The Neodinosaur Files: The Row
(Part I)
Previously, we discussed two alleged “neodinosaurs” from Papua New Guinea- cryptids which have been sighted by multiple witnesses, to the point where their behaviors are intimately known to locals. While proposed to be relic dinosaurs, I suggested alternate, more plausible identities for them, because I don’t believe dinosaurs are still living today anywhere in the world.
Today we’re going to cover one more neodinosaur from Papua New Guinea- the Row. Described by Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of cryptozoology, as a “surrealist dinosaur”, so outlandish looking it couldn’t possibly exist, this creature is commonly dismissed on account of it only having been sighted once in the 1920s or 30s. But there’s more to the surrealist dinosaur than first meets the eye…
The first recorded sighting of the Row was by an American named Charles Miller, at some unspecified point in the 1920s or 1930s, during his honeymoon with the newly minted Mrs. Leona Miller. Why they chose to honeymoon with cannibals in west Papua is lost to history, but what is known is that while they were there, they had a close encounter with a monster.
Accompanied by a detachment of Javanese headhunters, bodyguards against potentially hostile natives, the Millers trekked up the serpentine Maro River, in the present-day regency of Merauke. In the high tableland between the lush river valley and the island’s spine of snowcapped mountains, they encountered a previously unknown tribe, the Kirrirri. The Kirrirri were friendly enough to accept the two Americans, communicating with them via a sort of pidgin sign language, and the Millers slowly became acquainted with the tribe’s culture.
One day, Mrs. Miller noticed a Kirrirri woman bashing open a coconut, using a tool that resembled a rhinoceros horn or the tip of an elephant’s tusk. She was curious enough about it to inform her husband, and after looking around a bit they found dozens more of these tools in the village. Examining some of the horns, the Millers found they were quite hefty, measuring on average about 18 inches in length, 6 inches wide at the base, and weighing nearly 20lbs each. They seemed to be made of keratin, like a regular animal horn, but their structure was bizarre- instead of being smooth like a cow or rhino horn, these horns had cone-shaped layers, “like a nest of conical paper drinking cups, gradually diminishing in size until the top one came to a sharp point.”
When Mr. Miller asked one of the village elders, a wizened old man named Wroo, where the horns came from, Wroo drew a picture of a lizard-like creature in the sand. Per Miller: “It had a large neck, a huge bulging, hump-backed body terminating in a long tail. At the end of the tail, Wroo indicated, the horn fitted like a cap.”
Miller wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at, and asked Wroo to draw it again. This time, Wroo drew it larger and added more detail, portraying the animal with a broad, bony collar at the base of its neck, and large, triangular plates staggered along its spine. Miller remarked that it looked exactly like “reconstructions of dinosaurs in the museum back home.”
When asked how big the creature was, Wroo made two marks in the dirt about nine meters apart. He stepped back and thought about the size he had marked down, then went back, smeared out one of the marks with his foot, and added three additional meters to the creature’s size, for a total of twelve meters. Wroo said through signs that the creature was called the Row, after the sound it made- described as a cross between a roar and a snake hissing.
Miller was understandably skeptical, despite the stern assurances from Wroo of the creature’s existence, so he asked where the Row lived. He was told that the creatures lived in the hills to the northwest, only a two or three days’ journey away. How all this was communicated via an impromptu sign language by a tribe that had been isolated from the rest of the world for untold eons is just as unclear to me as it probably is to you, but please hold your questions until the end.
After considerable effort, Miller managed to persuade some of the tribesmen to take him and his wife to the dreaded dinosaur’s home turf. The Kirrirri were terrified of the Row, but Miller had a camera with him and was looking for something sensational to report back home- and this certainly would be the story of a lifetime if it turned out to be true.
Early the next morning, before the sun seared away the dew, the small party set out from the village. After a long day’s trek over steep, craggy terrain, they reached a vast, grassy plateau and made camp. At dawn the next day, they headed west along the edge of the plateau, the sides of which gradually became steeper and steeper until it was a sheer cliff with a fifteen meter drop-off. When they reached the western end of the mesa, the Kirrirri guides proceeded to take them north, treading more cautiously as they neared the lair of the beast. Hearts thumping in their chests, the sweat gathered a little more thickly on their brows than from mere physical exertion.
