Goering, Laurie "Trailing the Amazon's Monster," The Canberra Times (19 January 1995)

IT HAUNTS the Amazon jungle with a giant bear's body and a monkey's face, clad in dark red fur and trailing a cloud of flying beetles. Its stench is disabling, its upright bulk disconcertingly humanlike and its roar like endless thunder.

"When you hear it, you want to move in the other direction," said ornithologist David Oren. "It's absolutely terrifying."

To rubber tappers and Indians in the forest's remote western fringe, the creature is the Mapinguari, the Amazon's version of the legendary Yeti or Bigfoot. No scientist has ever seen it, but Oren may be on the verge of proving the mythological animal actually exists.

Scientists in the US and Germany this month are performing DNA tests on hair and feces Oren collected in Brazil's remote Acre state. If his suspicions are correct, the tests will reveal a biological shocker: The fabled monster is actually a species of giant ground sloth believed extinct for 8,500 years.

"I have every confidence we found it," Oren said in his offices at the Emilio Goeldi Natural History Museum in Belem, where he is recovering from malaria contracted during is search in November and December.

If he's right, the sloth, believed to weigh more than 280kg and stand 1.85m tall, would be the largest land mammal in South America. It also would be powerful evidence of the kind of mysteries the still largely unexplored Amazon basin holds.

"The prospects of finding megafauna like this are intruiging," said Peter Clearly, a spokesman for the Washington-based Nature Conservancy, which seeks to preserve habitat in the Amazon rain forest. "There's no question it would strengthen the arguments for conservation of rain forests in general."

Oren, a Harvard and Yale-trained biologist described by colleagues in Belem as a "brilliant" scientist, first heard stories of the Mapinguari 10 years ago while tracking birds in remote regions of the western Amazon.

Rubber tappers, Indian hunters and others told remarkably similar tales about a giant nocturnal red or black creature, proportioned like a man and with a human-like face.

It had backward-turned clawed feet, skin capable of withstanding shotgun blasts and a horrible smell that emitted from a "second mouth" in its stomach.

"Several said they had come face-to-face with the devil itself," Oren said.

"And there are classic stories about it being an Indian shaman who discovered the secret of immortality, but paid for it by being tranformed [sic] into this horrible monster."

Initially, Oren laughed off the stories. But the first time he heard an eyewitness account from a reliable source, "a light went off in my head," he said. "It could only be a ground sloth."

For nine years, Oren kept his suspicions about the Mapinguari to himself.

"I'm the first one to admit the whole idea is rather absurd," he said.

But after Amazon dwellers year after year described to him stories of mothers with offspring, the creatures' seasonal movements to find water and even what their feces looked like, he siad, "it became quite clear it would be irresponsible as a scientist not to follow up these leads."

So last year the ornithologist took a break from birds and set off to find the elusive sloth. He never did see one.

But he shot videotape of clawed trees, taped what he believes are the creatures' minute-long thunderous roars, and made moulds of round footprints with backward-facing claws.

He also collected hair and 10kg of feces, which are undergoing analysis.

Oren would not specify which labs are doing the work.