A SNAKE IN A SHELL?

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2010/10/sachamama-snake-in-shell.html

Karl Shuker looks at a truly bizarre mystery beast from Peru: a shelled snake. Surely so bizarre a beast cannot be true....

Read all about it

MORE FROM THE PERUVIAN "GIANT SNAKE" EXPEDITION

It has been several weeks since we last heard from Mike and Greg Warner who, earlier in the year, undertook an expedition to Peru in search of giant snakes. We received an e-mail from them yesterday evening, which we reproduce in its entirety without editing:


Hi John

We are beginning to release the data from site 2 of our expedition which few, if any, people know about at this stage. Again,we are offerring CFZ first option.

In locating and recording site 2 we believe we have discovered the thermal lake that Franz Herman Schmidt & Rudolf Phleng discovered in there encounter with the South American Dragon related to Mokele-mbembe, Quetzalcoatl or the Sirrush which is recorded in Bernard's "On the Track".

Here is the link to the video release at our website http://www.bigsnakes.net/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU1P0ei34Ig

We have also received the first scientific analysis of our data from a world renowned scientist & cryptozoologist (who was recommened by your own consultant Dr. Karl Shukar) and will be releasing this to you soon which we think you will find surprising & valuable.

We are looking for answers like anyone else; feel free to re-evaluate your comments at any time.

Kind regards

Greg & Mike Warner
1st September 2009

PERUVIAN "GIANT SNAKE" PICTURES RELEASED THROUGH THE CFZ BLOGGO

After a week of negotiations with Mike and Greg Warner, the CFZ has the exclusive rights to release all the pictures from their Peruvian expedition.

Greg sent these with the following message: "These are the two shots we got that we believe is Yacumama or giant anaconda. It looks like the head to me and part of the body surfacing at the other side of the channel."

Unfortunately, although Richard and I have examined all the pictures in depth, and have spent a long time discussing the matter both by telephone and e-mail with Greg, we disagree completely with their conclusions and believe that these pictures show nothing more than a natural formation of mud or sand.

However, at this point, may we say that we are not for a moment doubting Greg and Mike's sincerity.

They appear to be very nice people who have worked very hard, and have always been open and honest with us. We, too, have always tried to behave like gentlemen, and the whole affair has been conducted in a scientific and civilised manner.

We are surprised that over the last week or so as this story has broken, that we were the only cryptozoological website to give them the courtesy of examining their evidence. Indeed we were the only cryptozoological website to bother covering this story. When you think of the torrents of press such ridiculous claims as last year's Georgia bigfoot, the two Montauk Monsters, and this year's ludicrous Quatari goblin got, I find this highly peculiar. In fact, I don't understand it at all.

When we first saw these photographs, Richard wrote to Greg:

Dear Greg

Thank you for sending over the photographs and co-ordinates.

I have spent the morning looking over them. I said that I would be totally honest in my assessment, and I will be.

I can see nothing in any of these photographs to indicate a giant snake. The picture of the creature's head with another part of the body protruding out of the water further on, looks to me like a sandbank or lump of mud. It, to my eyes at least, does not resemble a snake. Perhaps if the image had been sharper it may have revealed more.

The toppled trees and areas of destruction look like rain damage. Rainforest trees are notoriously shallow-rooted and easily ripped up by floods.

There may well be huge snakes in the area, indeed I believe that the green anaconda gets far larger than we imagine. However, I can't conceive of us getting funding for a second expedition on the back of these pictures. I'm sorry to sound so negative but I have to be honest. There are far more disappointments in cryptozoology than there are triumphs.

I wish you the best of luck with any further endeavours you embark upon.

Yours

Richard

Greg wrote back:

Hi Richard/Jon

I appreciate the time you spent on this even though I can’t accept ‘looks like a sandbank’ as an informed answer. There is no sand as this area is heavily flooded as you can see almost to the top of some trees.

To be honest, I was hoping for something more scientific with an analysis and opinion on all the evidence supplied to you but I respect your opinion and believe that you are sincere.
You guys have been fair with us so I want to offer you the same courtesy and keep to our deal.
It’s time to put this to the court of public opinion so my father has agreed to let you publish all the data we sent you on the condition that it is presented as our data (Mike Warner & Greg Warner) without subjective opinions from either party and it is presented in full (all the images we supplied with annotations also). Let people decide for themselves.

