At the beginning of the 21st Century monsters still roam the remote, and sometimes not so remote, corners of our planet. It is our job to search for them. The Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] is - we believe - the largest professional, scientific and full-time organisation in the world dedicated to cryptozoology - the study of unknown animals. Since 1992 the CFZ has carried out an unparalleled programme of research and investigation all over the world. Since 2009 we have been running the increasingly popular CFZ Blog Network, and although there has been an American branch of the CFZ for over ten years now, it is only now that it has a dedicated blog.
DOES THIS BEAST STILL LURK IN THAILAND?
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| Orang-Utans |
You possibly haven't heard of Captain Bingham. Outside this context, neither had I. But in Thailand in the 19th Century he was given the dead body of an unidentified creature of the simian kind. An ape, no less. He could not identify the ape, which he was told was a specimen of the tua yeua. The skin of the dead animal was rotting somewhat, so he could not preserve it. The skeleton he saved for a time, but it then became lost. What was this unidentified animal?
Captain Bingham was not the first to have heard of the tua yeua. The Thais, of course, spoke of it and one witness in the 1880s said he had seen one and it was too tall to have been a gibbon.
South of Thailand in Malaysia various types of apes or humanoids have been reported. Perhaps it was one of these, but, again, we cannot identify these with certainty either. However, it is known that Thailand once numbered the orang utan among its fauna. Could a population of these have survived as late as the 19th Century? And the question arises, could a population of this endangered species still survive in some part of Thailand rarely trodden by human feet, to this day?
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