A recent discovery of a new salamander brought my mind back to the Cryptid giant salamanders .
A striking new species of lungless salamander has been found living in a small stream in the Appalachian foothills of the
Giant salamanders were said to have been seen in the Trinity Alps wilderness area in California .It covers over 517,000 acres, so a very large area for something to hide in.
In the 1920’s Frank L. Griffith, was out hunting deer and reported that he spotted five Giant Salamanders at the bottom of a lake ranging from 5 to 9 feet in length. Mr. Griffith further reported that he was able to catch one of these Giant Salamanders on a hook, but was unable to pull it out of the water, forcing him to let the creature go.
In 1948, after hearing about Frank Griffith’s story, biologist Thomas L. Rodgers made four unsuccessful expeditions to the area to search for the Giant Salamander. Rodgers thought that these Giant Salamanders might be a type of Pacific Giant Salamander, perhaps mutated to great size by the isolated geography of the area.
Then n 1951 Herpetologist George S. Myers wrote a piece in the Scientific Journal in which he said that a link between the Trinity Alps Giant Salamander and the Asian Megalobatrachus made sense. Myers went on to recall his encounter with a Giant Salamander captured in the
“The animal was a fine Megalobatrachus, in perfect condition… It was between 25 and 30 inches in length…The source of the specimen is, of course, unknown. Its strange coloration even suggested the possibility of a native Californian Megalobatrachus, which would not be surprising, but no other captures have been reported.”
In the lat 1950’s Vern Harden of Pioneer California also claimed to have seen a dozen Giant Salamanders in a remote Trinity Alps lake known as
In 1960, after hearing about Father Hubbard’s announcement , Tom Slick went in search of the Giant Salamanders. He encouraged members of his Pacific Northwest Expedition, who normally researched into Bigfoot, to try to capture a live specimen of Giant Salamander. Slick and his team came back empty handed.
In September 1960, three zoology professors, Robert C. Stebbins of the
In 1962 Roger’s’ reported debunking of the Giant Salamander seemed to put an end to most interest in the creature, until 1997 when Mizokami, a Japanese American writer, decided to hunt for The Trinity Alps Giant Salamander. Mizokami returned empty handed.
A member of the giant salamander family (Cryptobranchidae), commonly known as the hellbender is found in the eastern United States, but today, the largest salamanders acknowledged by science live in Asia, in exactly the same types of habitat as the American variety. They can grow up to 1.8m (6ft) in length. So had there once been an up to 8 foot sized family of salamanders living in the wilderness which had now died out?
Well if a new species of salamander has been discovered anything is possible.
4 comments:
We do have a giant salamander that is very large called the "hellbender" or "Allegheny alligator."
http://www.hellbenders.org/
They are related to Japanese giant salamanders, which can be 5 or 6 feet long.
Unfortunately for the hellbender, it requires rather clean water, and Appalachian mountain streams are becoming increasingly polluted. Further, where I live, the locals killed them, thinking they were a major threat to game fish (absolutely not true) and because they thought they were ugly (which they might be).
I'm glad we have a new species of salamander in Georgia. I wonder if the giant ones found in California were more of the hellbender type. Hellbenders are very aquatic salamanders, just as those California ones were claimed to be.
Also, West Virginia has a unique salamander that is found in a single spring and cave system in Greenbrier County, West Virginia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_Spring_Salamander
Thank you for your illuminating comments. So it could be a possibility large salamanders once lived in the area, lets hope someone finds some evidence.
I saw a salamander in the redwoods of California that was 4-5ft in length. I'm still hoping one day I will go to google it and something will come up....
I've talked to people in SW Oklahoma that have described what appear to be monstrous neotenic ambystomid salamanders that are locally referred to as walking cat fish. The appearance is similar to A. tigrinum but much larger, the adults are about 3-5 feet long, greenish black in color with a specking of yellowish markings arranged in rows down the side, with a body about as big around as a medium sized thanksgiving turkey and a head shaped somewhat like a shovel and comparable in size. The creatures seem to have small barbels. The local tribal name usually translates into horned otter.
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