There are still questions that need answered and someone out there may have some interesting views on the matter:

• What happened in Nueva Tacna?
• Why are all these ‘major and ‘minor’ interconnecting channels running through the area?
• What is this creature if it moves on video and disappears from the channel if it isn’t a reptile?
• What happened in Morona Cocha last week when the “Black Boa” destroyed a house on the lake?
• What is this shape in the middle of the area on Google, coincidence?
• Why do the locals persist with accounts of the Yacumama in the area?
• The evidence we supplied is only a sample of what we have but it is a start.
  

We give your permission place these all the material on your CFZ site. I also, suggest that you copy our email correspondence also so that there is full transparency.

Please ensure all private information like email addresses and telephone numbers are deleted please. If anyone wants to contact us then they can do it through CFZ. We are continuing our work in the area and are sending someone to interview villagers in the settlements of Morona Cocha although we must make it clear that we do not believe this is the same creature from the Napo/Amazon.

Ultimately, we would like to go back to the Napo/Amazon and survey the area more, with better equipment and a helicopter rather than a Cesna but we’ll see how things pan out.

Kind regards

Greg & Mike

We will be releasing all the rest of the material over the next few days, and invite the bloggo readership to submit their opinions. This, we believe, is one of the first times that an expedition's findings are going to be laid open to public scrutiny in this matter, and we hope that Greg and Mike's gentlemanly behaviour will be reciprocated by anyone who cares to join in the debate.

THE SAGA OF THE PERUVIAN GIANT SNAKE (2)

DALE DRINNON WRITES:

This Sachamama stuff is more than a decade old in Peru and Karl Shuker had an article in FATE about it while that magazine was still in its old, large-size format. Shuker wrote about the Sachamama in 1999-2000 (The FATE article being "Close Encounters of the Cryptozoological Kind" in 2000, following a few in the Fortean Times) and he was connecting it to the Minhocao then but what was being described was a giant snake similar to the current reports. The stories began hitting the news suddenly in the 1990s and were an odd mixture of Sucuriju Gigante and Minhocao features, but identified as another different and local cryptid, the "Snail Demon" or "Snake-with- a-shell", Sachamama. It is evidently depicted on Chimu artwork. Karl Shuker did identify it with the Minhocao and he did think it was a gigantic caecilian. It has an entry in Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures.

I have a theory myself that the damage being done by the Minhocao is mostly being done by an unknown crocodile (reportedly up to 80 feet long on its own!) when it is not natural damage attributed to it supernaturally (more likely) The tunnels and channels are being made by this creature, American Alligators are capable of shifting river courses and toppling trees with their burrowing. The Minhocao is supposed to have banded armor like an armadillo, horned "ears' and a piglike snout, which together sounds like a sort of alligator or caiman. It is also not necessarily the same creature that is reported in both the Peruvian Amazon and the Chaco, although they might both do equivalent damage by their burrowing. A crocodylian six feet broad is on a par with a saltie Indopacific croc, and there are reports of evidently more than one type of croc (Crocodylus) in the Amazon. The one doing the damage in Peru might not necessarily be the same creature as reported in the Chaco, but as you say that is a separate matter.

It seems that in this current case the main bulk of the evidence is actually coming from the newspapers and actually represents what is alleged locally. That does not mean that it corresponds closely to reality

MORE ON THIS STORY AT:

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/giant-anaconda-plot-thickens.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-snake-or-no-great-shakes.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-on-saga-of-peruvian-giant-anaconda.html

THE SAGA OF THE PERUVIAN GIANT SNAKE (1)

Greg Warner and I are still in dialogue about the possibility of him releasing the photographs he says were taken by the expedition to Peru, and which he says show a snake that may be 130ft long. Greg was interested in what our old mucker Dr Chris Clark had to say the other day and asks:

"Chris, I am interested in your comment about focal point and hight of plane. I have this data, how can we work out size from this? Our scale reference was coming from known sizes of trees in the area."

Over to you Chris...

MORE ON THIS STORY AT:

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/giant-anaconda-plot-thickens.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-snake-or-no-great-shakes.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-on-saga-of-peruvian-giant-anaconda.html

THE ORIGINAL STORY ABOUT THE PERUVIAN GIANT SNAKE AS IT FIRST APPEARED

MORE ON THE SAGA OF THE PERUVIAN GIANT ANACONDA

The saga of the supposed giant snake from Peru continues. I am now in a dialogue with Greg Warner, the younger of the two explorers who claim to have taken photographs of a 130ft snake in South America. And - much to my surprise - he does seem to be a decent and polite bloke. But his story is so extraordinary that we would not be doing our job properly if we did not approach our investigations of the affair with as much rigour as possible.

