CryPtoReports.com

Photo of possible “Wild Man” hair

The Shennongjia Nature Reserve in Hubei province has examined a strand of hair which it has not managed to identify, prompting local people to speculate that it may belong to the “Wild Man” – China’s own Bigfoot.

Piao Jinlan, a researcher at the reserve, said that scientists need to continue their tests before they can identify the species.

The hair is said to be thicker than human hair and thinner than horsetail hair.

More than 400 people have claimed to have seen the half-man, half-ape “Wild Man” in the area in the last 100 years.

Witnesses describe the creature as walking upright, more than 2 meters tall and with grey, red or black hair all over its body.

An investigative team was set up in 2009 and started a large-scale search for the mysterious creature in Shennongjia this year.

Source: globaltimes

“Yeti Sketch”

An expedition that was looking for the mysterious yeti in Mountain Shoria – a faraway region in the Siberian taiga – has recently returned home. The expedition’s members claim that the forest fires of this extremely hot summer made Altai yetis move to the Kuzbass region, where they have started a “war” with local bears.

Searches for this mysterious creature, also known as “bigfoot” or “snowman”, started several decades ago. People look for yetis – or, at least, their traces – elsewhere: in Canada, Europe, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Russia. Several times, yetis’ traces have been found – footsteps that resemble that of humans but are too big for a man, flocks of hair or gigantic branch shelters in forests. In 1967, a certain Roger Patterson even filmed a yeti in northern California, but experts still argue whether this shooting is real or fake.

This year’s expedition to Mountain Shoria is already the third. One of its participants, the director of the International Center for Hominology Igor Burtsev assures that yetis leave traces of their stay in the taiga and fight with local bears.

“They make strange pyramidal constructions of trunks and branches in the wood – sometimes 3 or 4 meters, sometimes only 30 cm high. Sometimes they bend huge trees and twist their trunks like wheels. A human being is just not strong enough for that, and there seems to be no need for bears to do this. At first, we thought that yetis do this to make shelters, but then we came to the conclusion that this is a sort of landmark for them. Or, maybe, this is a way for a yeti to say something to its congeners.”

Igor Burtsev has talked with local residents who claim that they have seen yetis with their own eyes. Sometimes, farmers take them for wood goblins.

“Folk beliefs say that the wood goblin is the master of the woods. All animals, even bears, submit to him. The wood goblin has a strong hypnotic power, thus he is not afraid of any animal.”

Scientists think that these ancient beliefs do have some grounding – it seems that today yetis in Siberia are competing with bears, and the yetis are winning – they are obviously stronger and have rudimentary intellect. If this “war” between yetis and bears continues, there is a risk that bears will not sleep this winter because of a shortage of food, instead going to villages in search of something to eat. To prevent this, the region’s authorities plan to organize bear feeding. However, it seems that local residents have already found a common language with the yetis – they leave candies for them and communicate with them mentally – yetis are believed to be telepathic. Igor Burtsev even claims that to a certain extent, yetis can imitate the human language. “I would, without doubt, call the yeti another species of man,” he says.

Source: ruvr.ru

The Hubei Wild Man Research Association (HWMRA) in China’s Hubei province announced they are recruiting researchers from around the world to join its team in relaunching the search for the Bigfoot creature in the Shennongjia forest region. Luo Baosheng, vice president of HWMRA, told Xinhua, China’s state run news agency, that team members must be in good physical health and it is preferred they are between the age of 25 and 45 years old. “Most importantly, we want the team members to be devoted, as there will be a lot of hard work in the process”, he said.

Researchers in China have been looking for the ‘Bigfoot” phantom, also known as “Yeren” or “Wild Man”, since the 1970’s, but the last time an organized search took place was in the early 1980’s. HMRWA member Wang Shancai said this new search will cost about $1.5 million U.S. dollars. Wang is also an archeologist with the Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology.

Xinhua said there have been over 400 reported sightings of the half-man, half-ape “Yeren” in the Shennongjia area, but evidence found so far, which has included hair, footprints, and a sleeping nest, has been inconclusive. Groups in the United States have also been looking for years for “Bigfoot” also known as “Sasquatch”. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) in the United States claims to be the oldest and biggest organization dedicated to finding the creature.

Source: Seerpress

Possible Yeti Photo

A fourth science expedition has left for Mountain Shoria (a territory in Southern Siberia, east of the Altai Mountains) earlier on Wednesday in search of any traces of the abominable snowman. Taking part in the expedition will be the director of the International Center for Hominology, Igor Burtsev, deputy president of the public association Kosmopoisk, Vasily Dovgoshei, History Doctor Valery Kimeyev and other experts.