Finally, at the northern end of the plateau, the Kirrirri halted. They urged the Millers to lie prone in the grass, and pointed over the edge of the cliff. Mr. Miller peered over the precipice and saw a triangular marshland sprawled before them. Covering about fifteen hectares, the marsh was wedged between the plateau they were on and another whitewalled plateau facing them in the distance. At the juncture of the two mesas, a creek tumbled down the scree slope into the marsh. Crowds of rushes and reeds swaying gently in the breeze. Mangroves draped in ghostly blankets of hagmoss. A breathtaking panorama in the glory of midday, but Miller’s appreciation of the natural beauty soon devolved into abject horror, as the reeds began to shudder.
Leona fell to the ground when she saw it. Charles thought she had fainted, but she hadn’t- she was simply so scared she buried her head in the grass like a child, frantically grabbing at the tussocks and pulling them over her face to shield herself. Charles had more fortitude. Swallowing a pit of fear, he slowly raised his camera and aimed it at the monster in the reeds…
As if in obedience to my wishes; the colossal remnant of the age of dinosaurs stalked across the swamp. Once its tail lashed out of the grass so far behind its head I thought it must be another beast For one brief second I saw the horny point. I heard it hiss - Roooow - Roooow - Rooow.
The Row seemed to hear the whir of the camera, and didn’t take kindly to it,
for it suddenly stopped, reared up on its hind legs, its small forelegs hanging limp, and shot its snaky neck in our direction. It was a full quarter mile [400 m] away, it couldn’t possibly hear the camera, but I found myself cowering back as if that snapping turtle-shaped beak would lash out and nab me. I gasped with relief when the creature settled back.
Unfortunately for Miller, the Row’s hide was a drab, yellow-brown, exactly the same shade as the reeds it was half-concealed in, which made Miller’s color camera virtually useless. It was also covered in irregular scales which only further camouflaged it.
Twice more the row reared up, giving me a good view of the bony flange around its head and the projecting plates along its backbone. Then with a click my camera ran out just as the row slithered behind a growth of dwarf eucalyptus.
That is the end of Charles Miller’s account of the Row.
The story of the Row was first published in Miller’s book, Cannibal Caravan, which was published in 1939. I was regrettably unable to find an online copy of Cannibal Caravan, but a detailed overview of Miller’s account was available in Bernard Heuvelmans’ famous cryptozoology tome On the Track of Unknown Animals.
Heuvelmans took his work as a cryptozoologist seriously. He believed there really are large, unknown animals left in the world that have gone unnoticed by the scientific community, but which are nevertheless occasionally sighted or interacted with by ordinary people. On this, I concur with him entirely. The thing is, Heuvelmans specifically cited the Row story to juxtapose an obvious hoax against what he found to be far more truthful accounts, and to basically tell the cryptozoological community to get its act together and stop peddling obvious chicanery.
I must confess that I have quoted it here in such detail merely in order to give a typical example of the sort of evidence that cannot possibly be accepted. I am not saying that ‘Cannibal’ Miller, as he likes to call himself, is an arrant liar, but he offers not the slightest guarantee of his veracity.
Heuvelmans then proceeded to metaphorically firebomb Miller’s entire alleged encounter, noting multiple issues with the story both on its face and in its implications.
Firstly, whatever happened to the horn from the end of the Row’s tail? Miller didn’t bring one back so it could be examined by a biologist or paleontologist. That right there would have been all the proof required for the creature’s existence, as it could have been matched against known animal horns, and- if we still had it today- genetically tested to see what creature its owner was most closely related to. And although Miller’s book is “lavishly illustrated” there’s not one photo or even a drawing of the horn.
Second, what happened to the film? Miller mentions several times throughout the book how he showed parts of the footage he took to various film directors in Britain, but there’s no mention of what they thought about the dinosaur scene. No film director in Britain- in the whole world!- has ever whispered a rumor about the “secret dinosaur movie” by Charles Miller. It doesn’t exist. Even if the film did only show the creature in the background, 400 meters away, it still would have been of immeasurable value to a zoologist or paleontologist if it were digitally enlarged.
