Another Hand of Unknown Origin?
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on February 26th, 2007
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The actual hand was found caught in a gate in North Qld. The night before, all the stock were clearly spooked and screaming and roaring could be heard. Next day the farmer finds this hand! It was JUST before DNA was introduced here (wouldn’t you know it).
So they sent the hand off to all the experts including the CSIRO and nobody knew what it belonged to. After being sent back to them after several weeks and after ALL the experts looking at it, it then sat in a tin on their mantle piece in the living room until they couldn’t stand the smell any longer. I mean, it was GREEN!
So, they ended up throwing it out. Nobody knew what it came from and the old couple basically threw their hands in the air and said, well, what can we do about it? Nuttin! Get rid of it – it STINKS!!!!
The prints in the other pics are from July 06′. They were found on top of a Bobcat that was parked in a rural area in Yowie territory in Queensland near a place called Gayndah. Bears have also been seen there. Interesting dermals huh? Anyway, I just combined both hands in the same pics as a point of interest. Could they both be from the same type of creature? Mike Williams got the report for the Bobcat prints, got in contact with me and I sent our boys out to get the pics.Dean Harrison
Australian Yowie Research
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Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
If it was on this continent I’d say a beavers front foot.
Maybe a kangaroo front foot….
Here is a link I found with a photo of a wombat’s foot.
It looks a lot like the feet in the photos shown above.
kangaroo foot was my first guess.
Looks VERY sloth-like.
I thought koala, but then again, I’m from Texas, not Australia, so I’m not familiar with their animals at all.
Hmm. Well, some sort of marsupial, anyway, rather likely, I’d say.
Well, it could be a lot of things but I feel “hand of Bigfoot” is not one of them. Reminds me of the foot of a sloth.
Slothlike
There is an animal called a sloth bear (Melursus ursinus) that has feet that look a bit like this. They are indigenous to India, but this is very similar in appearance to their feet. I also have to wonder when I read this report, where did the rest of the animal go?
I’m located not too far from this location myself, not that I have ever seen anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t realise there was bears in Australia (outside of zoos that is).
Anyway, very interesing pics! If experts are baffled by it, then who knows? Maybe a Yowie, they are supposed to have sharp claws something like that. 🙂
these are very interesting new photos of new possible yowie hand. the article about this new hand very interesting too. more research etc needs to be done to this hand. thanks bill
People who find ‘things’ need to know that a jar of simple alchohol (even rubbing type) will prevent a smelly specimen especially if the lid is put on. What’s with this convienient throwing it out bit? Geesh.
If that belonged to a yowie, then they aren’t the bigfoot type creature we were hoping. Looks like just about any of the marsupial’s feet look like. Although I guess it is rather decent in size, and what about the growling? Weird.
Woohoo – what a cool article! 🙂 Somewhere there is now a rotting hand skeleton waiting to be rediscovered.
Has anyone considered thylacoleo or the Queensland tiger (if they’re not the same).
I will have to look into these images in more detail some time soon.
I thought of thylacaleo, youcantryreachingme, but after I saw the wombat foot I realized that a known animal would be much more likely (alas) to have been the previous owner of the hand.
Yes, actually the article is slightly misleading: we don’t really have any sense of scale for the hand itself. Having it positioned next to the photos of the footprint does not mean that it is the same size.
Even so, if it were so large, wombats easily reach that size as I’m sure you know.
The prints themselves are actually not too dissimilar to wombat prints although I don’t know how they got on top of a digger.
I’d like to know more detail too about where the “hand” (can we call it a “paw” instead?) was found… high on the gate, or low?
Maybe someone should research the size of prints which a grown wombat would produce: do their claws grow to 6 or 7 centimeters? I would expect so.
I didn’t know there were bears “down under” as the article referenced. Looks sloth-like, but I’ll go with giant cryptid wombat.
