GLEN VAUDREY: I'll go the Whole Wide World #13

Venezuela
Venezuela is home to Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall, with a rather impressive plunge of 2,648 ft. It takes its name from the man who made it famous, Jimmie Angel. I bet the tourist board is thankful his surname wasn’t Sewage.

Photographs feature heavily in the folklore of cryptozoology. There is the fabled 'thunderbird' photo that many claim to remember seeing but no one has successfully tracked down; then there are other photos that are easily located but do nothing to clear up the mystery - just think of the surgeon’s photo of Nessie. The animal that I have chosen to represent Venezuela has its own famed picture, today we are looking at De Loys ape.

Francois de Loys was a Swiss geologist searching the jungle for black gold, that’s oil to those who have never seen the Beverley Hillbillies. Somewhere on the Tarra River, in the border area between Venezuela and Colombia, de Loys and his party set up camp. Imagine their surprise when their pleasant evening was interrupted by a couple of large angry ape-like creatures that stood 5 ft tall; they appeared screeching and hooting at the men, not only shaking branches but throwing things at the gathered group. Perhaps not that unexpectedly the men picked up their rifles and started shooting at the mystery animals; once the smoke had settled one of the apes had gone and the other was lying dead on the jungle floor, once again proving that sticks and stones may break bones but bullets will easily kill you.

And what an unusual creature they had killed; it was tailless and it had 36 teeth, 4 more than any other monkey to be found on the continent. Suitably impressed they sat the dead ape on a spare crate, propped it up with a stick and photographed it. And that is were the real mystery starts. The skin, skull and jaw bone that had been taken by the group were lost, and without them the photo came under greater scrutiny. It was suggested that this was not really an ape but rather a spider monkey that had been posed so that its tail was hidden, and as no one could be certain of the size of the crate De Loys ape had gone from being a missing link to a hoax.

That’s not to say that de Loys was being untruthful; there is a tradition of large monkeys in the area that continues to this day with reports of the Mono Grande, a tailless ape-like creature 5-6 ft tall known for its eerie howling and for throwing stones at huts.

Where next? Well let’s step over the border and enter our last South American country, Colombia.