcranial remains of Boverisuchus we can look at. Boverisuchus’s legs were much longer and more erect than those of living crocodilians, and its hind legs were much longer than its fronts. Instead of claws, its toes were tipped with hooves to aid in running. And, eerily matching up with our eyewitness reports of the Doren, it appears to have been facultatively bipedal- that is, it was normally quadrupedal, but would sprint on its hind legs3.
Thus we can now come to a satisfying explanation for the apparent bipedalism of the Doren. It’s either a very large Quinkana or a closely related mekosuchine, which is facultatively bipedal.
One thing that remains inexplicable with this proposed identity is the apparent semiaquatic nature of the Doren. Remember, Quinkana was terrestrial, specifically so it wouldn’t have to compete with regular crocodiles. Why’s it swimming and eating crabs? Here, I’ll suggest the possibility that it has no other choice. In the Pleistocene, Quinkana preyed on megafauna- diprotodonts and giant kangaroos, but these are gone now. With its main food source gone- or very nearly so, as we’ll get into next- it would either have to adapt to changing conditions, or go extinct. There’s a slim possibility that it was able to return to a semiaquatic lifestyle, feeding on crustaceans and large fish in the rivers it formerly spurned.
The Kaiaimunu
Another dinosaur cryptid in the region is the Kaiaimunu. On two of the outlying islands south of West New Britain- Ambungi Island and Alage Island- a large, mysterious creature is occasionally sighted. These small islands are sparsely populated, with only ninety people living on Ambungi and three families total on Alage. Additionally, there are other uninhabited islands close by and the very large, desolate island of New Britain is only a mile and a half away from Ambungi.
Brian Irwin, writing for Creation.com, went to Ambungi Island to interview two local men about the creature they claimed to have seen- Robert (no last name given) and Tony Avil. We don’t have a specific date for this encounter, other than that it occurred sometime in either 2005 or 2005.
One day, late in the afternoon, Robert and Tony were on the beach of Ambungi Island, when they saw a giant monster shamble out of the forest. The men described the creature as being 10-15 meters long. The top of its head was as high as a house, and its belly alone was as tall as a man. It had a long tail and neck, with skin that was brown and shiny and smooth, and long arms tipped with gigantic claws. They said that it looked like a very large wallaby, but its head looked like a turtle’s head. Robert and Tony observed the creature for a decent length of time- they don’t remember exactly how many minutes, but it was long enough for them to observe it in detail. They followed the creature from a comfortably safe distance of 50 meters as it walked along the beach, dining on vegetation in the treeline. Eventually, it turned and went into the water, swimming out to sea and out of sight.
Robert told Irwin that the creature- sometimes referred to as the Kaiaimunu- has been sighted about nine times since the 1990s, usually around Christmas time, with 4-5 year gaps between sightings. He also stated that it’s been seen swimming between Ambungi and Alage islands with its head held above the water. When Irwin drew a classic three-toed dinosaur footprint in the sand, Robert said it was similar to the footprints of the creature he had seen, with the caveat that the creature’s footprints were similar to a duck’s.
After completing the interview, Irwin showed Robert (Tony wasn’t on the island at the time to be interviewed) illustrations from the book Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life by Hazel Richardson, and Robert pointed out a painting of Therizinosaurus as being most similar to what they had seen, with the exception of the coloration and its head, which he was adamant was more turtle-like.
Now, at first glance, Therizinosaurus seems like a good candidate. Therizinosaurs were around at the end of the Cretaceous and could theoretically have survived the KT extinction, and they were herbivorous which matches the Kaiaimunu’s feeding habits. But there are several issues with the creature being Therizinosaurus, or in the therizinosaur family. Like tyrannosaurs, therizinosaurs are only known from the northern hemisphere- they simply wouldn’t have been able to get to New Guinea due to its biogeographic isolation from the rest of the world.
Most obviously, Robert pointed out that the head is all wrong. Far too horselike, whereas the Kaiaimunu’s head was like that of a turtle. In his article, Brian Irwin notes that since no skull material is known from Therizinosaurus, a turtle-like head is as good as anyone’s guess. This is inaccurate- while no skull material is known from Therizinosaurus specifically, we do have skull material from other therizinosaurs, and using comparative anatomy we can infer that Therizinosaurus itself probably had a similar skull shape. A very good skull is known from the closely related Erlikosaurus, which matches the horse-like reconstructions, and partial skull material is known from several other therizinosaurs which also reinforces this. In short, there is no reason to believe Therizinosaurus had a turtle-like head.
