Tale of the tree that ate cows

David Pescovitz 4:15 pm Tue Oct 23, 2007

Loren Coleman detours into "cryptobotany" as he comments on a strange news report from Uppinangady, Mangalor, India about a carnivorous tree that allegedly has a taste for cattle. From the Express News Service:

(Cow owner) Anand Gowda and the villagers struck mortal blows to the branches that turned limp and the cow was rescued. Uppinangady range forest officer (RFO) Subramanya Rao said the tree was described as ‘pili mara’ (tiger tree) in native lingo. Link

And from Loren's post at Cryptomundo:

In Roy Mackal’s book, Searching for Hidden Animals (NY: Doubleday, 1980), his last chapter is entitled “The Monstrous Plants.” It was not about cryptozoology, needless to say, but about cryptobotany, being a short treatise on the Victorian accounts of man-eating plants…

Mackal spends his final chapter detailing mostly the reports from the 1850s through the 1940s of the “Man-Eating Tree of Madagacar,” and the expeditions that searched (unsuccessfully) for the species. Link

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