#amazon expedition

There was definitely more than one spider on board.

Amazing Amazon Expedition

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Beasts in the Mist This text was in Discover, Vol. 20 No. 9 (September 1999) preceding the article about David Oren. It was a letter written by the author Marguerite Holloway, but wasn't published on the website:         "His detractors suspect he's as likely to find the beast as other adventurers are to find Bigfoot, the mythical creature said to be roaming the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. One might argue how much faith Oren should put in anecdotal evidence provided to him by 50 or so people who say they've had encounters with the sloth. Still, it seems odd that scientists, of all people, would question the search for anything thought to be elusive or even impossible to find. Think of the naysayers who used to scoff every time Carl Sagan said there had to be other planets orbiting other suns in other solar systems; now other planets are discovered so often it's hard to keep track of how many there are.         You'd think that the science establishment, having been proven wrong so many times, would adopt a bit more humility. If there's one thing we keep learning, it's that we don't know as much as we think we do. Holloway says,"People seem to have trouble admitting that not everything has been found. The Amazon is a huge, largely unexplored area."         She is hoping Oren will find his elusive beast, if only to offer the doubters a little comeuppance: "We have a lot of hubris about nature, and when we find things we don't expect, it shows us that nature is more complicated than we ever guessed and that there must be a lot more to find." She is impressed that, wherever he goes, Oren treats other people as equals. That respect has led him to trust accounts many have given him of encounters with the beast. "It seems ironic that Oren himself isn't offered the same level of respect and trust by some of his peers." .... Marguerite Holloway If David Oren could find just one of the horrifying creatures he knows are out there — huge sloths with giant claws and a reputation for twisting off the heads of humans — he could save the world's largest rain forest. Manuel Vitorino Pinheiro dos Santos had just shot four white-lipped peccaries when he heard it. The horrible soul-wrenching humanlike cry came from a tangle of vines about 50 meters away. "The moment you hear it, all your hairs stand on end," says Dos Santos. He dropped the peccary he was carving up, grabbed the lianas he had cut to lash the carcass to his back, and sprinted in the opposite direction, toward the nearby river. The second scream was farther away, but the trees still shook with the force of the noise. The third and fourth calls were muted, seeming to come from deep in the rain forest as the animal moved away. But Dos Santos waited in the water for an hour or so until he felt safe going back for his peccaries. "I just had a knife and no shells and didn't want to face the creature," he explains. No one — not Dos Santos or any of the other villagers of Barra do São Manuel, a tiny settlement on the banks of the Tapajós River deep in the Brazilian Amazon, or anyone else in the vast rain forest—relishes facing it, with or without shotgun in hand. Covered in long red hair, standing more than 6 feet on its hind legs, emanating a stench so foul it disorients everyone in sniffing distance, the mapinguari is reputed to be the wildest, rarest, most mysterious and terrifying denizen of the rain forest. It is said to avoid water, to wander with roving herds of white-lipped peccaries and to protect them, to forage at night, to twist huge palm trees apart with its massive claws so it can feast on the soft insides, to have backward-turned feet, and to be generally immune to bullets. The mapinguari is also said to be another Bigfoot, a figment of the imagination of people like Dos Santos — and of a prominent scientist named David C. Oren, whose relentless quest to find one is growing as legendary as the beast itself. It is to Oren and his mapinguari-seeking swat team that Dos Santos relates his encounter some two months later, standing in the same spot in the forest near Barra. It is late afternoon, and the already dim verdant light of the rain forest is waning. Everyone falls silent as Dos Santos tells his story. Even if nothing lurks behind the massive buttresses of a copaiba tree to one side of the clearing, the mind's eye can see the shadowy form of the mapinguari. The men have all heard the tales, although sometimes the creature is given a different name: capé-lobo (wolf's cape), mão de pilão (pestle hand), sic (bottle foot), or juma. Dos Santos says the mapinguari he saw had the claws of a giant armadillo, the face of a monkey, and a nauseating smell, like garlic vine and fetid peccary. Oren, an ornithologist and expert on Amazonian biodiversity at the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém, listens to Dos Santos's account and then suddenly