Sucuriju gigante means "Giant Water Snake" or "Giant Boa". Has also been called "Mysterious Beast" and "Controller" in the belief that it "controls" certains sections of the rivers it inhabits. Sucuriju gigante is mostly likely a giant Anaconda that is a distinct species from the common anaconda, Eunectes murinus.
Length: Up to 40 meters. Width: Up to 80 centimeters. Weight: Up to 5 tons.
Dark chestnut color with the belly being spotted with dirty white.
In the rivers of the Amazaon basin in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru.
Various types of animals and occasionally people.
The following information received via E-Mail from Mike Little, MLittle452@aol.com.
Tim Dinsdale in his book, Monster Hunt, discusses stories recounted by a young Englishman named Craig who lived in Paraguay after WW I, about a "Mysterious Beast" which he never saw, but which he credits with taking a young farmhand and several cattle at various times while they were swimming across El Paso Limpo, a crossing in the Rio Jacare. He actually witnessed one of incidents, when a calf was pulled under. Craig later concluded that the culprit must have been an exceptionally large catfish, but Dinsdale doubts this, and goes on to make his case that it was a sucuriju gigante, the "giant water snake."
Dinsdale continues with several accounts of the thing, particularly an incident which was reported in the 1-24-48 issue of the Diario de Pernambuco, of a sucuriju which was captured while lying on the river bank ingesting a steer. It was reported as weighing 5 tons and being 80 centimeters in diameter and 40 meters long. The report included a poor-quality photo with nothing to gauge the actual size of the creature by. The animal was reportedly killed, but there's no indication of what happened to the body from the newspaper story.
There is, however, another newspaper story (from A Provincia do Para) with another photo of a giant snake, which Dinsdale feels is of the same snake after its body had been pushed back into the river and floated downstream. And indeed, in the second photo all you can see is a long, mottled body - apparently bellyup - floating in the water with the head and tip of the tail invisible, just as you'd expect a dead snake to float.
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