Hippoturtleox
Location: A lake on the Tibetan plateau.
Time: Specimen caught and killed in 1972, only reported in 1984.
Sometimes descriptions given by witnesses of an alleged cryptid are so ambiguous and contradictory, that the veracity of the report, or even what the sighting describes, is called into question.
Such is the case of the “Hippoturtleox”, and odd creature supposedly caught at Tibet’s Lake Duobuzhe in 1972, and later killed brutally by Chinese soldiers. It was described as having the body of an oxen, the skin of a hippo, turtle-like feet and small curled horns. The hybrid-sounding nature of the animal could point to it being a lie, or alternately simply be a poor quality description of what was seen.
As with other “one-off” cryptid sightings, not much can be done about this to verify the nature of the creature. There is no record of what happened to the animal’s corpse, but some speculate it was cooked and eaten. The most popular identity proposed for this cryptid is that it was a large horned turtle, something like the Ice Aged Meiolania, but this seems a little forced. What would an animal from a wholly Gondwanan group be doing in Tibet? Why was it aquatic and not terrestrial, as other members of the extinct horned turtle family were? That the occurrence was reported some years after its happened raises the possibility of it being a hoax, that was back-dated to give it an air of credibility. There is a chance that it was a known animal, whose attributes were badly or inaccurately described by witnesses or the media.
For a real-life version of the Hippoturtleox, some speculative evolution could go a long way. The Hippoturtleox (Lacobovis chelonipes) is a singularly strange looking animal, and is part of a specialised lineage that has become extinct elsewhere. Its ancestors evolved from primitive Bovids in the Miocene of India, becoming increasingly aquatic, much like chevrotains, and increasing in size and girth as the climate cooled. This lineage was always restricted to the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayas, and as the genus Bubalis produced the ever adaptable water buffalo, they were outcompeted almost to complete extinction. The last surviving species is the hippoturtleox itself, restricted to the many lakes which dot the Tibetan plateau. These animals are large and heavy, as heavy as a typical barnyard ox, but with barrel-shaped expanded ribcages, to aid buoyancy. Forelimbs have become something like the foreflippers of a dugong, allowing them to punt along the lakebed, and also paddle through the water (the joints in the forelimb are specialized, being more flexible than terrestrial oxen). Spending their days grazing aquatic plants in their lakes, they must surface to breathe fairly frequently, as the montane air is so thin. Interestingly, the young are much better at walking and running on land than the adults, and this is linked to their breeding cycle. Hippoturtleox form small harems with one male and 2 or 3 females. Their precocious, almost independent calves are driven out of their birth lake to find their own body of water, often by travelling overland. Inevitably, these wandering juveniles soon make bonds with others calves, and harems eventually form as the teenage bulls dispute over which lake belongs to which bull.
Location: A lake on the Tibetan plateau.
Time: Specimen caught and killed in 1972, only reported in 1984.
Sometimes descriptions given by witnesses of an alleged cryptid are so ambiguous and contradictory, that the veracity of the report, or even what the sighting describes, is called into question.
Such is the case of the “Hippoturtleox”, and odd creature supposedly caught at Tibet’s Lake Duobuzhe in 1972, and later killed brutally by Chinese soldiers. It was described as having the body of an oxen, the skin of a hippo, turtle-like feet and small curled horns. The hybrid-sounding nature of the animal could point to it being a lie, or alternately simply be a poor quality description of what was seen.
As with other “one-off” cryptid sightings, not much can be done about this to verify the nature of the creature. There is no record of what happened to the animal’s corpse, but some speculate it was cooked and eaten. The most popular identity proposed for this cryptid is that it was a large horned turtle, something like the Ice Aged Meiolania, but this seems a little forced. What would an animal from a wholly Gondwanan group be doing in Tibet? Why was it aquatic and not terrestrial, as other members of the extinct horned turtle family were? That the occurrence was reported some years after its happened raises the possibility of it being a hoax, that was back-dated to give it an air of credibility. There is a chance that it was a known animal, whose attributes were badly or inaccurately described by witnesses or the media.
For a real-life version of the Hippoturtleox, some speculative evolution could go a long way. The Hippoturtleox (Lacobovis chelonipes) is a singularly strange looking animal, and is part of a specialised lineage that has become extinct elsewhere. Its ancestors evolved from primitive Bovids in the Miocene of India, becoming increasingly aquatic, much like chevrotains, and increasing in size and girth as the climate cooled. This lineage was always restricted to the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayas, and as the genus Bubalis produced the ever adaptable water buffalo, they were outcompeted almost to complete extinction. The last surviving species is the hippoturtleox itself, restricted to the many lakes which dot the Tibetan plateau. These animals are large and heavy, as heavy as a typical barnyard ox, but with barrel-shaped expanded ribcages, to aid buoyancy. Forelimbs have become something like the foreflippers of a dugong, allowing them to punt along the lakebed, and also paddle through the water (the joints in the forelimb are specialized, being more flexible than terrestrial oxen). Spending their days grazing aquatic plants in their lakes, they must surface to breathe fairly frequently, as the montane air is so thin. Interestingly, the young are much better at walking and running on land than the adults, and this is linked to their breeding cycle. Hippoturtleox form small harems with one male and 2 or 3 females. Their precocious, almost independent calves are driven out of their birth lake to find their own body of water, often by travelling overland. Inevitably, these wandering juveniles soon make bonds with others calves, and harems eventually form as the teenage bulls dispute over which lake belongs to which bull.