Lacking any hard evidence whatsoever for the existence of the Row, Heuvelmans concludes that we can only rely on Charles Miller’s word- since his wife can’t testify for or against him. But Miller’s word is unreliable at best- he made a bunch of other ridiculous claims in his book, such as how he personally participated in a headhunt and a cannibal feast. Cannibal Caravan is also the first, last, and only time the Kirrirri tribe is ever mentioned in any kind of literature, whether it be travelogues or anthropological studies.
Miller also seems to have been of the type prone to exaggeration, as his pre-Row career is summarized by Heuvelmans:
Instead of pursuing his studies as an engineer, he became a professional racing driver of cars, motor-cycles and hydroplanes. During the 1914-18 war he became an airman, and, having learnt to fly, he afterwards turned to stunt flying for a circus. Nor does the fact that he was also a wholesale pastrycook’s roundsman help to complete his scientific education.
Heuvelmans is quick to clarify that he doesn’t mean to discredit Miller on the grounds of his education alone- he cites many others with less education, and notes how laymen observations are oftentimes of great value to scientists if they notice an obscure detail of an animal. But in this specific instance, where Miller is known to have made other stuff up, his background doesn’t exactly help his case.
So that’s everything wrong with the story from a purely investigative standpoint, but this is a paleontology site. I wouldn’t waste your time just by debunking some silly story, so let’s look at the creature itself. Let’s take a closer look at the Row. Was it a dinosaur?
Absolutely not!
Heuvelmans included this hilarious, Seussian depiction of the Row in his book, merging illustrations of a Triceratops, a Stegosaurus, and a Diplodocus to create Miller’s “monster.”
Because that’s exactly what the Row is- a total mishmash of three completely unrelated dinosaur genera. Triceratops was a ceratopsian, Diplodocus a sauropod, and Stegosaurus a thyreophoran. These animals were as distantly related from each other as deer, giraffes, and elephants. That’s not an exaggeration- while Triceratops and Stegosaurus were very distantly related, both being ornithischians, Diplodocus was a saurischian, more closely related to theropods than any of the other dinosaur groups. Likewise, deer and giraffes are artiodactyls, under the order boreoeutheria, while elephants are afrotherians. There are also temporal issues with the mishmash, with late Cretaceous Triceratops existing closer in time to you and I than to Jurassic Stegosaurus and Diplodocus.
It’s absurd to mash them together like this- the end result looks like a cartoon parody of a dinosaur.
And, as Heuvelmans notes, not one of these dinosaur genera had a lone horn at the end of its tail. Yes, Stegosaurus had a four-pronged thagomizer, but the thagomizer functioned quite differently from a single, pointed horn. The thagomizer’s spikes were parallel to the ground, so that the tail could be used defensively by swinging it from side to side, stabbing attacking predators with the spikes. A single pointed horn at the very tip of a long, cumbersome tail would serve no defensive function at all- it could stab nothing.
Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ve identified what the horn was. I think Miller based the Row’s horn on the horn of a water buffalo. Water buffalo aren’t native to New Guinea, but they were introduced there by German colonial authorities prior to World War I, so it’s not impossible for Miller, visiting in the 1920s or 30s, to have seen someone using a water buffalo horn to break open a coconut. It resembles the description of a conical cup-tower structure, with many grooves along its flat surfaces, and water buffalo horns are frequently used as hammers, just like among the probably fictitious Kirrirri. Here’s a photo of one from southeastern China, used to cut fish:
Heuvelmans also offers an admirable attempt at using paleo-biogeography to explain why a dinosaurian identification of the Row is impossible, but dinosaur paleontology is not his strong point and he does make several errors, which I’ll briefly correct here-
Moreover the Stegosaurians are known only in the Cretaceous period in North America, and it would be rather surprising to find that they had reached the south-eastern tip of Asia, which seems never to have been joined to the North American Continent. It is also most unlikely that New Guinea was ever invaded by large Sauropoda with long necks and tails.