Despite recent political changes in this country people are still just about inocent until proven guilty. However, when one is approaching a case like this one, one has to take the opposite tack.

But one thing is paramount: whereas we have to treat all claims, especially ones as extraordinary as this, with a great deal of suspicion, we also have to treat the people making them with respect.

Last year I was quoted in a press story about artist Pollyanna Pickering's trip to Bhutan where she saw what appeared to be a yeti scalp, and I was
pilloried (often illiterately) on websites across the cryptoverse. I know what it is like to have your claims under suspicion, and to be treated with ill-bred rudeness both from the canaille and from those who really should know better. Greg and his father Mike have treated us in a polite and gentlemanly manner, and we have every intention of treating them the same.

The first mystery that had to be cleared up was the matter of the photograph that accompanied the original press story, reproduced in facsimile here just in case anyone thought that we had made it up.

If you read the article, it doesn't claim that this photograph was actually taken by the expedition. Indeed it wasn't. It appears to have been taken by a dude called André Issi and was used to illustrate a journal that can be found here. Tony Lucas in New Zealand and Dr Dan Holdsworth both provided translations which can be found here

Dan went on to write:

This page too is written in Portuguese, and once again Google translate only seems to want to translate part of it, however searching through for the word "anaconda" and translating those sections of text still doesn't seem to yield much info on the photos.

Chris Kraska wrote:

Jon-

That's looks like a dead yellow anaconda on its side. It could also be a dead green anaconda on its back but the photo is so tiny I can't tell if I'm seeing ventral scales or dorsal/lateral scales.

Bobbins.

Chris

However, Greg Warner has written to me that "The photo used is a research photo not one from the expedition although we believe it has all the charictoristics [sic] of a Yacumama or Black Boa 15-20 Meters long." That is fair enough, although I think it shows a dead yellow anaconda about 12ft long. But it is a relatively convincing explanation for how this picture became associated with the case, so I think that it is time that we took Senor Issi and his picture out of the equation, for the time being at least.

If one reads the original newspaper article from the Belfast Telegraph carefully, a lot of the more outlandish claims for the creature (which sounds far more like the minhoaco than a giant snake, but that's another issue) are from stories originally from the South American newspapers reproduced on this page.

Greg kindly provided a translation of these newspaper articles. His translations can be found here Being a suspicious bugger, (although I prefer to call it an adherance to some level of scientific rigour) I also got Chris Kraska to translate them:

(PS although I can make myself understood in New World Spanish, after my expeditions to Mexico and Puerto Rico, my grasp of the language is rudimentary at best, and mostly only good for buying beer and cigarettes, and finding the nearest bar or airport - and as I have since quit smoking, a large chunk of my bilingualism is rendered completely pointless)

It destroyed their home and devoured domestic animals. (smaller above)

Sachamama frightens elderly couple (larger below)

Next. From the text (Btw, this is basically one big run on sentence):

A nearly inexplicable act was what happened to an elderly couple residents of Committee 11 of the Michaela Bastidas settlement who from one moment to the next were swung from one extreme to the other by something large that came out from the depths of the river, from the depths it came out like a hurricane that destroyed my poor house that is more than 50 meters from where it was located, I was dying of fright because I saw it, saw it's gigantic jet black head that was about to kill me, expressed Mrs. Dolores Suna, who was sure that what had left her exposed to the elements with one canoe worth of supplies, is the mother of that island that is in front of ours, there you find her, in the aguaje tree there, finished Dolores, who along with her husband Artemio, was comforted by her neighbors, who didn't doubt in their prayer, now they wait to have the same luck with Civil Defense, we hope.

#3

Smaller above:

Knocked down a house and panicked two residents

Larger below:

Giant Boa in Moronacocha

Smaller below:

People say monster has huge eyes, scales and horns

Iquitos (Peru)-

With fear they are found the neighbors of the settlements of El Porvenir and Micaela Bastidas, located in the sector of Moronachocha, by the presence of a gigantic boa. Antonio Mayta Aricaya (64), fisherman of Moronacocha lake, attests that months prior, in the zone there were plenty of fish and that now there are none owing to the enormous reptile.

