Buru

The Buru is a cryptid inhabiting the southeastern Himalayan mountains. They are aquatic lizard or lungfish-like animals inhabiting lagoons and ponds in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India. The first recorded sightings were in WWII by Indian and British soldiers.

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In 1948, journalist Ralph Izzard and explorer Charles Stonor set to investigate the sightings in the Rilo Valley in the Daffla Hills in Arunachal. Although they did not discover the buru, they collected many sightings of it and described the animal in great detail.

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The buru is blue with white spots, elongate, 11 to 13 feet long, with a 20-inch head, and a long, flat-tipped snout. It had flat teeth except for the sharp incisors. Its neck is three feet long and can be retracted like a seal. The limbs of the buru are somewhat vague because it spends its time in the water. Some locals say the buru has lizard-like legs and others say they are useless on land and are shaped like the body of a snake. The buru is herbivorous, eating algae and plants that fall into the pond. If the lake they live in dries up, they bury themselves in the muddy floor and hibernate until it floods again.

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Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker noticed that many of its descriptions are not very lizard-like, but actually resemble some kind of enormous lungfish. Lungfish are a primitive species suborder of fish that match most of the buru’s description and behaviour, including burying itself and hibernating in the mud.