Stegosaurs are known mostly from the Jurassic, the era preceding the Cretaceous, though a few did persist into the early Cretaceous before the group finally petered out in the Albian epoch (~112mya). While Stegosaurus- the genus possessing plates most similar to those of the Row- specifically is only known from North America, stegosaurs as a group had a global range, living in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and possibly South America- that is, across Laurasia and Gondwana.
As we’ve discussed at length previously, Australia- and by extension Papua New Guinea- has been biogeographically isolated from the rest of the world since the Jurassic. While no stegosaurs are currently known from Australasia, it’s not impossible for them to have arrived there early in the Jurassic and then been stranded when the south pole got cold. Indeed, if Australia’s propensity for relic fauna is any indicator, it could have been the last place stegosaurs lived, if they did ever get there.
Similarly, there were sauropods in Australia and thus certainly in New Guinea as well, even if we don’t have any species known from New Guinea specifically. But factual errors aside, I still appreciate the attempt, as biogeography is overlooked far too often when discussing paleontology and cryptozoology.
Heuvelmans rounds out his argument by stating that Miller’s account was the only sighting of a Row ever reported, and that Miller was almost certainly lying.
Indeed, until there is proof to the contrary, the row looks damnably like an ill-digested memory of a bad Science Fiction film made by a producer ignorant of zoogeography.
But it wasn’t the only sighting.
Miller’s sighting was not the last time the Row was ever seen.
This story is so bizarre. We’re going to have to return to Creationist cryptozoologist Brian Irwin, who gathered the reports of the Kaiaimunu and the Doren of the previous essay. In addition to those sightings, he also collected multiple accounts of a creature nearly identical to Miller’s Row. Irwin does not mention the Row by name in any of his articles, so it’s unclear if he is aware of the creature from Heuvelmans’ book. We have to accept this as a possibility, since Irwin was specifically investigating cryptid reports, and thus can be inferred to have at least a basic interest in the subject. But he doesn’t mention it anywhere in the two articles he’s published.
In 2012, Irwin went to New Britain and interviewed Alphones Likky, who claimed to have seen a “sauropod-like creature” in 1995 while he was spearfishing on the south side of Ambungi Island- the reader will recall Ambungi Island as being just off the southern coast of New Britain, and the home of the alleged Kaiaimunu from the previous essay.
Alphones was facing south at the time, stalking fish along the bottom of the reef when he heard a cacophonous crash on the corals behind him. Alphones whirled around and was startled to see a very large animal a mere five meters away, fully submerged in the water. He said it slowly paddled past him, undulating from left to right, and entered one of the two underwater caves on the southern cliffs of Ambungi Island.
Describing the animal, Alphones said it had a long neck and tail, four legs- not flippers- but the hind legs were long than the fronts, and its feet resembled a duck’s. He estimated the animal was about four meters long, from the front legs to the end of the tail, and that it stood between two and three meters tall. It moved very slowly, but there was a visible motion to the tail underwater, swaying side to side. The skin was dark brown, but Alphones couldn’t discern the texture of the skin- if it was scaly, slimy, furry, etc.
The creature’s head was small and similar in appearance to a snake’s head. Alphones didn’t see any of its teeth, but its eyes were specifically stated to be similar to the eyes of other animals, whatever that means. The creature had plates or frills of some kind along its back and tail, but its neck was bare, and the neck remained horizontal for the duration of the ten second encounter. Alphones quickly resurfaced, scared out of his wits, and climbed into his canoe, rowing madly out of the area.
This sighting took place entirely underwater, but there were two other sightings on Ambungi Island of similar creatures.
In 1999, Alice Pasington was tending her garden on the south side of the island when she observed a three meter long creature eating some plants. It had smooth, reddish-brown skin, but was white around the breast. There were “dermal frills” poking out along its tail, but these were absent from the rest of its back and neck.
Alice said the animal moved slowly, with its neck held vertically. After it was done eating, the creature turned around and walked off, Alice following unobserved from a safe distance. The creature headed for a small cliff and, upon reaching it, jumped over the edge and dived into the sea. Alice said it left behind five-toed footprints, which was corroborated by other villagers whom Alice showed the tracks to.
