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Minhocão

Minhocão is the augmentative of the Portuguese minhoca, earthworm, and it has named two different animals.

Where and when was Minhocão sighted?

Location: Santa Catarina, Brazil
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: -27.29, -50.578
Last updated: 2026-10-08

LOCATION

What is Minhocão?

In a note read to the Académie des Sciences on 28 December 1846 and reprinted in the American Journal of Science in July 1847, the botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire described a minhocão of the lakes of Goiás: black, short, of enormous size, seizing horses and cattle by the belly and dragging them under. He concluded it was probably a giant Lepidosiren, a lungfish. Thirty years later and fifteen hundred kilometres to the south, Fritz Müller collected a quite different creature in the highland campos of Santa Catarina, a burrower that opened trenches one to three metres wide after long spells of rain. He wrote to Charles Darwin on 25 March 1877 that the belief was general from São Paulo to Rio Grande do Sul, that most accounts were truly fabulous, and that even so it was highly probable that some animal about a metre thick lived in those swamps. Darwin pencilled one word in the margin: Mastodon. Müller published his informants that year, with names, trades and villages; Nature summarised them, and mistranslated them, on 21 February 1878.

Minhocão — illustration — A digital drawing made in 2007 and released to the public domain, not a historical illustration. Measured against the reports of 1846-1878 it gets one thing right and two wrong: the two movable horns are there in the account of an informant from Paraná, but no witness describes a mouth of teeth, and the dry red plain contradicts every testimony, which places the animal in ground soaked after long rains. Image: Kryptid at English Wikipedia · Public domain

What is the history of Minhocão?

Two different animals have carried this name, and thirty years and some fifteen hundred kilometres separate them. The first was aquatic. On 28 December 1846 the French botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, who had travelled Brazil between 1816 and 1822, read a note to the Académie des Sciences in Paris; it was reprinted in English in the American Journal of Science and Arts for July 1847. His minhocão lived in the lakes of Goiás — Padre Aranda and Feia — and in the Rio dos Pilões. He never saw it. He took it from two Brazilian authors, Luiz Antônio da Silva e Souza, whom he had met in Goiás, and Monsenhor Pizarro, and from the governor of Meiaponte, Joaquim Alves de Oliveira, who confirmed the reports and added, on the word of several fishermen, that despite its very round form the minhocão was a true fish provided with fins. It was said to be black, short, of enormous size, to have a visible mouth, never to rise to the surface, and to seize horses, mules and cattle by the belly and drag them under. Saint-Hilaire first guessed at the electric eel Gymnotus carapo, discarded it on Pohl's evidence, and then, on a suggestion from Professor Paul Gervais, read Bischoff's account of the Lepidosiren that Natterer had brought back from the Madeira. His conclusion was that "it is therefore probable that the minhocão is an enormous species of Lepidosiren". The lungfish hypothesis, in other words, is his, and it is thirty years older than the version everyone quotes. The second minhocão is the burrower of the southern campos, and it belongs to Fritz Müller, the German naturalist who lived at Blumenau on the Itajaí and corresponded with Darwin for seventeen years. Müller made two expeditions to the Campos de Curitibanos, in late 1876 and in February and March 1877. He reached home on 23 March 1877 and wrote to Darwin two days later. Most of that letter is about orchids, a trimorphic Pontederia and some hygroscopic grasses; the minhocão is the last paragraph. He told Darwin the belief was general across São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul; that the stories were "truly fabulous" — a worm sixty metres long and six thick, its skin plated like a tatú, bending mighty araucarias aside like blades of grass; and that even so he had come to the conclusion that it was "highly probable" that some very large animal, about a metre in diameter, "probably some cousin of Lepidosiren and Ceratodus", still lived in the swamps along the smaller tributaries of the Uruguay and the Paraná. Darwin read the paragraph and pencilled a single word in the margin beside it: "(Mastodon)". The sheets survive in Cambridge University Library as DAR 111: A89–90. Later that year Müller published the dossier as "Der Minhocão" in the fifth number of Der Zoologische Garten, the Frankfurt zoo journal edited by F. C. Noll, pages 298 to 302. It is a short piece and almost all of it is other people's testimony, given with names, trades and villages. Nature summarised it, unsigned, on 21 February 1878, and that summary — not the German original — is the text from which nearly everything written in English since descends. On 8 August 1878 Nature came back to the subject: Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution, had sent in a Nicaraguan parallel, a long letter signed Paulino Montenegro and printed in the Gaceta de Nicaragua of 10 March 1866, describing the same kind of collapsed trenches at La Cuchilla, near Jinotega.

