Unidentified animals · Franklinville, Gloucester County
The Franklinville specimen sent to the University of Pennsylvania (1925)
One contemporary local newspaper report · Outcome unrecorded
A South Jersey newspaper reported in December 1925 that a Franklinville man had sent an unidentified animal, with jointed paddles instead of front feet, to the University of Pennsylvania, where experts had not identified it.
A “prehistoric” find along the Harding Highway
On December 17, 1925, the Monitor-Register of Woodstown reported that it had recently carried what it called exclusive items about an unidentified animal found in the woods along the Harding Highway near Franklinville, which many people were calling a Jersey Devil. In the same paragraph the paper described a related find it called the “‘Prehistoric’ Jersey Devil,” discovered some time earlier near Franklinville. That animal, it said, had jointed paddles in place of front feet but was otherwise much like an animal shot that same month at Greenwich, in Cumberland County.
Sent away for identification
According to the same item, Henry Finger of Franklinville sent the first specimen to the University of Pennsylvania. The paper reported only that “as yet experts have been unable to identify it.” Whether an identification followed later, or the specimen was simply set aside, is not recorded in the item, and no later notice completing the story was located.
A brief inside a brief
What survives of this case is a few sentences inside a story mainly about the separate Greenwich shooting. The paper gives no date for the Franklinville find, no description of who found it or how, and no name for the animal. The earlier stories the paper refers to were not located, so this recap is the fullest account available here.
Sources and research limits
- The Monitor-Register (Woodstown, Salem Co., N.J.), December 17, 1925, page 1, “Another ‘Jersey Devil’ Is Found at Greenwich” — The page's OCR text was retrieved from the Library of Congress Chronicling America full-text service and read on September 11, 2026. This entry rests on the recap paragraph within that story. Further searches for the paper's earlier Franklinville items could not be completed, because the Library of Congress search service rate-limited automated requests.