Brian Irwin posits that, based on its smaller size, this sighting may have been a juvenile of the same species observed by Alphones.
There was another encounter in 2007, in which Jasinta Pitim and her husband Joe observed one of the creatures sleeping on a rock near the reef, again on the south side of Ambungi Island, and it fitted the description of the creature Alphones saw- a long, curving neck, dark-brown crocodilian skin, and dermal frills. In this instance, the creature slinked into the sea after it heard the Pitims making a commotion over it. And there were other sightings dating back to the early 1990s, but I don’t want to waste time recounting a litany of brief glimpses of the creature.
Let’s talk about the Gasmata Sighting.
Gasmata is a peninsula on the south side of New Britain, about thirty-five miles away from Ambungi Island. There’s a small village there, with a dirt airstrip connecting it to the outside world. Two and a half miles south of Gasmata is Dililo Island, an uninhabited island used for farming by the residents of Gasmata. In August 2004, three adults- Fabian Amon, Simon Patolkit, and Margaret Patolkit- were spearfishing on a reef, on the south side of Dililo Island1. They heard an unusual sound in the water and watched the fish scatter before them, obviously spooked. Being frightened themselves, they quickly left the water and went back to the beach.
Not long after, while they were drying themselves on the rocks, the trio observed an enormous creature lurch out of the water 40-50 meters away. It was traveling from east to west, parallel to the coast, so the three fishers were able to observe it in profile for over a minute before it submerged once again.
It had a huge body, and a three meter long neck that it held horizontally, close to the water. Half-submerged, its tail and legs weren’t visible, but the hulk of the animal they could see was eight meters total. The head was described as being lizard-like, or crocodilian, with big eyes. The animal was of a uniform brown color, and had rough skin. It also had what was described as a “saw” in the middle of its back, consisting of five frills or plates.
That, dear reader, is a Row.
There’s nothing else it could be. There is no other cryptid that matches this description.
This leaves us with a whole slew of quandaries. We’re forced to admit that, despite the very strong and valid objections raised by Heuvelmans, Charles Miller might’ve been telling the truth. And we’re confronted with a creature that is impossible. What is this thing?
First, let’s take a skeptical look at the Ambungi Island stories, because that’s where all of the sightings except the Gasmata one occurred. It’s entirely possible that they were all “in” on a practical joke. It’s possible that the Ambungi Islanders thought it would be funny to play a joke on Brian Irwin and made up this ridiculous creature to poke fun at a Creationist’s futile search for living dinosaurs. Ambungi Island only has ninety people, it would have been very easy for them to agree on the general details of their made-up monster before he arrived. And they would have known he was coming beforehand, because he had to arrange for lodging and accommodations. It’s even possible that the Ambungi Islanders had a copy of Heuvelmans’ book to base the creature on. Maybe not likely- I don’t think On the Track of Unknown Animals was ever translated into Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea- but we have to admit it as a possibility, given the similarities between the creatures.
But an Ambungi hoax still wouldn’t account for the Gasmata sighting, which occurred thirty-five miles away. Nor would it account for Miller’s story- assuming, of course, that the villagers didn’t have access to a copy of On the Track of Unknown Animals. Miller’s story appears to be at least partially vindicated by these more recent accounts. I do not believe for one second that Charles Miller hiked out into the wilderness with a previously undiscovered tribe to personally observe one of these creatures, but he really did travel to Papua several times throughout his life.
Even if he heavily embellished and falsified parts of his own account, it’s possible Miller heard about the Row from someone, and then added a bunch of details, embellished the creature’s size, and turned it into a dramatic expedition in which he starred as the heroic Carl Denham-esque figure. The ceratopsian frill and the single horn on the tail are notably absent from the accounts collected by Brian Irwin, so we could perhaps disregard those details entirely.
So where does this leave us?
Well, in joining these accounts- and, as far as I can tell, I’m the first person to do so- we have to accept the possibility that the Row might be a real creature. In rejecting Miller’s account, Heuvelmans noted how “nothing but a sheaf of similar reports can establish the veracity of such a story.” We don’t have a sheaf, but we have seven additional witnesses (six, if you count the Pitims together as man and wife), all plainly describing the same animal.
