Gambo

Gambo is the name of an unidentified corpse of a large marine animal that washed up on the beach of Bungalow Beach Hotel in Kotu in the West African nation of Gambia.

Origin of the myth

The 15 -year-old Owen Burnham and his family arrived in the morning of June 12, 1983, the reference, while some villagers were busy with the decapitation of the animal. Owen, a nature lover, took the dimensions of the body to later to make sketches, but it had no camera. According to later testimony, he did not think to take a sample until he realized that he could not identify it from books. The villagers sold the severed head of the animal finally to a tourist. After Owen called him a " dolphin ", but he assumed that this was only a superficial resemblance. The body was finally buried, and attempts to find him later were unsuccessful.

As the animal was noted three years after the discovery of Owen in a newspaper article, it came to the attention of cryptozoologists Karl Shuker, who requested more information about the animal. According to Owen, the body showed little or no signs of decay, and measured approximately 4.6 meters in length. The color was brown on the back and on the belly white, the skin itself was smooth. Most measurements were taken from the head, which was 1.40 m in length. He had a 0.8 m long beak, 14 cm high and 13 cm wide, which was equipped with 80 single and conical teeth. A small pair of nostrils was located at the tip of the beak. The slightly domed head measured 25 cm in height and was 30 cm wide and had small eyes. The front pair of fins measured 46 cm in length and 20 cm in width. One of the rear fin was severely injured and nearly torn off, the entrails were visible. The inflated by water body was 1.8 m long and had a circumference of 1.5 m. On the upper side of the animal, there was no dorsal fin. The tail was 1.5 m long and tapering.

There was a lot of speculation, what animal had been found here. The paleontologist Darren Naish doubted that the reports were genuine at all - that no sample was taken, he found suspicious. The crypto zoologist Chris Orrick suspected that it was a heavily mutilated Shepherd Whale. Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe speculated that it could be an unknown form of Shepherd whale. Another common suggestion is that the body is some kind of a surviving prehistoric reptile. Shuker first proposed that it was either a plesiosaur or a Thalattosuchia crocodile, but he later described him as " the last of the mosasaurs ." Other proposed candidates are Askeptosaurus or a primeval ichthyosaurs as Cymbospondylus or Urwal Basilosaurus.