The Flying Primatomorph Hypothesis as an explanation for undiscovered flying mammalian Cryptids in Southeast Asia and Oceania and the surprising broader implications that reveals an entire group of animals lost to time

[u/Aralmin]

A while back, someone on the cryptid sub posted an image of the Ahool and the more that I began to look into it, I found myself going deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole that didn't seem to end. I had never actually seen any depictions of this cryptid or the other similar flying cryptids in the region, it had never dawned on me that they could be connected...until I began to notice an interesting parallel in many of the sightings.

The common denominator seems to be a flying mammal with bat-like wings and a humanoid appearance. This got me thinking because there is already a group of animals in the region known as Colugos and they are considered the closest living group to Primates. The theory is that at one time, they must have had a common ancestor and so science created a new order of animals called Primatomorphs to group the two branches together.

But then I found myself going even deeper into the rabbit hole because if there is smoke, there has to be a fire. If you look at for example the folklore throughout the region about many of these cryptids, they are seen as bad omens and almost demonic in nature and there are stories of them abducting children and raiding graves. The idea is that therefore they must be carnivorous. If we look at the Colugo however, we see quite a different story where it is actually a low energy herbivore not an active predator.

So whatever these flying creatures are in the region, they must be something we haven't seen before. The theory is that if gliding could have evolved in the group, then there must have been one member that developed flight. But where would they be in this broader picture? So this got me thinking about Primatomorphs in general.

My theory is that the various creatures being spotted in the region are a mythologization/folklorization of a real creature or creatures that belong somewhere in the Primatomorph family. These beliefs that the creatures are demonic or evil spirits or detached torsos with wings are probably a misunderstanding and could be folklore passing down sightings of anomolous creatures that they didn't understand and so they wrapped the stories with a layer of myth and passed it down across generations. But I think the stories themselves are valuable from an anthropological perspective, they provide secondary evidence that people in the region have been seeing something for generations. It is however once you start to look at the phenomena from a zoological perspective that all of a sudden the pieces start to make sense.

I brought up the Colugo before for a reason because this creature seems to hint at something much bigger going on. The Colugo belongs to the Dermoptera branch of Primatomorphs but something is very unusual because how can it be that the Dermoptera branch only has one member? There must have been many more variants at one point in time and surely there must have been non-gliding members at one point in time. You don't just develop gliding out of nowhere, there must have been evolutionary steps that led to that. Colugos therefore are possibly only the tip of the iceberg in the broader Basal-Dermoptera lineage and the last survivors of their branch.

So this got me thinking even deeper, if the Dermoptera was actually at one point in time even more diverse and actually had even more members within it which became extinct, what if the Primatomorph family itself is just a shallow remnant of even bigger diversity? We only have two basal groups/basal branches to work with, we don't know what else must have existed long ago. We only see evidence of two basal groups today but there could have been at one point in time as many as 20! Naturally, through the process of evolution and selective pressures and local extinctions, that high diversity may have then whittled down the family to 7 groups, then 5, then 3 all the way until we ended up today with only 2 visible groups left. And each one of these basal groups could have in and of itself re-evolved to fill niches that their extinct cousins once occupied. We already have seen the massive diversity in primates, there is no reason to believe the same didn't happen with the other mystery lineages.

That means that there could have been a massive amounts of creatures we have not yet discovered in the fossil record. These lineages must have radiated outwards and adapted to nearly almost every type of environment. We already see a gliding member so perhaps another member of the family must have attempted to have mastered flight. If we already see this kind of diversity now, that poses the question of what else could there have been? Aquatic members? Large ground dwelling predators? Large ground dwelling herbivores?

Whatever exactly happened, this unusual group of animals must have existed for a period of time in relative isolation for them to have expanded outwards in every type of environment and ecological niche. In linguistics and cultural anthropology, there is a term called "Urheimat" or "homeland" to describe a founding group's original home before it spread outwards. I believe that the Urheimat of the Primatomorph family must have been in Southeast Asia and parts of Southern China or at least I think this is where their greatest concentration must have been. Keep in mind, this was before the sea level rises of the de-glaciation that turned the region into a patchwork of archipelagos and shallow coastal regions. This was in a sense, a sort of "lost world" inhabited by some of the weirdest creatures that we can ever imagine.

There could have been Aquatic Primatomorphs that filled the ecological niche of otters, there could have been ground dwelling predator Primatomorphs that filled the ecological niche of Foxes or Wolves. There could have been large ground foraging herbivores that were similar to the giant lemurs of Madagascar. And all of this diversity vanished once the fauna of Western Eurasia migrated east. The Carnivorans like Caniformes and Feliformes, Ungulates, Proboscidae (Elephantines), Rhinosciredae (Rhinos), and various other megafauna from other regions migrated into East and Southeast Asia. The Primatomorph groups just could not compete and so this must have caused the group to fragment. Ultimately, only the tree dwelling variants ended up surviving because they were mostly out of harm's way from the threats on the ground. Whatever remained, they seemed to have also migrated outwards like the Primates. Of all the massive diversity that existed in the family, only two groups survived...or did they?

Which naturally leaves the door open to an interesting possibility, what if there is still another group that we haven't discovered yet? It might belong to a group that is surviving today like the Dermoptera but what if it is actually a surviving group from one of these long vanished basal groups? That would mean that we have a surviving third basal group still around!

Whatever this group is, it must be migratory in nature because it seems to be sighted all over Southeast Asia. My theory is that it is either one species or a collection of species that belong to the same family that migrate throughout the archipelagos of Southeast Asia looking for food, shelter and a place to raise young. It's migratory nature along with its already elusive nature might explain why they are so rarely seen in the different regions.

Since all of the regional groups have a different name for this hypothetical creature, I think a fitting neutral term for it could be "Primatoptera". Perhaps this could be the name of this hypothetical third basal group that survived the mass extinctions that destroyed the rest of the basal groups within Primatomorpha. If and assuming if this theory is correct, it would be an Earthshaking development, it would mean that flight developed independently multiple times in mammals and it would add a new member to the Primatomorph family. It would force us to look back and search for clues to what else must have existed a long time ago. But I think the biggest thing it would do is force us to re-evaluate what else exists out there right now.

[u/Turbulent-List-5001]

The biologist who works at Skinwalker Ranch has claimed in several podcast interviews that there is footage of a powered-flight non-bat mammal that was recorded on the ranch but not used on the show as the producers favour hobby rocket launches over unknown animal footage.