Giant and out-of-place reptiles in Oklahoma

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Friday, February 6, 2009
Posted by Yards
 
An ice storm, the flu, and a computer virus have kept me out of the blogsphere for a while—when it rains, it pours (and in this case it rains ice). But one good thing came out of trekking twice a day to the only outlet still serving food: about two days into the storm one of my fellow refugees approached me during dinner with a very strange story.

Adam Meirs of Kansas, Oklahoma (another in a long line of creative Okie names) had an encounter of the slithery kind in the summer of 2005.

Kansas is a small town in Delaware County, just off the Cherokee Turnpike. It has a population of 685, according to the last census. Meirs states:

“I was riding my four-wheeler at dusk behind my uncle’s house where there’s a lot of trees. Back behind his house there’s a dip that leads to a pond that he also owns and before you reach the pond there’s a turnaround point.”

It was dusk, and Meirs began to get spooked. He continues:

“I turned around and right at the dip my four-wheeler immediately shuts off. I’m trying to pull-start it, and I started getting a little more freaked out because I heard some rustling off to the side. I look over and see a human-like shadow standing off to the side, but instead of being a normal human he had a snake-like head.”

The being approached Meirs, who struggled more and more frantically to start his vehicle:

“I gave one final pull on the starter while pressing on the gas at the same time and my four-wheeler starts, and I haul out of there and go tell my friend Joe what I seen.”

Joe took the four-wheeler and returned to the site, but headed back to the house after hearing a noise that “did not seem normal”.

The most interesting thing about Meirs’s snake-headed humanoid is the resemblance it bears to the Seminole tribe’s “human snakes”, legendary malevolent creatures that lived in dens full of giant snakes. I asked Meirs if he was familiar with the legend, and he said he was not. Human snakes are either half-snake half-human or can shape shift between the two.

Human snakes aren’t the only breed of strange snake the Native Americans believe in. The Cherokee tribe tells of Ukena, giant horned reptiles that live in the water, and perhaps most interesting are the Creeks’ tie-snakes, strong, dark snakes that live in caves alongside riverbanks and are capable of pulling unsuspecting humans to a watery death.

Of the forty-six species of known snake native to Oklahoma, only a few are aquatic, and none are powerful enough to prey on humans. The Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake and the Coachwhip hold the title of OK’s largest snakes, both clocking in just shy of seven feet long.

But could there be monsters hiding in the forests and lakes, as the Native legends hold?

Snake Creek, near Tenkiller Lake, appears to have been named for good reason. Edna Stubblefield recalls in the Stubblefield memoirs that sometime in the 1890s she and her family spotted a snake at the Creek that “looked like a big old fence post” crawling across the road.

A nine-foot Burmese python turned up in a Tulsa driveway, and on October 25, 2001, another Burmese python, this one seven feet long, appeared in a Stillwater neighborhood. And according to this article, more giant snakes may be on their way to Oklahoma.
http://newsok.com/article/3207429

While we’re on the subject of out of place reptiles, how about rampaging alligators? The official range of the American alligator is restricted to extreme Southeastern Oklahoma, particularly Choctaw and McCurtain counties, and yet they just seem to keep turning up in other parts of the state.

In August 2002 a South American caiman, of all things, was netted in Lake Tenkiller. Another caiman, this one two to four feet long, appeared in a Tulsa backyard in February 2004. And in July 2006 animal control officers spent two days trying to capture a four-foot-long alligator that appeared in the Battle Creek Golf Course in Tulsa. The gator was never caught, and apparently vanished. (Note of interest—the Battle Creek housing edition was also home to another out-of-place creature in 2005—a “mountain lion” reportedly terrorized the neighborhood, preying on household pets. It was also never caught and eventually just faded away.)

And of course the strange case of the “fugitive” gator. In the summer of 2003 a 350-pound reptile dubbed the Truck Traveling Alligator was caught in a pond, sent to a breeder, and then sent to Safari Joe’s, a wildlife sanctuary in Adair. The gator promptly vanished from its pen and reappeared in a pond just south of Interstate 44, and then turned up in yet another pond, this one behind the Big Cabin Truck Plaza, where he was finally recaptured. He was relocated to prime gator habitat in McCurtain County.

Granted, giant reptiles are nothing new to Oklahoma. The Sam Noble Museum in Norman hosts the world’s largest Apatosaurus (http://www.rareresource.com/images/apato...—93 feet long—found in the Panhandle. And if that’s not big enough for you, the world’s largest dinosaur to date also once called Oklahoma home. In 1994 fossils that were first thought to be tree trunks were discovered. The “trunks” turned out to be neck bones, each four feet long. The sauropod the bones belonged to stood an estimated 60 feet and weighed 60 tons, and was dubbed Sauroposeidon—the “earthquake God lizard”.

This monster went extinct 110 million years ago, but perhaps some of the God lizard’s smaller cousins stuck around.

http://cryptook.blogspot.com/2009/02/gia...es-in.html