Timeline: the documented record of Minhocão

Written in 1812 According to Saint-Hilaire, who had met its author while travelling in Goiás, the memoir of Luiz Antônio da Silva e Souza on the captaincy of Goiás states that the lake of Padre Aranda is inhabited by minhocões, monsters that dwell in its deepest parts and have often dragged horses and horned cattle under the water. The memoir itself would not be printed until 1849.
28 December 1846 Auguste de Saint-Hilaire reads his note on the minhocão of Goiás to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Prompted by Professor Paul Gervais, he concludes that it is probable that the minhocão is an enormous species of Lepidosiren. This is the origin of the lungfish hypothesis, thirty years before Müller.
July 1847 The note is reprinted in English in the American Journal of Science and Arts, second series, volume IV, pages 130 to 131. It describes an aquatic animal of Goiás, not the burrower of the southern campos.
1849 Two of the reports Müller would later collect are dated to this year: land beside the Rio dos Papagaios, in Paraná, found trenched overnight after long rain at the house of João de Deos, with the river running turbid for a fortnight afterwards; and, near the Arapehy in Uruguay, Lebino José dos Santos being told of a dead minhocão wedged in a narrowing rock cleft, its skin as thick as pine bark and formed of hard plates like an armadillo's.
January, about 1863 Antonio José Branco returns after eight days away to find the road by his house, ten kilometres from Curitibanos, undermined and collapsed. The trench began at the source of a brook, followed and cut across its bends, and ended in a marsh after 700 to 1,000 metres; it was about three metres wide, and the brook has kept to it ever since. Müller heard the case from two eyewitnesses: José, a son of old Branco, and his son-in-law Crescentio Fernando da Maia.
About 1869 Francisco de Amaral Varella, of Baguaes, sees lying on the bank of the Rio das Caveiras, about ten kilometres from Lages, an animal unknown to him and of gigantic size, nearly a metre thick, not very long, with a snout like a pig's; he could not tell whether it had legs. He did not dare tackle it alone, and by the time the neighbours arrived it had gone, leaving a trench about a metre wide. Friedrich Kelling, then a merchant in Lages and Müller's informant, saw the trench himself.
25 March 1877 Two days after returning from his second excursion to the Campos de Curitibanos, Fritz Müller writes to Charles Darwin from Blumenau. He calls the popular accounts truly fabulous but says it is highly probable that some very large animal about a metre in diameter, probably a cousin of Lepidosiren and Ceratodus, lives in the swamps of the smaller tributaries of the Uruguay and the Paraná. Darwin annotates the paragraph in pencil with a single word: Mastodon.
1877 Müller publishes the dossier as Der Minhocão in the fifth number of Der Zoologische Garten, pages 298 to 302. He states that the only fairly certain fact to be drawn from the reports is that long trenches are sometimes thrown up in the headwaters of the Uruguay and the Paraná, generally after prolonged rain, always starting from and returning to marshes or rivers. He closes by suggesting the animal be tracked down and, if possible, caught for a zoological garden.
21 February 1878 Nature publishes an unsigned summary, A New Underground Monster, at pages 325 to 326. It is the version from which nearly all later English accounts derive, and it introduces three errors: it reverses the rain, which Müller reported as preceding the sightings, into a prophecy of rain; it turns numerous neighbours into hundreds of people; and it demotes the son-in-law Crescentio Fernando da Maia to an unnamed step-son.
8 August 1878 Nature returns to the subject under the heading Underground Monsters. Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution, has sent in a Nicaraguan parallel: a long letter signed Paulino Montenegro, dated Jinotega 21 February 1866 and printed in the Gaceta de Nicaragua of 10 March 1866, describing collapsing ground, uprooted oaks and cracked roads at La Cuchilla, and concluding that two animals shaped like huge fishes were responsible.
2021 Rafael Ferreira dos Santos, Henrique José Schipanski, Alcemar Rodrigues Martello and Huilquer Francisco Vogel document thirteen paleoburrows and six crotovinas in the sandstone of Porto União, in Santa Catarina, and União da Vitória, in Paraná, about 120 kilometres from Curitibanos, with scratch marks tentatively attributed to Mylodontidae, the giant ground sloths.

Is there a rational explanation for Minhocão?

