Gollum creature stoned to death in Panama

What a headline! A group of teenagers encountered this strange creature on Saturday 12th September at a lake in Cerro Azul, Panama. It (allegedly) emerged from a cave behind a waterfall and ran towards them as if to attack them. Being typically brave teenagers, they grabbed the nearest rocks that came to hand and stoned it to death ‘in order to defend themselves’ (that’s funny, UK teenagers use the same defence in order to ‘protect themselves’ from local pensioners in their own homes…). They killed it and threw it back into the lake, but clearly not before taking a set of photographs to flog to the local newspaper.


When the teenagers returned to the scene later with their parents in tow, they found the carcass washed up on the shore and picked apart by buzzards. (Wow, I thought the whole ‘circling buzzards’ scenario only happened to bad guys left in the desert to die in cowboy movies!?)


The general consensus from zoological sources is that the decomposing carcass resembles a three-toed sloth and therefore the creature may have been an unfortunate sloth that was suffering from a hair-loss condition such as alopecia. Not exactly The Creature from the Black Lagoon then. And, all things considered, a slightly embarrassing and spineless reaction there, lads…

The locals described the creature to the local Panama news as like ‘Gollum from the Lord of the Rings’ so many of the subsequent reports are taking the Gollum angle on the strange creature. Well, I guess even fantasy characters need to take a holiday sometime. Perhaps the teenagers didn’t notice the short folk with very hairy feet cowering in fear higher up on the rocks. But seriously, the whole thing sounds very, very unlikely indeed...
...Gollum looks more like an Ayia Napa guy to me…;)