There aren’t any bears native to “down under” or sloths for that matter. Which is useful as there’s no possibility of bears being mistaken for bigfoot. Any bear sightings are either misidentifications or zoo escapees, not that i’ve heard of any reports of bears escaping from zoos since my time living over here. On reflection, the pics do look more paw like than hand like, but if it is a known species why can’t any experts identify it?
I have heard of a train wreck back in the 1950s? in that region of Queensland. Bears were apparently among the animals that are said to have escaped.
As for the Thylacoleo Carnifex. It was a marsupial, so in many respects similar to wombats, koalas and kangaroos. It was however, as big as a large jaguar or leopard and killed by ambushing its prey from the trees. Using its oversized incisors to puncture the skull/brain of its victims. Is this where the stories of “drop bears” originated? Farmers in far north Queensland, during the 1880s, are said to have been shooting these marsupial lions hand over fist. They did not consider them rare. Of course back then, naturalists and scientist were thin on the ground and so no specimans were collected for study.
Cheers
Don’t know what the hand is, but those hand prints are clearly fake (or at the very least were not produced by anything with hands like the specimen being considered).
Hard claws would not leave that kind of impression in a thin layer of dust, they would leave small thin scratches at most. Claws might leave that kind of mark in something like soft mud, but the marks here look much more like they have been made by something soft like a human finger- my bet that these ‘claw marks’ were made by dragging fingers through the dust- probably as an attempt to mimic what a claw mark looks like in a deep soft medium.
Hoaxers make a school-boy error- shock!
Well, I think we should be patient. I think there is every possibility that someone will come along and be able to definitively identify this “hand”. Zoologists and the like are not all knowing, it may take a bit of time to get to the bottom of it.
Definitely a kangaroo forepaw, likely from a Great Red Kangaroo. I had the pleasure of working with kangaroos and wallabies at Metro Toronto Zoo and this ‘hand’ only differs in size and colour. Poor critter! Getting it caught and lost in a gate must have been horrible!
I saw wombat up there. Wouldn’t have thought of that. Now I have. Thanks. That’s likely it although having read John5 I might tend to defer a bit. Marsupial. I was in the ballpark. It looks like a specialized digging paw, and wombats are diggers.
Anybody read the tabloid caption at the top? “The Queensland claw – could it be linked to a flying saucer?” YEAH! That’s it! That’s the ticket…. . Hairy hominoid research takes another Great Leap Forward. Sheesh.
I think the thing about experts being unable to classify it was a tabloid red herring. This isn’t a sas track. And it looks like a real paw. If it were unidentifiable…I bet it would be identified by now, if you get my drift. It wouldn’t have been simply tossed if it couldn’t be linked to anything known.
And for folcrom, who mentioned “drop bears”: when I was in Oz a biologist told me that’s a popular term for tree kangaroos – which are better getting into trees than getting out of them.
The paw looks like it is from a digging creature of some sort. Do they have anteaters down under or something similiar?
Well DWA,
You can see a bit of resemblance to a wombat in Yoda … ;).
Or maybe it was an Ewok :).
I’m taking bets.
Marsupial, definitely. Wombat, probably.
If I win…one all-expenses-paid trip on a TBRC expedition.
If I lose…I never make any more guesses about silly relics.
But DWA, what if it really IS a yowie?
Otter?
It looks remarkably like my mother in-laws foot
How bout a Giant Ground Sloth? Or were they only supposed to live in the Amazon?
DWA drop bears are not tree kangaroos.
Biologists may use the phrase, but they didn’t create it.
Drop bears are NOT real.
As an Australian, I can tell you, drop bears are a “boogy man” story Australian’s tell to tourists to scare the hell out of them when their out camping. Again drop bears aren’t real.
