FT269

Long reported from Brazil, the mysterious minhocão is said to be an enormous black scaly worm-like creature with a pair of tentacles on its head, which spends its life burrowing underground but creates such enormous trenches that it has been blamed for uprooting orchards and even redirecting the courses of rivers. I have suggested in various books and on my ShukerNature blog that if such an animal genuinely exists, it may be an undiscovered gigantic species of cæcilian – a subterranean, fossorial, and superficially vermiform, limbless amphibian that possesses cephalic tentacles and can be scaly. I recently received the following communication from correspondent Samwell Rowan concerning a truly remarkable but hitherto undocumented minhocão-reminiscent mystery beast encountered by his mother during the late 1980s or early 1990s in a Peruvian rainforest:

She told me she was walking by herself in the jungle and saw what she initially thought was a large, black snake moving through the leaves on the forest floor.