cups his hands around his mouth, throws back his head, and yells, hoping to get the mapinguari to respond. No matter how many times a day he does this, it still induces involuntary shudders in the entourage. His loud high cry travels down the scale, ending as a low rumble. Silence. Then, a piercing sound. A Screaming Piha, a bird whose whistle resembles the catcalls of construction workers on lunch break, answers. But nothing else. The team — including Dionisio Pimentel, a technician from the Goeldi Museum, Tiago Xipaia, who has accompanied Oren and Pimentel to this region before, Dos Santos, and two other men from Barra, Sebastião Miranda and Luís Claudio Albuquerque Mendes — heads back to camp for a dinner of freshly shot peccary. No one seems disappointed, though. Several villagers have reported seeing or smelling the beast in the last several weeks and, on their very first day in the forest, the men found a set of tracks: footprints about 11 inches long and 5 inches wide, set apart by a stride of 3 feet or so. The expedition is still young. And Oren, who has risked his scientific reputation because he has come to believe the stories of hunters and rubber tappers and others in the rain forest who say the mapinguari is quite real, remains cautiously optimistic. He knows what becomes a legend most: the one who hauls the legend in. Oren did not always believe in mapinguaris. When he first came to study birds in Brazil more than 20 years ago, to do research for his doctorate at Harvard, Oren heard about the creature. He quickly classified it along with other Amazonian myths: the activities of the boto dolphin, blamed for all unwanted pregnancies because it assumes the form of a handsome man, penetrates village parties, and lures young women into the floral night; or the transformation of the curupira, a protean creature that appears as an animal or a hairy, ugly man and plagues hunters. Some of the mapinguari tales are just as fanciful: It is an old Indian whose hubris led him to seek immortality and who is now relegated to wandering the forest forever as a stinking, shaggy bicho (beast in Portuguese); it has a single eye, loves tobacco, and twists off the upper skulls of its human victims so as to suck up their gray matter. But about 15 years ago, after repeatedly hearing mapinguari tales, Oren changed his opinion. "I was talking with a friend and he said, 'David, you are the biologist, I am the historian. What could this creature be?'" Oren recalls. "And it was when I first listened carefully to one of the stories that the light went on." In a Goeldi Museum monograph in 1994, Oren hypothesized that mapinguaris were indeed real—or very recently extinct — and that they were none other than the last extant giant ground sloths, Pleistocene survivors lying low in the tropics. These enormous creatures — relatives of today's two- and three-toed arboreal sloths but with higher metabolisms and thus greater speed—emerged about 30 million years ago and roamed the Americas, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. They were red-haired vegetarians with large claws that curled under and faced backward when they walked on all fours, they could stand on their hind feet like people, and some species had dermal ossicles, bony plates that made their skin tough. In paleontological time frames, the giant ground sloths had just disappeared yesterday. Overhunting or climate change or some combination thereof had wiped them out sometime between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. It seemed eminently possible to Oren that the greatest expanse of rain forest in the world — and one that is rich in ground sloth fossils — could still harbor such beasts. Oren is not the first scientist to reach this conclusion. In the late 1800s an Argentinean paleontologist named Florentino Ameghino took an eyewitness story of a strange creature seen in southern Patagonia to be an indication of a living ground sloth. Although Ameghino never found the evidence he sought, his reasoning is described in detail by zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans in On the Track of Unknown Animals. The book, published in 1955, launched cryptozoology — the study of hidden animals — and captivated Oren when he read it years ago. Heuvelmans ends his chapter on Ameghino and the giant ground sloths with a tantalizing query about the Amazon: "Might they not still live in this 'green hell' and find it a heaven of peace?" Stalking the wild-eyed mapinguari in that green hell is not the easiest way to spend one's time. The terrain is wet and dense and dark and infested with ticks, spiders, stinging ants, malarial mosquitoes, wasps, Africanized bees, stingless bees (that can nonetheless pinch heartily), chiggers, blackflies, whiteflies (which carry leishmaniasis), and the dreaded botfly. Oren has had his share of all of the above, but particularly the last one. His left heel has a dime-size scar surrounded by a web of what look like varicose veins. A botfly larva — which probably entered the skin