Remembering the ‘Saurian Monster’ That Terrorized 1880s New Zealand

Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura

It must have been a ghoulish sight. At the slaughter yards of Frankton Junction, near Hamilton, New Zealand, in October 1886, workers found a sheep picked clean to the bones. Some creature, they reported, had taken the carcass from the hook where it hung, eaten its flesh, and then departed, leaving only a strange trail of footprints unlike any other they had seen.

Men gathered their guns and revolvers and kept watch for its return.

These, New Zealand’s

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reported, were the “undoubted traces of a saurian monster.” The word “saurian” means lizard-like—other papers concluded that this monster must be an alligator or crocodile, despite New Zealand’s smattering of living reptiles being, without exception, only a few inches long.

For two months, throughout October and November, the people of the Waikato region kept up a near-constant watch for their worrying new neighbor. Farmboys reported seeing it in the river, with its head poking up from the creek; indigenous Maori told settlers that they had known of it for some time and called it a taniwha. “Stories are extant among them of a very large animal, like an eel, which has…

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