I don’t know a whole lot about the manus of most marsupials (although the thought of a roo forepaw came to mind when I first viewed the photos) but I feel fairly safe in saying that it doesn’t belong to thylacoleo-unless maybe it is the pez. Thylacoleo had retractile claws(just like a cat-and unique to marsupials)om the forepaw (with a large hooded thumb claw). But I ain’t so sure about the rear paws. I looks to have a set of grooming claws (syndact?) and perhaps could be from a marsupial lion’s rear foot (ok, it’s a long shot) but if the collectors of this paw heard roaring-it has to make you think. About the drop-bear: I think it is possible that this urban-teasing/legend may have roots in reality. What are the odds that a “legend” like that, would come from a land with a recently exinct marsupial killer that hunted in that way, to not be connected? Yarri
Yarri.
Personally I think the Thylacoleo Carnifex is precisely where the original legend of the “drop bear” came from.
Since then of course it has become little more than a “camp fire” story to scare children and tourists.
As for the foot, it looks like it came from a digging/burrowing type of animal, not a predator like the Thylacoleo.
that’s a drop bear paw if I ever saw one!!
bloody things, rip your face off
Kangaroo feet. Here’s a pic.
It certainly belongs to a kangaroo, that much is more or less obvious. However, assuming that the size of it has been accurately reported, one question still remains: Which species of roo? Perhaps a Procoptodon – to the non-Aussies, that’d be a kind of giant, short-faced roo considered to be long extinct – or something similar? I’d hazard a guess that its huge size and flat face could easily be confused with a “Bigfoot”-like creature.
Yeah, but why just the hand? The account says they heard a commotion with growling and when they went outside, there was just this hand. You gotta wonder what happened out there. Where is the rest of the creature and more imprtantly what took its hand off? I don’t know about you all, but I sure am curious about that.
Well, I’ve seen many a roo get its hand, foot or even head caught in, and torn off by, the sparse barbed-wire fences favoured by farmers there. A mistimed jump often proves deadly for the poor things, especially when they thrash madly in an attempt to free themselves.
mystery_man, to me it looks as though this … er… appendage was cut off at the wrist (ankle?) a little too cleanly to have been done by accident. I really think it’s a sort of prank.
I don’t doubt that it’s a real paw of an animal, but I do doubt its “back story”.
Yes, Kittenz, “appendage” is more fitting here. I was just using “hand” for convenience sake! I am kind of going with the prank story too. It is just so cleanly cut and so bizarre that no other sign of the rest of the body was found. I wonder if there was any other sign of a struggle? It seems most likely that someone left it there. It makes me a little angry to think that someone would butcher this poor animal just for a prank, regardless of whether it was alive at the time or not. Pretty bad taste if you ask me. If this was a rare or endangered type of kangaroo, then it seems to me that the authorities should be involved somehow.
Hmmm….one idea that occurs to my mind is the possibility this might have originally been intended as a kind of trophy or a lucky charm.
I have some local knowledge being that I live/lived in the area, where this was found, for all of my life.
Although this foot/hand/claw looks great with the claws and what not, I would say it is from a big wombat. And I can tell you they get big. Although they don’t often inhabit areas in this particular part of the north.
I have lived and worked in Gayndah and my home town Monto is just a few hours drive away.
I lived in an aboriginal community near Gayndah and heard a lot of stories about all sort of things to do with creaures mythical and “real” to the Aboriginals at least.
It is hard to make sense of what are essentially stories more com only told around a bar. But there are some stories of cryptids I guess you could call them, large dogs, massive kangaroos (not uncommon), ‘large cats’, bunyips is a favorite, and bear like creatures not surprisingly.
My father was a professional roo shooter in those parts for about 20 years before I was around and he doesn’t mind telling an interesting story or two either. And from what I gather locals are more worried about being called cookoo then they are about telling stories about something they saw in the scrub or in the dark.
Interesting Dermals??? Looks like someone made palm prints and then drew in claw marks. It would not match to any cat or bear prints and claw marks made on a dusty surface at all. These claw marks are from a finger drawing them not the sharp claws of an animal. The person who made these on the bobcat are having a huge quiet chuckle and telling their mates they have baffled the experts.
Some people see what they believe…others see what is actually there.