through a mosquito bite hole — foraged around his foot for weeks, growing into an inch-long fly, eating out a new circulatory system and never staying still or putting up a breathing siphon as botfly larvae typically do. "It was the Jacques Cousteau of botflies," says Oren. "It had an Aqua-Lung." Beyond braving the bugs and many other hardships, Oren and the team must cover as much ground as possible — sometimes walking as many as nine hours a day — trying to find tracks or traces of recent peccary passage. "It is like looking for a needle in a haystack without a magnet," says Oren as he sits in the dark of the camp, digesting white-lipped peccary, which was accompanied by an appetizer of yesterday's fire-roasted free-range curassow. The men discuss tomorrow's strategy: Now that they have found the site of Dos Santos's aural encounter, the team will try to find a watering hole that he also remembers and see if peccary or mapinguari tracks show up there. The huge prints the team found on the first day were a week old, according to Dos Santos. He and Pimentel followed them as far as they could, but the tracks just faded away. This trip to Barra is Oren's sixth mapinguari foray since 1994, when he began looking in the field for hard evidence of the creature. "If you add it all up, it's less than four months actually," he says. He has received grants for this work from the Brazilian Boticário Foundation and a small film company; the rest of the time he relies primarily on his Goeldi salary, which includes the many research grants he gets from such places as the MacArthur Foundation and the World Bank. So far, the evidence Oren has gathered on these hunts — a clump of hair, several fecal samples from different areas, and some casts of footprints — has led to naught, fading like tracks in the forest. The hair proved to be that of an agouti, the fecal samples did not reveal any DNA aside from, in one case, that of a giant anteater, and the casts don't hold any scientific weight, as Oren readily points out, "because they can be easily faked." The lack of tangibles is hard to overlook. "He is a kook," mutters one ornithologist, who doesn't want to give his name. Even some of the scientists who are supportive of Oren's quest have a hard time reconciling the paucity of mapinguari data with the rigor of his work on birds and biodiversity. "He is a top-notch scientist," says Roger Sayre of the Nature Conservancy. "But it is like all those things you see on tv: They throw out all those teasers, and it's like, 'Where is all the hard evidence, David?' " Other scientists are willing to accept more on faith. "What a bankrupt world it would be if you refused to believe things existed until you actually had seen a specimen in a museum. I mean, there are lots of things we are prepared to believe exist without having seen them," says Wildlife Conservation Society biologist Kent Redford, citing subatomic particles and Madeleine Albright's accounts of NATO air strikes in Kosovo. "Why not a mapinguari? More power to David. And I hope he is right." The strength of Oren's conviction comes from firsthand testimonies he has collected from more than 50 witnesses who have had run-ins with the creature. One witness is Mário Pereira de Souza, whom Oren visits for the third time on his way to Barra. De Souza lives in Itaituba, where he does odd jobs for the highway department. After Oren's gentle prodding, De Souza tells the story again — although it is clearly not his favorite memory. His encounter with a mapinguari took place in 1975, when he was working as a hunter for a mining camp along the Jamauchim River, which flows into the Tapajós, just south of Itaituba. De Souza said the long-haired creature screamed and came staggering toward him on its hind legs, swaying and unsteady. But what he remembers most, and the reason he claims he has never set foot in the rain forest again, was the stench. "The horrible smell entered into me and made me dizzy," he says. "I was not right for two months." Oren's reliance on anecdotal stories makes many researchers uncomfortable. "I think it is a hoax," says Louise Emmons, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. "If you know local people, they love to pull the neck of any gullible scientist." While Emmons is intrigued by Oren's hunt, she says the chances of such a thing being anywhere in the Amazon are minuscule because naturalists have been poking around there for centuries: "I've never heard anyone mention anything that is something we don't know about, particularly a large animal." "I don't think he is being hoaxed. I think he is being courageous," counters Nigel J. H. Smith, a geographer at the University of Florida in Gainesville who has traveled widely in the Amazon collecting folktales and legends — including those of the mapinguari — which he describes in his book The Enchanted Amazon Rain Forest: Stories From a Vanishing World. "We don't have to put local knowledge in a shrine, but there's a lot of natural history knowledge that scientists are too