Second, the footprints- Brian Irwin drew three-toed footprints in the sand to represent the feet of Therizinosaurus, and Robert said these matched the creature he saw quite closely. But there’s a problem with this- Therizinosaurus had four toes. Unlike every other known theropod, whose fourth toe was reduced to a dewclaw, Therizinosaurus retained its fourth digit for walking. So it would leave four-toed footprints, not three.
Therizinosaurus also seems like a hugely outsized creature to be living in such a small habitat. It’s only been observed, as far as I was able to tell, on two tiny islands south of New Britain. Even assuming that it lives undetected on West New Britain itself- and since it can apparently swim between islands, there’s no reason to believe the larger island would be inaccessible to it- it still seems far, far too large to exist undetected.
So, putting aside the notion that it was a therizinosaur, what else could it have been?
Initially I was going to suggest it could be a giant flightless bird, related to moas. These birds certainly are tall enough to be mistaken for a dinosaur, they had brown feathers, and they do look a little bit like a wallaby, with longer necks and rounded backs. But they lack a very important feature present in the Kaiaimunu- the claws. Moas had no arms whatsoever, not even the vestigial wings present in other ratites like cassowaries. In contrast, Therizinosaurus had massive, three-foot long claws, and its arms would have been very visible.
So where does that leave us?
It could be something more expected for the Australasian realm- a giant kangaroo. A sthenurine, specifically. These were among the largest known kangaroos, with Procoptodon goliah standing up to 8’10. Like all kangaroos, they were primarily herbivorous, and they were characterized by having very short, boxy faces, which wouldn’t be dissimilar to a turtle from a distance. While nowhere near as dramatic as the three-foot claws of Therizinosaurus, Procoptodon still had a nasty set, primarily used for defense and manipulating branches. We could also guess, if this is a different, as-yet unidentified species from Procoptodon goliah, that it may have substantially longer claws which would be more readily visible at the distance Robert and Tony observed the creature from.
Most importantly, a sthenurine is a perfect match for the initial description of the creature- a very large wallaby. Their underbellies would be as high as a man when standing erect, and their height could easily match that of the single-story houses common in Papua New Guinea. If we give ourselves some leeway, w could propose this unidentified sthenurine might be even taller than Procoptodon goliah, maybe converging with the titanic, as yet-unnamed species of Macropus from central Queensland, which stood up to three-meters tall. This Macropus species was very closely related to the living eastern grey kangaroo, and would have resembled it, but there’s no reason to believe a sthenurine like Procoptodon couldn’t have achieved a similar mass.
Now I’ll shoot my own theory full of holes and try to put it back together. Procoptodon is substantially smaller than the 10-15 meters of the Kaiaimunu, but more within the realm of plausibility, and we could perhaps chalk up the immense size to the witnesses’ fear making it seem larger than it actually was.
There are several other issues with the identification of the Kaiaimunu with a sthenurine kangaroo, however. Procoptodon, and sthenurines in general, are known only from Australia, not New Guinea. However, as we discussed previously, New Guinea and Australia were once connected as Sahul, so I do not attach great importance to this. Procoptodon could have walked there. And it may very well have walked, as it seems to have been unable to hop like a regular kangaroo due to its large size.
A bigger issue to a sthenurine identity is the biome difference between New Guinea and Australia. Procoptodon is known from areas that were semiarid during the last ice age, while New Guinea was and remains entirely forested. Here, we could propose that our hypothetical sthenurine adapted to a rainforest habitat in the time of Sahul, with the niche of large herbivore being vacant in New Guinea. Hunted to extinction elsewhere in Sahul, our giant Procoptodon kaiaimunu has managed to persist in small numbers on isolated islands in the Bismarck Archipelago, into modern times.
Also, its footprints would be even more divergent from the three-toed dinosaur track drawn by Brian Irwin than Therizinosaurus. Sthenurines only had one hoofed toe, so their footprints would not resemble either a dinosaur footprint or a duck footprint in any way. To account for this, I’ll tentatively propose a misidentification of a known animal- the cassowary. Cassowaries live in New Britain, and their footprints look exactly like a theropod dinosaur track, because that’s what they are, theropod dinosaurs.