As Igor Burtsev, a participant in several previous expeditions, has told Itar-Tass, the search will last for about ten days. The experts are determined to find irrefutable evidence the Bigfoot (also known by the names of Sasquatch and Yeti) does exist.

“During the previous expedition a year ago I saw markers (half-broken branches) the creature uses to mark the controlled territory,” Burtsev said.

“Mountain Shoria is a perfect place for yetis. It is a sparsely populated, mountainous area, where there are many caves, it is relatively warm and there are sources of pure fresh water. In the mountain rivers fish is in abundance and hunting in the forests must be really good. I reckon the Bigfoot likes to go fowling. In the woods I have found several artifacts to confirm my theory of mine. This time I plan to find the Bigfoot’s shelter and even try to contact the creature.”

The head of the Tashtagol District, Vladimir Makuta, says that the first mention of Bigfoot’s presence in Mountain Shoria dates back to 1980. The creatures seem to have gone especially active over the past three years.

Source: itar-tass

Goats suspected of being killed by Chupacabra

Shepherds in Mexico  are up in arms — or heads, as the case may be — over a rash of beheadings inflicted on their goats, and many people are blaming the legendary predator known as the chupacabra.

Over the past two months, more than 300 goats owned by shepherds in Mexico’s Puebla state have been decapitated by someone, or something, that hasn’t yet been tracked down.

According to various reports, Felix Martinez, president of Colonia San Martin, recently stated that nearly 40 goats were killed near his municipality. Strangely, there was reportedly very little evidence of blood in the area where the goat bodies were found — throwing suspicion on an unknown animal or chupacabra.

The chupacabra falls into the cryptozoological category of cryptids, a term used to describe animals that haven’t yet been confirmed by science, like the  Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.

Chupacabra sightings often emanate from the Southwest U.S., Puerto Rico, Latin America and Mexico, and the animal is thought to attack livestock, leaving behind puncture wounds after it drains their blood.

AOL News reported in July that a bizarre-looking animal, allegedly a goat-blood-sucking chupacabra, was shot and killed by Texas Animal Control officer Frank Hackett.

“All I know is, it wasn’t normal. It was ugly, real ugly. I’m not going to tell no lie on that one,” Hackett told NBC DFW.

Medical researchers have speculated that the purported chupacabras of Texas and Mexico may actually be coyote hybrids, something DNA tests could determine.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, groups of peasants have formed watch groups to monitor any possible chupacabra activity in their communities.

Source: aolnews

It is possible that there may have been multiple kills of the mysterious Chupacabra creature in Texas. At a barn in Hood County , Texas the hunt for the chupacabra may have ended. An animal control officer named Frank Hackett shot and killed a extremely odd and ugly creature.

Many believe that the creature killed by Hackett is the elusive chupacabra or goat sucker. But this was not the only chupacabra sighting to happen in Hood county. A second chupacabra was sighted and also killed several miles away from the Hackett killing.

Both of the creatures appear very similar and look somewhat like ugly dogs , hairless coyotes, or possibly some yet undocumented creature known as el chupacabra. Legend of the chupacabra says that the creatures would attack and suck the blood from goats.

When questioned officer Hackett would not say if he believed if these creatures was or was not the chupacabra and said he will wait for DNA test results to make up his mind. But he says one thing he does know is that these creatures were not normal. Another officer who also saw the creature at the scene said she had never seen anything like it. Here is a video of the ;locals and the creatures, the images of the creature are pretty nasty.

Quote:

I was hiking with my dog about 6 miles northeast of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. I was carrying water, my still camera, some food, a compass, a knife and my phone (which had no service in that area). I never traveled through this remote desert before and I hoped to capture some photos of the spectacular landscape. I saw the incredible carcass after we hiked about 2 1/2 hours and were about to turn around to head back to the truck. My dog wouldn’t go near it, which was unusual, as he always finds dead animals eagerly and I have to call him off.

I began to take a picture and the battery died after I snapped one frame. It was fully charged when I left that morning. I knew this was a significant find and I wanted to collect the specimen in lieu of the lack of photographic evidence to document the creature, but there was no way I could carry it back to the car. I decided I would come back with the means to do so, a large backpack with some ropes to tie it on with. As I couldn’t record the spot with my phone’s gps, I did my best to remember the spot and I marked the trail going back so I was sure I could retrace my steps.

I returned the next day with a friend from Taos, determined to bring the animal home. We easily found the trail that I had marked out the day before. It was gone. We couldn’t find a trace.

