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The hairy monitor was an ultra-mysterious cryptid reported from central Mali, where it was allegedly known to the local Bambara people. According to Russian agricultural scientist Evgeny Velichko, who learned of the animal while working for UNESCO in Mali, several Bambara people living around Katibougou claimed to have seen it.[1]
In 1966, while travelling from Katibougou to Bamakao, Velichko, who was then unfamiliar with local reports of the animal, saw what looked like a large monitor lizard emerge from a ravine on the right side of the road. He slowed his car, and was able to watch the animal for about five minutes before it disappeared into another ravine on the opposite side of the road. In general form, the 2 m (6 ft 5 in) animal resembled a desert monitor (Varanus griseus), which he had observed in the Karakum Desert, but it was covered in "clearly visible" chocolate-brown hair, of a woolly consistency, around 4 cm (1.5 in) long, as well as a long and bushy tail like that of a fox. Velichko, who admitted that he was no expert on African fauna, described his sighting to the magazine Vokrug Sveta, hoping that a reader with more African experience could identify it.[1] Some Russian cryptozoologists regard it as a possible "living fossil" descendant of Permian non-mammalian therapsids.[2]