If we admit that there is some truth to the Row, then we need to come up with an explanation for it. This is a difficult task. Previously, I suggested relic Pleistocene fauna as possible identities for some other Papuan cryptids. That doesn’t work in this case- there’s nothing like the Row in all of Australasian paleontology. You have to go all the way back to the Cretaceous to encounter anything similar, because the animal most similar to it is a sauropod dinosaur.
I was harsh earlier when criticizing Miller for saying the Row looked just like “reconstructions of dinosaurs in the museum back home.” And I stand by that, because it’s a laughable statement, there are no dinosaurs in any museum that look like the Row. But, let’s be a little speculative for a moment and try to put the Row back together, assuming for the moment that it really is a sauropod dinosaur.
None of its outlandish features are impossible in principle for a sauropod. Some- but not all- sauropods are believed to have had a bird- or turtle-like beak, and while a pointy horn at the end of the tail is patently ridiculous, a tail club is not. Shunosaurus, a Late Jurassic sauropod from China, is known to have possessed one. Unlike a horn, the tail club has a clear defensive usage, being swung from side to side to strike at attackers. While it wasn’t pointed, it would have noticeably stood out from the rest of the tail and could theoretically be used as a hammer.
The neck frill- assuming it’s not a figment of Miller’s imagination- could be some sort of soft-tissue integument, made of skin and cartilage like the famous frilled lizard’s neck frill, or maybe keratin bristles. This could also help explain why the New Britain witnesses didn’t see it at all- since the frill was soaking wet after coming out of the ocean, it was flattened against the animal’s neck.
Even the plates along the back can be accounted for- while Heuvelmans correctly noted that they appear distinctly stegosaurian, something similar could theoretically have been present in a sauropod. Many sauropods are known to have had spines along their backs- Diplodocus had a row of short, pointed spines like an iguana running along its entire dorsum, and Amargasaurus had a double row of vertebral spines on its neck, although these are believed to have supported some sort of soft tissue structure, rather than standing freely. The Argentinian sauropod Agustinia was likewise formerly reconstructed with twin rows of broad, splayed spines along its back which could fit the description of “plates”. Such reconstructions are now considered outdated, with the spines being reinterpreted as misidentified ribs, but such a condition wouldn’t be impossible for a sauropod.
All of this aside, we discarded a dinosaurian identity for the Row earlier, and I stand by that. The Row, which I admit really does sound like a sauropod, certainly isn’t one. There are regrettably enormous gaps in Australasian paleontology, but there are Paleocene sediments known from Australia, and no dinosaurs have been found in them. There is also an excellent Pleistocene fossil record in Australia, and again- no dinosaurs.
Recall how Papua New Guinea was joined to Australia during the last ice age; even accounting for biome differences between tropical New Guinea and grass/shrubland Australia, they were part of the same biogeographic realm. If relic sauropods persisted in New Guinea, they would by necessity have also been present in Australia at least in the earlier Cenozoic when the continent was wetter, and we would probably know about them- put a big asterisk on that “probably” though since new species are constantly being discovered and remains are often fragmentary.
I don’t want to delve too much into this, as it’s an essay-worthy subject in its own right, but I’m open to the possibility of early Paleocene dinosaurs in this exact region of the world. There’s some tantalizing evidence from New Zealand suggesting a handful of dinosaurs may have survived into the early Cenozoic in the sticks of Gondwana, but I don’t believe they’ve persisted into modern times undetected. Even in a place as out-of-the-way as New Guinea, we’d know about a living sauropod by now.
If we rule out a sauropod identity for the Row, we have to think outside the box. Thankfully, the authors of the book Cryptozoologicon already did much of the heavy lifting on that front- they looked at Miller’s account of the Row and, while coming to the conclusion that it was an utter hoax, they offered a speculative look at what it could have been if it were a real animal. They proposed it was a highly divergent species of tortoise.