"The island is always alive at night and sounds are heard in the river, it's all a mystery. It appears the giant animal uses the vegetation as camoflage to slide through without being seen", decared Mayta Aricaya.

Admin Perez Gutierrez related that all the time the island was a peaceful place, and now it's the opposite. "Until it knocked down a house that was in the middle of the lake. It's the first time this has happened and the river has grown too much."

In the meantime, the people of the two settlements, don't go close to the edges of the river, for fear that the animal will appear, that has been catalogued as a monster with huge eyes, horns and scales.

In RED at center.

"That zone is known for having animals; previously there was a lizard that ate hens, but this incident was different because I saw that there was a huge one with eyes that sparkled like a lantern" says Carlos Caballero Dahua (47), subsecretary of the Micaela Bastidas settlement. According to the neighbors, the boa travels in a zone of vegetation and moves from one end to the other during the night, when there are no humans present.

In my opinion the two sets of translations are substantially the same, and that unless Greg and Mike have far too much time on their hands, and have gone to the trouble of faking two sets of South American newspapers, which is not impossible, but would seem ridiculously unlikely, that the stories that they claimed came from the newspaper were exactly that!

Whether or not a snake did attack someone's house and cause the damage described (which sounds incredibly unlikely), Greg and Mike are making no such claims from their own experience. It is tempting to suggest that someone at the Peruvian newspaper has resurrected stories of the minhoaco and used them to explain damage done to a crappily built building by a flash flood or something similar. Who knows?

The events overnight (and forgive me if they are a little confused, but I was up late watching the election results and I am less than 100% compos mentis this morning) seem to have clarified the matter considerably. And at the moment I have to say that Greg and his father Mike are coming out of this looking much better than I had at first expected.

Watch this space, for there will undoubtedly be more updates later..

RICHARD FREEMAN: A FROG SO SMALL

European and Peruvian herpetologists have discovered the smallest frog in the world, in the highlands of Manu National Park near Cusco in south-eastern Peru.

It was found at an altitude 3000 m (9840 feet) and has been named Noblella pygmaea, or Noble's Pygmy Frog. Females measure less than half an inch (12.5 mm) in snout-vent length, whereas males are just a bit longer than 1 cm.

Noble's pygmy frog lay two eggs, which hatch into fully formed tiny frogs, not tadpoles.

The eggs are laid in moist places such as under mosses or the leaf litter. The mother remains near the eggs to protect them from predators and drying out. The eggs, measure 4 mm in diameter, about two-thirds of the size of their mother.

The frogs inhabit the cloud forest, the montane scrub and the high-elevation grasslands of Manu National Park and of the privately-owned Wayqecha Research Station in the upper Kcosñipata valley, named after a river which is a tributary to the Madre de Dios River in the Amazon basin. Their altitude range seems to be restricted between 3000 and 3200 metres (9840-10500 feet).
The Noble's Pygmy Frog is one among over 10 new frog species discovered over the past 2 years in the cloud forests of Cusco.

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD MUIRHEAD: The mysterious seahorses of Lake Titicaca

PREAMBLE BY JON: When I was a child I lived in Hong Kong.

I spent the latter part of August and early September 1970 in hospital undergoing a barbaric operation on my knees. I went in on the day after my eleventh birthday, and stayed in for the next four weeks.

However, I was allowed to come home for weekends, and every Friday afternoon an ambulance would drive from Queen Mary Hospital down in Pokfulam, up the Peak, until I was carried into our ground floor flat at Peak Mansions by two burly young ambulancemen. Somehow, I can surmise with the benefit of hindsight, that my father had pulled rank, because I had even been provided with a hospital bed on wheels, (something which I doubt was a service available to all and sundry) and on very sunny days Ah Tim and Ah Tam (the Chinese couple who looked after us) would wheel me out into the conservatory, and open the french windows so I could haul myself up in bed using the support bars, and look out onto the world outside.

