MINHOCÃO

Opening

The minhocão, Portuguese for "big earthworm", is a giant burrowing creature said to live in southern and central Brazil. Nineteenth-century reports describe an animal that tunnels underground, leaves deep trenches, undermines roads and riverbanks, and drags horses and cattle into the water. Most witnesses saw the damage rather than the animal, and descriptions range from a giant worm to a finned fish.

What makes it more than a rural tale is who wrote it down. The French naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire recorded accounts in the first half of the century, and the German naturalist Fritz Müller, a respected correspondent of Charles Darwin, collected reports in the 1870s. No specimen has ever been found.

Timeline

Early to mid-19th centurySaint-Hilaire, travelling in Goiás, hears of a large animal in lakes and rivers, including Lake Feia, that seizes livestock by the belly and pulls them under. His informants describe it as a true fish with fins and a visible mouth.

1860sThe explorer Richard Burton hears local people at As Queimadas blame the minhocão for a collapsed riverbank, but finds no one who claims to have seen it.

1870sMüller collects reports from the highlands of Santa Catarina. One witness, Francisco de Amaral Varella, describes an animal nearly a metre thick with a snout like a pig's, on the bank of the Rio das Caveiras about ten kilometres from Lages. A Lages merchant says he saw the trenches it left.

1880sThe Edinburgh lecturer Andrew Wilson brings the reports to British readers, calling the animal a gigantic earthworm while declining to say what it really was.

20th centuryReports fade.

Key figures

Fritz Müller, known for his work on mimicry and evolution, gave the minhocão its scientific credibility by taking the reports seriously enough to publish.

Auguste de Saint-Hilaire recorded the earliest accounts, in which the animal is a water creature rather than a burrower.

Francisco de Amaral Varella is the best-known named witness from Müller's collection.

Local farmers, travellers and a road surveyor made the reports.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources: Saint-Hilaire's, Burton's, Müller's and Wilson's published accounts. The trenches, fallen trees and collapsed banks were real and were seen by several people, including a road surveyor who later attributed winding trenches near Itajaí to the creature. The animal itself was almost never seen clearly, and no remains were ever collected.

Things you might not know

• Darwin's friend took it seriously. Müller corresponded with Darwin and was one of the most respected field naturalists in Brazil.
• It started as a fish. Saint-Hilaire's informants described fins and a mouth. The giant worm came later.
• It had a pig's snout. Varella's description of a thick animal with a snout like a pig's is the most specific sighting on record.
• Burton could not find a witness. The famous explorer heard the stories but no one would say they had seen the worm.
• The rivers obeyed it. The traveller Franz Keller recorded a belief that rivers rose or fell as the creature entered or left them.

Competing explanations

A giant unknown animal. Some writers suggested a surviving glyptodont, an extinct armoured relative of the armadillo, or a giant caecilian, a legless amphibian. Neither fits the reported sizes or the lack of remains.

Erosion and known animals. Heavy rain, collapsing riverbanks and landslips can produce trenches that look dug. Real caecilians, which live in Brazil but are much smaller, the South American lungfish, and large anacondas may lie behind some of the sightings.

Later life of the case

The minhocão is a classic of 19th-century cryptozoology and still appears in lists of giant worm legends, alongside the Mongolian death worm.

Finding

The trenches and damage were real, and serious naturalists recorded the stories in good faith. The data points to a rural explanation for erosion and lost livestock, built partly on glimpses of known animals. The accounts of the creature itself are too few and too varied to test.

What still will not resolve: what Varella saw on the Rio das Caveiras, the one sighting detailed enough to need an answer of its own.