Nandi bear

An unidentified animal reported in British East Africa in the early 1900s, also called the chemosit. Later scientists put most reports down to spotted hyenas or honey badgers.

In 1912 C. W. Hobley, writing in the Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society, returned to a strange animal that G. Williams had described in an earlier issue after seeing it on Uasin-Gishu Plateau. Hobley said he had made wide inquiries and, with help from others, gathered enough evidence to show that a curious beast of some kind existed, though no collector had yet taken one. He thought they were closing in.

A. Blayney Percival, in the same journal, listed it among the strange animals reported from British East Africa and called it the chemosit, chimiset or Nandi bear.

The name Chemosit appears earlier. A. C. Hollis, in The Nandi: Their Language and Folk-lore (1909), records Chemosit as a devil of Nandi belief, living on earth and roaming in search of people to eat, children above all. He is described as half man and half bird, with one leg, nine buttocks and a red mouth that lights up like a lamp after dark. He gets about with a spear-like stick used as a crutch. Hollis describes a demon; Hobley and Percival describe an animal.

Later zoologists pointed to known animals. Wikipedia reports that Reginald Innes Pocock held the Nandi bear reports to be misidentified spotted hyenas, and that Britain's Natural History Museum said in 1932 that many of them had turned out to be spotted hyenas. The palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson said most, perhaps all, of the cases were a ratel, or honey badger, an animal known to science since 1776.