Description
Descriptions of the Nandi Bear are of a ferocious, powerfully built carnivore with high front shoulders (over four feet tall) and a sloping back; somewhat similar to a hyena. Some have speculated that Nandi Bears are in fact a misidentified hyena or a surviving Ice Age giant hyena: Karl Shuker states that a surviving short-faced hyaena Pachycrocuta brevirostris,extinct ca. 500,000 years before present, would "explain these cases very satisfactorily."
Other than the Atlas Bear (extinct by the 1800s), no bears are known to be native to Africa, besides those of the prehistoric genera Agriotherium and Indarctos, which died out 4.4 million years ago. Louis Leakey suggested that Nandi Bear descriptions matched that of the extinct Chalicotherium, though chalicotheres were herbivores.
The Nandi people call it Kerit. Local legend holds that it only eats the brain of its victims. Nandi Bears were regularly reported in Kenya throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. Bernard Heuvelmans's On the Track of Unknown Animals and Karl Shuker's In Search of Prehistoric Survivors provide the most extensive chronicles of Nandi bear sightings in print.
Read more about this topic: Nandi Bear
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)