About the creature itself, it was much larger than any fox, more the size of a large coyote of wolf, about 48″ long. It had a pronounced and extremely long snout, like a tapir or platypus. The most unusual features were the bumps along the spine and the approx. 4-5 inch long “sabre-tooth”. I could see only a single one of these large fangs. The spine bumps seemed to extend out from the vertebra in line with the ribs. They had the same short dense fur that covered the body (definitely not the hairless mange dogs commonly referred to as chupacabra). It had some longer coarse hair on it’s haunches. It’s feet were oddly shaped, more like hooves, but with the features of canid paws, toes and nails. It’s legs were long and extended, especially the lower rear legs. The gaping hole in the ribcage was the only visible wound on the body and looking into it, I could see no remnant of any internal organs. There were no insects on the carcass.

I believe it is possibly a previously unclassified canine, perhaps distorted by the process of mummification. This was something extremely rare and unusual and I feel privileged to have seen and recorded it.

Billy Willard says he’s on the verge of a major discovery that could change the way humans think about the natural world, not to mention their need for a creature-proof home security system.

Here in Spotsylvania County, in the forests around Lake Anna, Willard contends there have been 14 sightings in the past decade of that most fabled of cryptozoic beasts: Bigfoot.

Or Sasquatch, as the elusive, apelike brute is referred to in other circles — and on the side of Willard’s blue pickup. The decal on the truck reads “Sasquatch Watch of Virginia,’’ of which Willard is chief pooh-bah (when he’s not earning a living installing and removing underground home oil tanks).

Go ahead, call him a loon, a flake, a huckster. He’s heard it all. But Willard knows what he knows, which is that three people from this area — a woman, her husband, and their granddaughter — told him they saw a shaggy, super-sized figure on two legs gallivanting across their wooded property.

Last month, Willard led a week long expedition to the site, where he installed five motion-sensor cameras that will snap photos if and when the big galoot wanders by again.

Willard, 41, says he’d like to lead a tour of the property and introduce the witnesses, really he would. But the woman who says she saw what she believes could have been Bigfoot fears an avalanche of ridicule, which is why Willard is left to deliver his version of what happened a few miles away, in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen.

“We believe we may be close to some kind of major discovery,’’ he said. “All the things they would need are here, fresh water, shelter in the woods. The high concentration of sightings tells me they’re here.’’

He interrupts his monologue to answer his cellphone, the ringtone to which is the country tune “People Are Crazy.’’

Ever since humans began telling stories, they have spun yarns involving life forms that tower above mere mortals, whether it’s the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk’’ fame, or Goliath, or Frankenstein.

Bigfoot has been a perennial for generations, with hundreds of purported sightings (many of them of supposed footprints), most prevalent in the Pacific Northwest but also popping up in states as disparate as Rhode Island, Illinois, and Alabama.

The myth grew in popularity in 1967, when two men in California filmed what appeared to be a huge and hairy biped walking into the woods, at one point turning its head to glance dramatically at the camera.

In Bigfoot circles, the footage is referred to as the “Patterson-Gimlin film,’’ named for its makers.

In less admiring circles, the short, fuzzy clip is cited as nothing short of poppycock.

Willard knows about the film, and most everything else Bigfoot-related, all of which he’s happy to share at any time, sometimes to the annoyance of his wife, Jeanean, who is prone to blurt out, “Okay, the conversation will have to change.’’

For all of Willard’s certainty about Bigfoot, the buzz has not exactly caught on in the rural hamlets around Lake Anna, where many residents work at the nearby nuclear power plant or in construction or commute to Richmond or Washington.

Behind the grill at Tarheel Pig Pickers barbecue, Mark Lane, 54, giggled.

“When I see Bigfoot water skiing, I’ll believe it,’’ he said. “If they catch him, we’ll put him on the rotisserie and invite everyone in the community.’’

Ron McCormick, president of a home-building company, said people have more pressing concerns, such as plummeting property values and paying bills. “On the other hand, it could bring in tourists,’’ he said as he sat at his desk, playing solitaire on his laptop.

Craig Petrie, 55, mowing grass a few miles away, volunteered that he sometimes hears voices calling his name from below as he tends the cemetery adjoining Wallers Baptist Church, where he holds the titles of head deacon and chief groundskeeper.

But Bigfoot sightings? “Never happened,’’ he said, although he’s open to the possibility, particularly with all the new subdivisions in the area ripping out trees and kicking up dirt.

“If anyone’s going to see him, it’s me, because I’m always on this mower. And if he kills me, they’ll just have to walk a few feet to bury me. It’s convenient.’’

The small but avid universe of Bigfoot enthusiasts includes self-styled investigators who pursue their quest during off hours from their day jobs.

Willard, for example, hosts an Internet radio show and maintains a website from his home in Manassas; he also monitors his Bigfoot hotline for reported sightings (a recent caller announced “I just saw Bigfoot in Reston,’’ before exploding in laughter and hanging up).

More dispassionate scholars are fascinated by the unflagging interest in bogeymen.

