Tale of the tree that ate cows

Loren Coleman detours into "cryptobotany" as he comments on a strange news report from Uppinangady, Mangalor, India about a carnivorous tree that allegedly has a taste for cattle. From the Express News Service:

(Cow owner) Anand Gowda and the villagers struck mortal blows to the branches that turned limp and the cow was rescued. Uppinangady range forest officer (RFO) Subramanya Rao said the tree was described as ‘pili mara’ (tiger tree) in native lingo. Link

And from Loren's post at Cryptomundo:

In Roy Mackal’s book, Searching for Hidden Animals (NY: Doubleday, 1980), his last chapter is entitled “The Monstrous Plants.” It was not about cryptozoology, needless to say, but about cryptobotany, being a short treatise on the Victorian accounts of man-eating plants...

Mackal spends his final chapter detailing mostly the reports from the 1850s through the 1940s of the “Man-Eating Tree of Madagacar,” and the expeditions that searched (unsuccessfully) for the species. Link

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Shrdlu

Glad to know that trees are finally fighting deforestation and greenhouse gasses at the source.
iburl

#7
Chick-fil-a?
AdamLesh

Where’s Tom Bombadil when you need him?
Miss Cellania

Feed me, Seymour! Feed me!
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

NoneMoreBlack, indeed it does.

License Farm, I thought the little round-headed kid lived in Sebastopol CA. He’s probably working at O’Reilly even as we speak.

Microstooge, neither would win, because they’d never get into a fight in the first place. The tree eats cows, and the Chupacabra sucks goats. There’s no competition.
NoneMoreBlack

Smacks suspiciously of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
help i cant comfirm my username themelonbread

@ # 3 nonmoreblack

I was just about to mention the sheeplant with an umbilical stalk…

but seriously dude, “suspiciously”?

“Area accounts of flying saucers smack suspiciously of similar “flying rod” stories”.
License Farm

This is obviously a cousin to your garden-variety kite-eating trees, native to the Midwest and a plague to little round headed kids.
MiCroStoogE

In a fight between a cow-eating tree and a chupacabra, which would win?