The dossier survives in three versions by the same author, and they do not agree with one another. Müller's German gives the folk worm as thirty Klafter long and three thick. The Klafter is an old fathom of about 1.9 metres, so that is roughly 57 by 5.7 metres. In the letter to Darwin, written weeks earlier, the same figure is "sixty meters long" and "six meters in diameter". Nature turned it into "some fifty yards in length, and five in breadth". Nobody ever measured anything: the number is a rumour being rounded in three languages. Nature did more than round. Müller wrote that the appearance of the minhocão had been preceded by a long spell of rain. Nature printed that its appearance "is always supposed to presage a period of rainy weather", reversing cause and effect and, with them, the only testable pattern in the whole file. Müller's "numerous neighbours, especially the people of Curitibanos" became "hundreds of people". And Müller heard two eyewitnesses to the Curitibanos trench: José, a son of old Branco, and Crescentio Fernando da Maia, a son-in-law who had been living in the house at the time. Nature demoted the second to "a step-son" and dropped his name. A search of the whole Nature issue returns no hit for "Crescentio" and none for "Baguaes", the home village of the Lages witness; in the same file "Lebino" returns four hits, "Odebrecht" two, and "Kelling" and "Varella" one each — the names Nature chose to keep. Since almost every English-language account descends from that page, Crescentio Fernando da Maia has been missing from the story for nearly a hundred and fifty years. He is not the only one missing. The single most quoted line in the whole legend — an animal "as big as a house" — belongs to a woman whom Müller records only as eine Schwarze, a black woman, who went out one morning to draw water in the same district of Paraná as the Rio dos Papagaios case and found the pool destroyed. Every retelling carries her sentence; none of them carries her name. The famous animal "no longer than a lasso" also comes with a scale: Müller glosses the lasso himself, in brackets, as about twenty-five metres. Strip the numbers out and one physical claim is left, and Müller said as much: sometimes, in the headwaters of the Uruguay and the Paraná, long trenches open up. His own summary of how they behave is an exact description of something a geologist would recognise. They appear only after prolonged rain. They begin at a spring or a marsh and end in another. They are one to three metres wide and run seven hundred to a thousand metres. They follow a watercourse, cutting off its bends, and the stream then keeps to the new line permanently. That is soil piping: water finds a subsurface route, washes out the fine particles, hollows a pipe, and the roof falls in as a chain of collapses that reads at the surface as a furrow ploughed overnight. A pipe is invisible until it collapses, which is exactly why nobody in these accounts ever saw any digging — only the finished trench, always the morning after. There are real tunnels in this landscape as well, and they are not a figure of speech. Since the early 2000s Heinrich Frank and colleagues at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul have mapped hundreds of paleoburrows across Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina: branching galleries with an elliptical cross-section and claw marks on the walls, attributed to Pleistocene ground sloths. In 2021 Rafael Ferreira dos Santos and co-authors described thirteen of them, plus six sediment-filled crotovinas, at Porto União in Santa Catarina and União da Vitória in Paraná, about 120 kilometres from Curitibanos, with scratches they tentatively assign to Mylodontidae. They are tens of thousands of years old, they are cut in sandstone, and they do not open after a wet January. They explain the idea of a giant burrowing animal in this region far better than they explain Müller's trenches.

Can you visit Minhocão?

The coordinate on this file is the centre of Curitibanos, in the highlands of Santa Catarina, where OpenStreetMap places the town's point to within a few metres. Fritz Müller's article in Der Zoologische Garten for 1877 places its reports by distance from two towns. The Branco trench of about 1863 ran from the source of a stream feeding the Rio dos Cachorros, some 10 km from Curitibanos, and was said to be about 3 m wide and 700 to 1,000 m long before it ended in a swamp. Francisco de Amaral Varella saw his animal around 1869 on the bank of the Rio das Caveiras, about 10 km from Lages, which lies some 60 km south-south-east of Curitibanos in a straight line. Emil Odebrecht crossed his trenched marsh, on an arm of the Rio Marombas, while surveying a road line from the Itajaí valley into the highlands; Müller gives no distance for that one. The building with a direct link to the story is in Blumenau, where Müller lived and where he dated his letter of 25 March 1877 to Darwin. The Casa Fritz Müller, at Rua Itajaí 2195, Vorstadt (postcode 89015-200), is the half-timbered house in which he spent the years 1867 to 1897. According to NSC Total, the museum founded there on 17 June 1936 closed in 2022 because of structural problems and reopened on 25 June 2026. The municipal tourism site, read on 24 September 2026, gives free entry, opening from Tuesday to Friday between 10:00 and 16:00 and on Saturday between 09:00 and 13:00, and the telephone number (47) 3381-6374. The documents themselves are free online. Müller's article is on pages 298 to 302 of the scan of Der Zoologische Garten, volume XVIII, at the Internet Archive. The unsigned Nature summary is in the issue of 21 February 1878, pages 325 and 326, and the follow-up based on a communication from Spencer F. Baird in that of 8 August 1878, page 389. Saint-Hilaire's note is in the American Journal of Science and Arts for July 1847, pages 130 and 131. The Darwin Correspondence Project transcribes the letter to Darwin in full as letter 10911, and the manuscript is in Cambridge University Library under DAR 111: A89–90.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Minhocão

Where and when was Minhocão sighted?

What is Minhocão?

What is the history of Minhocão?

Timeline: the documented record of Minhocão

Is there a rational explanation for Minhocão?

Can you visit Minhocão?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

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Minhocão

Where and when was Minhocão sighted?

What is Minhocão?

What is the history of Minhocão?

Timeline: the documented record of Minhocão

Is there a rational explanation for Minhocão?

Can you visit Minhocão?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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