In their interpretation, the Row’s irregular “scales” and the stegosaur-like plates are just part of the carapace. Likewise, the ceratopsian-esque collar wasn’t a collar at all, but the flared opening to the carapace found in all giant tortoises. The long neck is simply an extreme high-browsing adaptation enabling them to feed from the Papuan canopies like giraffes. Stepping into this previously vacant niche, they would have faced virtually no competition, except from tree-kangaroos. They also suggest that the Row would be able to rear onto its hind legs to reach even further up into the canopies, even taking tentative bipedal steps.
Now, at first glance, this sounds like a pretty good explanation! It works with a recently extinct type of creature, but speculatively stretches it into a new species that closely fits the description of the Row. Living giant tortoises are known to have long, almost sauropod-length necks specifically for high-browsing, and some recently extinct genera from the Mascarene Islands had a similar adaptation. The Cryptozoologicon variant is just a more extreme version of this, and we certainly can’t say it’s impossible for a tortoise to evolve into a form such as this.
But the proposal presents major issues when we join Miller’s account to the ones collected by Brian Irwin. Tortoises can’t swim. They will drown if they’re placed in virtually any depth of water above their heads. But every single account collected by Brian Irwin involved the Row being in or entering the water- the one Alice Passington saw jumped off a cliff into the ocean. Even Miller’s account, while most likely fictitious, placed the Row in a marsh. The Row is clearly capable in the water, just like how high-browsing elephants are also adept swimmers.
Tortoises also don’t match the Row in several other key features. They lack long tails, which feature prominently in all of our Row stories, and thus can’t have a tail “horn” or club. And they definitely don’t have duck-like feet, as Alphones Likky reported.
Most importantly, however, is that there aren’t any tortoises in New Guinea to begin with, or in the entirety of Australasia. They never made it across the Wallace Line. So regardless of how compelling the Cryptozoologicon proposal is, the Row can’t be a tortoise. There were no tortoises in New Guinea for it to evolve from.
Back to the drawing board, then.
I think a testudine identity is still the most likely, given the animal’s attributes, but not a tortoise. Instead, I propose that a distant relative of the extinct stem-turtle Meiolania is the true identity of the Row.
Meiolania wasn’t a tortoise, but it convergently evolved to fill in the same ecological niche as the giant tortoises. Formerly widespread across Australasia, with fossils being found in Australia, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Lord Howe Island, all known Meiolania species disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene, most likely due to predation by humans.
It’s a more viable candidate for the Row purely from a biogeographic standpoint, but its physical attributes also match up better. Looking at it, we can see that it has a long tail covered in thorny spikes- horns, perhaps? Its head is likewise collared with thick, knobby horns, exactly like Miller’s Row!
All you have to do is give it a long neck- possible for testudines, as previously discussed- and upscale it a hundred times or so. It would do this to fill in the same high-browsing niche proposed by the Cryptozoologicon authors. Meiolania was already the second largest known terrestrial testudine, with the largest known species having a 6.6ft carapace, so an even larger size could theoretically have been attainable.
And since Meiolania was a turtle, not a tortoise, it’s possible for a species in its family to have retained or re-attained a partially semiaquatic way of living. Thus, we can still have our swimming Row if it’s a meiolaniid turtle. The duck-like feet reported by Alphones Likky could perhaps be accounted for as webbing between the turtle’s toes.
So there you have it! The Row might exist after all, but it’s not a dinosaur- it’s a giant turtle!
Sources
On the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard Heuvelmans
Theropod and sauropod dinosaurs sighted in PNG? by Brian Irwin
More ‘dino’ sightings in Papua New Guinea by Brian Irwin
Trophy Water Buffalo From Papua New Guinea - Feeding a Village
Cryptozoologicon by John Conway, C.M. Kosemen, and Darren Naish
Giant sauropod dinosaurs may have sported turtlelike beaks by John Pickrell
In the interest of investigative completion, note how all of these encounters take place on the south side of an island- in local context, the side that faces the sea, since the mainland of New Britain is plainly visible from the north side, just a short distance away.
Great piece, was hooked from start to finish!
Late response, but I enjoyed this when I first read it and re-enjoyed when I looked it over now.