http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/430944.stm
ACCORDING to Australian aboriginal mythology ( Dreamtime ) Bunyips are monsters that live in Australia's rivers & Billabongs.
The bunyip is a legendary spirit or creature of the Australian Aborigine.
The Bunyips haunt rivers, swamps, creeks and billabongs. Their main goal is to cause nocturnal terror by eating people or animals in their vicinity. They are renowned for their terrifying bellowing cries in the night and have been known to frighten Aborigines to the point where they would not approach any water source where a bunyip might be waiting to devour them.
There are many reports by white settlers who have witnessed bunyips, so cryptozoologists may still be searching for these creatures. They may have some difficulty in locating their prey, though, since Aboriginal tribes do not all give the same visual description of the creature.
Some say the bunyip looks like a huge snake with a beard and a mane; others say it looks like a huge furry half-human beast with a long neck and a head like a bird. However, most Australians now consider the existence of the bunyip to be mythical.
Some scientists believe the bunyip was a real animal, the diprotodon, extinct for some 20,000 years, which terrified the earliest settlers of Australia.
According to Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) in Stradbroke Dreamtime, the bunyip is an evil or punishing spirit from the Aboriginal Dreamtime.
In 1846 an unusual skull was retrieved from the banks of the Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales.
In the first flush of excitement several experts declared that it was the skull of something unknown to science. In July 1847 the so-called ‘bunyip skull’ was put on exhibition in the Australian Museum (then located at the Supreme Court House, Sydney) for two days.
Visitors flocked to see it and the Sydney Morning Herald, 1847 reported that it prompted a spate of bunyip stories:
Almost everyone became immediately aware that he had heard ‘strange sounds’ from the lagoons at night, or had seen ‘something black’ in the water.
Sydney’s leading naturalist, William Macleay, examined the skull and compared it with an even stranger one: a skull with only one eye-socket—a veritable cyclops!
Scientific knowledge and common sense prevailed, however, when Macleay concluded that both skulls were freaks of nature and did not represent a new species. The Australian Medical Journal warned that claims of ‘bunyip skulls’ could only be seen as an ‘ostentatious display of our ignorance and credulity’.
Gradually the debate calmed down although one final mystery remains—what became of the so-called bunyip skull. It disappeared and has never been sighted since!