Let’s assume that after they watched the sthenurine Kaiaimunu disappear into the forest, Robert and Tony went down to the beach where it had just been. They see two sets of tracks- one that looks like a dinosaur, from a cassowary that had recently passed through, and another that looks like the impressions of some sticks in the sand. Which would they be more likely to report?
Finally, Procoptodon doesn’t have the long neck associated with the Kaiaimunu. In fact, it had a very short neck, even shorter than living kangaroos. Once again I’ll offer a speculative suggestion that its neck may have become substantially longer to help reach the vegetation of forest canopy, but honestly I’m not sure how plausible this is given how the neck-length of all sthenurines appears to have been very bulldoggish.
While not as evocative as a living dinosaur, a living sthenurine persisting in New Britain would still be remarkable. The entire sthenurine family is believed to have gone extinct in the late Pleistocene, with Procoptodon goliah disappearing sometime between 45,000 and 18,000 years ago. Our Procoptodon kaiaimunu would thus be the last living representative of this otherwise extinct family.
I also want to address this- throughout this section I’ve been referring to the creature as the Kaiaimunu. This is actually unclear- the term is commonly used by cryptozoologists, but I’m not sure of its specific origin. Brian Irwin doesn’t use the term in his article- the creature Robert and Tony saw exists independently of the word- but other cryptozoology websites use it, so I’ll briefly discuss its meaning.
I’ve found two conflicting definitions of the term, both relating to strictly spiritual phenomena. On Wikipedia, imunu is a spiritual quality of Papuan mythology, the “power that pervades all things, including ritual objects.” It is personified in masked ceremonies, mostly being represented as human ancestors instead of plants or animals. Going by this, the term should be two words- kaia imunu. Looking at the etymologies of some Papuan baby names, Kai- seems to mean “sea”, so kaiaimunu would be “sea spirit”. I suppose this would reflect the creature’s swimming tendencies.
Another definition, however, uses it as just one word, kaiaimunu. Specifically occurring in the Purari Delta on mainland Papua New Guinea, this kaiaimunu is a dark entity, represented by a giant, wickerwork statue located in the back of men’s houses- one such statue is pictured at the beginning of this section. Each one of these wickerwork statues, pig-like in shape, stood over 6ft tall. Every male in the Purari tribe was initiated into the cult of the kaiaimunu, with young boys being lifted onto the old wickerwork kaiaimunu to break it. The initiates then helped their uncles to weave a new kaiaimunu wicker, sitting inside the statue the whole while, with his uncle poking a cane strip through to him, and the boy weaving it back through. As late as the 1940s, all Purari ceremonies ended with a headhunting raid for a human offering to the kaiaimunu. The head or body of the victim was ritually fed to the kaiaimunu wicker, and the next day any tribesmen who wanted to eat some of it could.
So we have a potential third explanation of the Kaiaimunu here, as an entirely supernatural creature. Not nonexistent, mind you, but supernatural. One that isn’t a biological animal with a reproductive cycle and a fixed diet and migratory habits, but something far darker, something that craves blood and human sacrifice.
Given that option, I’d much rather it be a dinosaur or a dopey looking kangaroo.
In part two of this essay, we’ll discuss one more dinosaur cryptid from Papua New Guinea- one so inexplicable and bizarre even the father of cryptozoology dismissed it as fraudulent… but it might actually be real.
Sources
The Lake Murray Monster of PNG
“More ‘dino’ sightings in Papua New Guinea” by Brian Irwin
The Croc That Ran on Hooves (Boverisuchus video)
“Theropod and sauropod dinosaurs sighted in PNG?” by Brian Irwin
Very good video on the anatomy of Therizinosaurus
Procoptodon goliah at the Australian Museum
Papuan baby names (kai- prefix)
Kaiaimunu tradition among the Purari
Yes, I understand full-well that birds are taxonomically living dinosaurs, but I feel no need to pretentiously preface every mention of the word dinosaur with “non-avian” since you all know exactly what the word means in this context.
In a forthcoming essay, we will discuss some evidence that dinosaurs may have persisted into the early Paleocene, but no further.
This theory is disputed, but has never been conclusively disproven.
Greetings from the primitive highlands of Papua New Guinea. Cannibalism is definitely no longer practiced here, sorry to say, probably not since the 70s. You are right about the various "dinosaur" sightings, but please be a little more careful with your ethnographies.