Peak Mansions was (I use the past tense because it was apparently demolished in 1989) a six story squat building with an impressively mock Georgian façade, and two seemingly pointless green domes on the roof. It had originally been built, either late in the 19th or early in the 20th Century as accomodation for expat Civil Servants, but during WW2 it was the home of the Hong Kong Volunteer Force and was badly damaged by shelling. However it was seriously rebuilt after the war, and carried on with its original purpose. Running along the front of the building was Peak Road, and on the other side of the road was a heavily forested hillside which tumbled down for miles to the town (now city) of Pokfulam. This forest was the haunt of leopard cats, pangolins, civets, and porcupines, and within living history had been home to tigers and possibly even leopards. It was a magnificent place, and I spent much of my childhood exploring it, and much of my adulthood dreaming about it, and after a week of surgery (they botched the operation the first time and had to do it again) and physiotherapy, just to lie in my bed looking through the open french windows at the jungle below was bliss.

Outside the windows, a shallow sloping stretch of lawn led down to the road, and my mother was wont to recline on a sun lounger there and sunbathe. Occasionally she would be joined by her friends, and on this particular occasion a lady called Sheila Muirhead, with an irritating young son aged four had come to visit. I was annoyed. Now my mother would not be willing to tell me stories, or make too much of a fuss of me, and what was worse, her son was too young for me to be able to talk to on any meaningful level, and as both my legs were in plaster, and I was wracked with agony every time I moved, I couldn’t do anything more boisterous in terms of play.

Then I had an idea.

For my birthday, the day before I went into hospital I had received a copy of Hong Kong Butterflies by Major J.C.S Marsh, and I was desperate to put my newfound book to use. I was at the age when I had just begun to realise that some creatures were more closely related than others, and I wanted to identify the myriad animals that surrounded me. Fluttering along a few inches above the closely mown grass were dozens of small, blue butterflies. Major Marsh listed several dozen members of this family, quite a few of which looked very similar.

So I called to the toddler who was earnestly chuffing up and down the sloping lawn pretending to be a goods train.

“Hello” I said. “I’m Jonathan. What’s your name”.

“Richard”. He said. “What are you doing in bed?”

So I told him, and despite the seven year gap in our ages, he not only seemed to sympathise with me, but – after I explained my predicament re. Major Marsh and the blue butterflies - he expressed - as well as a four-year-old can express anything – a willingness to help me in my investigations. So I told him where my bedroom was, and where I kept my butterfly net, and where my precious copy of Hong Kong Butterflies was, and he trotted off inside. About ten minutes later, after a few false starts, I was sitting up in bed with Major Marsh’s magnum opus on my knee, and a Robinson’s marmalade jar in one hand, as my young assistant – still making enthusiastic train noises – rushed up and down in search of butterflies.

We have been friends ever since. Richard has what Charlie Fort would have no doubt described as a "Wild Talent". He is the best researcher I have ever met, and invariably has something interesting on the go. I asked him if he wanted to write for Cryptozoology Online (I really must stop calling it the CFZ bloggothing) and he immediately asked me if I knew anything about mysterious freshwater seahorses in South America...

Seahorses are a genus(Hippocampus)of fish belonging to the family Synguathidae,which also include pipefish and leafy sea dragons.

There are over 32 species of seahorse, mainly found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world. They prefer to live in sheltered areas such as sea grass beds,coral reefs,or mangroves….The male sea horse can give birth to as few as 1 and as many as 2000 “fry” at a time and pregnancies last anywhere from two to four weeks,depending on the species.” (1)

They must be amongst the most interesting of sea creatures. There are many different species all over the world. Whilst reading William Corliss`s seminal work Anomalies in Geology,on pages 53-54,in the chapter ESB6 `Living Organisms and Recent Fossils Found At High Altitudes` I was very surprised to discover reports of living seahorses in Lake Titicaca.

Lake Titicaca,which straddles the Bolivia-Peru border at a height of 12,530feet/3820m above sea level is an unusual place. Not only do the local inhabitants use reed boats to traverse the lake,similar to the ones used in ancient Egypt[“In fact,the type of reed plant is reportedly the same as the reed plant used in ancient Egypt…”(2) ] but up to at least the end of World War 2 and may be later, a species of sea horse,Hippocampus titicacensis was said to inhabit the Lake,proving to some that the Lake was once attached to the Pacific Ocean.Corliss refers to beliefs that the Andes may be very “young” geologically and that the putative Lake Titicaca seahorse,very high beaches with recent marine shells and recent plant fossils at very high altitudes are a sign of this.

There is a photo of a degenerate(because of in-breeding?) seahorse from the Lake on the website of Jim Forshey and Bruce Watts,two American experts on seahorses.