dismissive of. I mean, they found an extinct peccary down in Paraguay 25 years ago." The Chacoan peccary is perhaps the best precedent for Oren's story because the creature was well known by locals, but it took scientists a long time to believe in it or to find the thing. "That was a mythical animal as well," recalls Phil Hazelton, a natural resources management specialist with the World Bank who helped find the creature. "We had this mythical peccary around, and it was terrifying in size and everything." It turned out to be a very large third species of South American peccary, thought to have gone extinct within the last few hundred years. Even in a part of the rain forest just a half day's walk from a settlement such as Barra, it is easy to imagine that anything could stay hidden if it chose to. By the end of the first week of slicing and slogging through the tangled expanse, the frustration of Oren's team grows. Although they encounter giant armadillo holes, tapir tracks, and a troop of woolly monkeys — indications that hunting pressure is low and that the area has been largely undisturbed — the shaggy bicho emits no hair-raising cries, leaves no feces for collection. The men find one other set of large footprints — also about three times the size of those of a tapir, the largest creature in the rain forest — but they are even older than the first set. At one point, the group passes a tree gouged by the teeth and claws of an onça, or jaguar, a creature rarely seen even by people who spend their lives in the rain forest. "This thing is rarer than an onça," says Oren, as the team lurches off again, following a trail left by peccaries. Why the mapinguari would run with smelly boars is unclear. Perhaps "it likes to eat the same kinds of things that white-lipped peccaries do," Oren muses. "Or I am wrong, and it is a horrible marsupial and it eats white-lipped peccaries. But I hope not because then it will eat us." Dos Santos argues that the reason for the association is quite simple: "It is the protector of the peccary." This view of the mapinguari is one Nigel Smith believes underlies much of the folklore of the Amazon. The geographer maintains that stories about reprisal by the mapinguari or other threatening creatures ensure that forest communities don't deplete resources. "Many legends were conceived in order to entertain audiences with colorful and inspiring stories," he writes in The Enchanted Amazon Rain Forest. "Indirectly, though, they also serve to relieve some of the pressure on animal and plant life." This explanation may also hold a key to Oren's obsession, to the reason he braves ridicule and the intense hardship of these expeditions: He loves the rain forest, and he loves Brazil, a country that he just joined as a naturalized citizen. Oren talks constantly about finding the wide-ranging mapinguari so that huge tracts of land would have to be set aside to protect the creature. In the forest near Barra, mineral rights are held by the mining company CVRD, which could decide at any moment to raze the trees and strip the reddish earth. Finding the mapinguari here "would change all that," says Oren. "David has chosen to devote his life to the animals and plants of the Amazon," notes Redford, who has known Oren since they were graduate students together more than two decades ago at Harvard. "So in a sense his conviction in the existence of mapinguari has as much to do with seeking a powerful symbol for the need to conserve the Amazon as it does with his conviction that this animal really exists. I think that part of the passion he exhibits toward this search is, in fact, passion toward a search for the ongoing survival of the Amazon rain forest." Passionate as he is, Oren seems tired of the hunt for now. Back at camp one afternoon, in the final days of the expedition, he says he may give up, let someone else search the rain forest for the creature. The fact that he has come forward with his hypothesis is enough, he says; it makes it more likely that other rain-forest visitors will turn in a mapinguari if they kill one in the future. "If we are not successful this time, I really should get on with ornithology," he sighs. "You get recognized for the number of papers you produce, not for the number of wild goose chases you go on." That night the rain is torrential and the team huddles under a tarp in the dark, swatting at mosquitoes, relighting the candle after moths extinguish the flame. Filled with rice and beans and manioc, the men are out of camp by 7:30 the next morning; clouds of blackflies follow them. As Dos Santos leads the way, Oren cups his hands around his mouth, throws back his head, and calls out again to the mapinguari, wherever it may be. by Marguerite Holloway © Discover, Vol. 20 No. 9 (September 1999) You may also enjoy this related post: Is the legendary Mapinguari a giant ground sloth? To discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures, please follow us at cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com or on twitter @cryptidfans!

