The Savannah morning news., 1903-12-20
QUEER ANIMALS
STILL UNCAUGHT.

The World Has Some New Sensn-
lions to EnjOy-Beasts That Have
Never Been Gagged.
"Oh, there are a good many animals
that are still to be caught and ex-
hibited in the menageries," said the
old animal man, reaching into the cage
and scratching the head of a jaguar.
Il can run off quite a list without
stopping to think.
'All the ZOOS are crazy now for an
okapi. That's the strange prehistoric
beast that Sir Harry Johnston found
alive in Eastern Africa. It's a cross
between a giraffe and horse, appar-
emily, and a mighty big animal. Therell
be big money for the circus that gets
the first example, and there are some
plucky and smart men in Uganda at
this very moment looking for the
brute.
Nobody has been lucky enough or
smart enough to catch a Kadiak bear
alive and carry him to civilization.
There's something like a beast for
you-big as a calf, so that he'd make
a roaring Rocky mountain grizzly
look like a little brown bear alongside
of him.
Down in South America, somewhere
Andes a little north of the equator,
is a beast that is the biggest rodent
in the world. Travellers have seen
pieces of its hide and it's bones, and
few have glimpsed it as it sped through
the dark primeval forests. 1t is a
true rodent like the rat, but it is as
big as a Newfoundland dog. That
would be good catch for a geological
garden.
Another fine prize is down there in
South America. 1t is a new species
of Jaguar, quite different from any
that has ever been exhibited in the
shows in any part of the world. It's
a big black fellow, and tremendously
fierce. Nobody has ever taken one
alive.
Then in the forests of the Amazon
are two birds that would make their
captor a famous man among zoolo-
gists. They are the bell bird, which
has voice exactly like a clear, ring
ing bell and the Lost Soul" which
has a cry that makes the shivers creep
along mans backbone when he hears
1t in those dark, mysterious, silent, for
bidding woods.
In Burmah somewhere is a rhinoc-
eros that has a black hide and big
tufted ears. The hide has been seen by
white men lots of times, but they
haven't ever seen a living animal.
Up in the Himalayas a man has
been looking for years for-what do
you suppose? A unicorn. He may be
crazy-he may be right. He says that
he has heard so many tales from the
native hunters up there of the exist
ence of a one-horned antelope-horse
that he is bound to try and get one /
don't think there is any such thing
myself, but then L didn't take much
stock in the discovery of a primitive
wild horse in Central Asia, either, and
now the geological gardens of Ham
burg and New York both have living
specimens of these horses-funny, big
headed, little brutes that are represen-
tatives of some type of horse that
must be hundreds of thousands of
years old.
Down in New Zealand, compare
lively small as the land is, there are
many animal and bird mysteries still.
TFAy say that there is a brand new
that is, new to the world-type of an
imal on the order of the duck bill
down there yet. Darwin always
thought that some day a veritable liz
ard-bird (not a flying lizard, but a
true missing link between the birds
and the reptiles) might be found there.
"One explorer followed mysterious
footprints in the snow of the high
mountains of New Zealand, but never
came up with the beast that had made
it. But they were such strange
footprints that other scientists agreed
with him that the thing that made
them was quite unknown to the world,
and must be a wonderful being.
80, you see, there is plenty of work
still for us wild animal catchers. We
haven't seen everything that there is
to be seen, by a long shot"