This photo dates from about 1943 and is said to be a specimen at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. (3) Arthur Posnansky,who mentions this seahorse in his volume one of “Tihuanacni: Cradle of American Man” stated: “The Indians believe that this animal is a sort of divinity,like everything that is strange and inexplicable to them.”(4). What is really inexplicable is,how did the seahorse get into the Lake and where are they now?

Even in the 1940s they were very rare and very recent web sites do not mention them at all,though trout,”suche” and “capache,” flamingos and duck are mentioned. If anyone can shed light on these enigmatic seahorses please can they contact the CFZ?

Thank you.

REFERENCES.

(1)Project Seahorse. The Biology of Seahorses. Reproduction. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seahorse

(2)Donald E.Chittick The Puzzle of Ancient Man (Newberg,Oregon), p193

(3) See: http://www.seahorses.com/AquariumAndFishItemsForSale/BibliographySeahorses2005Edition.pdf
(4) Ibid

Richard Muirhead`s cryptozoological web site can be seen at:http://geocities.com/cryptozoology.muirhead

CRYPTOZOOLOGY NEWS: IN THE NIGHT ALL CATS ARE GREY

On the excellent Tetrapod Zoology blog our friend and colleague Darren Naish details what may be a new species of leopard sized cat from India’s Western Ghats. The creature was discussed in BBC 2’s series The Natural World in an episode entitled Mountains of the Monsoon Friday 16th of January.

The pogeyam is said to be large, have rounded ears, a long tail and be gray in colour. Environmentalist Sandesh Kadur saw the creature in broad daylight, in the high-altitude grasslands around Anamudi. He set up a camera trap with bait but the pogeyam did not reapprear. Native people have long known of its existance, calling it ‘the cat that comes and goes with the mist’. There are no known photographs of the beast, but this drawing is excerpted from the BBC documentary on the wildlife of the Western Ghats (described above)that can be viewed HERE

It is possible that this is an unkown species or a colour morph of the leopard. Leopards have been known to exibit a wide variety of morphs. However the melanistic morph or black panther is the only commonly occuring one, the others are rare. So if people have been consistently reporting this big grey cat it would arge that this is either a new species or an isolated group of leopards with a dominant gene for this colour. This has occurred in other mammals such as the American black bear that has a white population on Queen Charlotte Island. We await more information with baited breath. With this new cryptid hot on the heels of yeti sightings, the Western Ghats seem like the place to head for.

The pogeyam is not the only new mystery cat to have emerged recently. A small, beautifuly marked cat was photographed by Aldo Sornorza of Fundacion Jocotco at the Jorupe Reserve, Ecuador close to the border with Peru.

This photograph was taken by Aldo Sornoza of Fundación Jocotoco (FJ), who was helping with the construction of the new visitors' lodge on the Jorupe Reserve, Ecuador. It is thought to be a new species of cat, still to be described, which was first seen two years ago in Peru. The Jorupe Reserve, owned and managed by the World Land Trust's partners FJ, is close to the border with Peru and this would be the first known sighting in Ecuador.

If not a new species, the only other cat it could possibly be is an Andean Cat (Oreailurus jacobita), one of the rarest of all the cat species, about which very little is known. Its habitat and appearance make it the small cat analogue of the Snow Leopard. While it is only about the size of a domestic cat, it appears larger because of its long tail and silvery-gray, striped and spotted long fur.

It is believed to live only in the high Andes mountains of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. It has been sighted at elevations of 5,100 meters, well above the tree line. Since it lives only in the high mountains, human-inhabited valleys act as barriers, fragmenting the population, meaning that even low levels of poaching could be devastating. It is often killed in Chile and Bolivia because of local superstition.

Over the last 25 years there have been fewer than 10 documented sightings. Lou Jost, of Fundación EcoMinga, also an Ecuadorian partner of the WLT, is lucky enough to have seen the Andean Cat, not just once but twice. When presented with this photo, Lou commented:

"The ground color is very similar. However I didn't see any strong patterns on the legs, like this one has, though I would not have seen that from the angles I had (just the back and sides of the animal running through dense vegetation, both times). The elevations of my sightings were very high, around 2800-3000 m, and very wet, completely different from Jorupe. I could easily imagine that there is a new species of cat endemic to the Tumbesian zone of SW Ecuador and NW Peru."