In popular culture A March 2011 episode of Beast Hunter titled "Nightmare of the Amazon" aired on the National Geographic Channel, featuring a search for mapinguari in the Amazon Basin. Josh Gates, world adventurer and eager truth-seeker, headed to the rainforests of Brazil in search of the legendary Mapinguary, for his Destination Truth show season two, trailing recent sightings of a giant sloth monster and finding reports that it might be a descendant of the giant sloth, a species long thought to be extinct. You can watch the Sloth Monster episode instantly at Amazon.com for a couple bucks. The video also shows Josh Gates going to Africa in search of a flying dinosaur that has reportedly been harassing the locals from overhead.

Recently a team of explorers and film makers returned from their expedition to the Peruvian Amazon in search of the giant anaconda and repeatedly came across stories and eye-witness accounts of the Yacumama. They decided to systematically interview every tribe they met in the jungle to see if the descriptions varied. Not only did every report corroborate the other but they also supported the data and theories of Mike & Greg Warner and the Yacumama (Black Boa). The photographs, locations, size, habitat and morphology of the Yacumama are all publicly available at http://www.bigsnakes.net The Warners intend to prove the existence of the Yacumama (mother of the waters) through scientific best practise during their ground expedition in the dry season. Mike & Greg Warner Warner Amazon Expedition, 2011 It sounds like an Indiana Jones adventure. After 23 years of research including the detailed study of ancient art, cultures spanning 3000 years and three continents to the latest in satellite imaging technology, a father and son make an extraordinary trip deep into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon to confirm their theories that this is where a giant anaconda with a difference lives. But that's precisely what Mike Warner (73) and his son Greg (44) have done, seeking evidence that this was the home of the Yacumama and actually capturing a picture of the creature. A leviathan of the jungle, which reports say reaches 40 metres in length and two metres in diameter, it dwarfs any snake known to science. This anaconda is not green but dark brown and is known by the locals as the 'black boa' or 'Yacumama'. "Yacumama is translated as Mother of the Water and reports of this giant snake abound throughout the Amazon basin and history." Mike, who is partially sighted, has spent 23 years researching the beast but it was only six months ago when his son discovered his research documents and they decided to take part in the incredble journey. Cryptozooologist Mike of Hillhall spent his life savings setting up the expedition with Greg to find out more about the snake, which reports say can engorge water then shoot a monkey out of a tree like a water canon. The team spent 12 days in March using the latest satellite equipment to take images of the huge reptile and were able to officially announce the discovery on May 2. The explorers were dogged by hazardous weather conditions in the middle of the rainy season but eventually managed to take off by hydroplane from the Amazon River on day five of the expedition. "Despite being buffeted by a freak storm we managed several flyovers at an average altitude of 400 feet recording video footage from two cameras at either side to the rear of the aircraft and Greg, located in the front with the pilot, taking around 300 still photographs" said Mike who had his 73rd birthday while in Peru. After an exhausting 12 days in the jungle and a 30 hour trip back home the father and son team were finally able to examine their photo evidence in more detail, over 700 photos and five hours of video "The data is immense and will take months to fully appreciate but already it supports our theories of 'channels' created by these giants as they make their way through the dense jungle knocking down trees 90 feet tall, but more importantly we managed to catch one of these reclusive giants on camera as it made its way through one of its watery channels." It was Colonel Percy Fawcett, who was commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1906 to map an area of the Peruvian Amazon in a dispute over rubber production who, after an encounter with a giant anaconda, first documented large 'trails 6 feet wide' or what are now called 'channels'. And according to Greg it was the link made between his account and the evidence of large irregular 'channels' at the site they visited that led to the discovery. They have now shared their findings with the Peruvian government, the National Geographic Society in Washington and Queens University in Belfast. The team will now spend months analysing the footage and plan to return to same location in October to get thermal imagery which will help find the numbers of anacondas. This time they hope to bring with them a television crew. Greg concluded: "The real hero is my father. It must be incredible to have spent 23 years researching this and then to succeed in an expedition where others had failed." There was an amazing postscript to their trip when an anaconda, believed to be the one they located in March, is thought to have been responsbile for smashing the house of an elderly couple in a small village in Peru earlier this week.