A strange discovery in Africa had locals questioning if there was an alien in their midst.
Several images taken by national park ranger Llewellyn Dixon in South Africa show what appears to be an alien entity. However, the mystery surrounding the unusual-looking cadaver was dispelled when a local veterinarian performed an autopsy and determined that the creature was not an alien, as some feared, according to The Herald.
“Anyone could see it was baby baboon,” Dr. Magdalena Braum of The Crags Veterinary Clinic said, according to Times Live.
The “alien-like” remains were discovered by Dixon’s 17-year-old son near Nature’s Valley, a southern resort town near Plettenberg Bay.
While the elongated body does not precisely resemble a living baboon, Braum stated that the corpse seems deformed because the mother carried the baboon about after the baby died.
“We have seen it quite often in baboon research troops, when females carry the deceased infants sometimes for as long as three to four weeks on their tail section before finally discarding them,” Braum told Algoa FM.
Indeed, experts have documented numerous cases of primate mothers refusing to let go of their deceased infant.
A team of scientists investigating a colony of chimps in Guinea saw this behavior in 2010, and linked it to the strong mother-infant attachment prevalent in primates.
“[P]rimate infants are born completely helpless and undergo a slow process of maturation during which time they are completely reliant on the mother,” zoologist Dora Biro of the University of Oxford told LiveScience in 2010. “So the fact that dead-infant-carrying is seen in other species of primates is not so surprising.”