“People have a need to think about something like ourselves, something scary, using them as a cautionary tale,’’ said Robert Michael Pyle, whose book “Where Bigfoot Walks’’ explores the history of Sasquatch.

Willard spends countless hours in the woods listening for footsteps, always with a camera, ready to snap a picture.

He brings a set of knives and a hatchet. If he finds a dead Bigfoot, he intends to walk away with the ultimate trophy, DNA evidence, to send a message to those who ridicule the believers: “To give them the final ‘Aha! I told you so.’ ’’

Source: boston.com

Bigfoot alive and living in northern Minnesota?  The co-founders of the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Society say, “100 percent yes.”

They said they  have received more than 75 reports of sightings, captured images, and Bigfoot footprints in just three years. They’re sharing their insight while sorting fact from fiction as they take KSAX on the hunt for Bigfoot.

“I’m a skeptic of Bigfoot because I’ve trapped this whole area and never, ever did we see any Bigfoot tracks or see Bigfoot anywhere,” William Tucker of Bena said.

Long time trapper William Tucker is anything but a believer, but just miles away from Bena, mind boggling footprints were found.

Each track was a bit different, different pressures, different depths, eliminating the possibility of some sort of footprint stamp.

This is just one of the things the co-founders of the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Society say confirms the fact, Bigfoot is out there.

“I’m 110% convinced that it exists. There’s just too much evidence, too many people’s emotions showing when they recount their stories,” Bob Olson, a co-founder of the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Society said.  “One lady cries when she recounts her story of how this thing stood up and looked at her. She felt it looked into her soul.”

Since 2006, Olson and Don Sherman have received about 75 reports of similar Bigfoot sightings in Northern Minnesota, some of which have been captured on camera.

The most recent was captured in Remer. Though to some, the image may look like a man in a suit, a comparison with 6 foot 5 inch Bob Olson showed this man would have had to have been at least 7 feet tall.

Sherman and Olson say “wood knocking” is just one more way Bigfoot makes his presence known. Olson said Bigfoot responded to him at Carey Lake when he knocked on a tree five times.

What about bones? One KSAX reader says,  “I believe Bigfoot is 100% real, as are a lot of the other creatures of Cryptozoology. But i believe in their true form, they are spiritual creatures, that manifest in flesh as they so desire. That is why we will never find bones, or other such evidence of them.”

On the other side of the coin, Olson says giant bones belonging to Humanoid creatures were found in the late 1800’s, stretching 10 to 12 feet.

While there haven’t been any Bigfoot skeletons found, many trappers say they’ve never come across any bear, wolf, or other large animal skeleton either.

Other signs Bigfoot exists include branches plucked straight out of trees, strange looking shelters, and stick men to warn other Bigfoot of humans in the area.

“When there’s stuff that doesn’t go away, there’s gotta be something to it and the evidence just keeps mounting up,” Olson said.

For some Bena residents, the legend of Bigfoot is far from a tall tale.

“I never seen it, but like I says I believe in it,” New Prague resident Leo Hinderscheid said.

“I don’t know what to say Megan but I believe in it and that’s the way it will be,” Helen Tibbetts of Bena said.

So, the hunt for Bigfoot continues.

Source: ksax.com

Last November, the Centre For Inquiry (CFI) hosted Monsters of the Deep! at Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square. Meetings devoted to marine cryptozoology are few and far between, but then the same might be said about crypto­zoology meetings in general. Meetings about academic crypto­zoology are rarer than sightings of crypt­ids themselves. Organised by Stephen Law, the meeting featured talks by Dr Charles Paxton, a fisheries ecologist at the University of St Andrews, and yours truly, a vertebrate palæontologist who works on dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles at the University of Portsmouth and dabbles in academic cryptozoology. In addition to the talks, we held two workshops. As Charles stated early on in his talk, academic funding for cryptozoological research is essentially non-existent, so the audience could rest assured that their valuable tax pennies were not being frittered away on any of the research they were going to hear about.

Sea monsters inspire wonder, and that can’t be bad. But Charles explained that they also raise the very important question of how science deals with anomalous data. Forteans (indeed, Fort himself) have asserted that science ignores what it cannot explain. In fact, scientists have a tendency to ignore anomalous data only so long as they’re poorly recorded (in other words, are known only from anecdotes); irrefut­able records of such things as St Elmo’s fire, rogue waves and sprites – all origin­ally known entirely from anecdotes – show that science is ‘happy’ to accept the validity of low-frequency anomalies once the data are good enough. Furthermore, while there’s a widespread belief (particularly prevalent among scient­ists) that anecdotal data are worthless, anecdotes are important at several levels of the scientific process, including in hypothesis formation. Indeed, once a hypothesis (random example: that hippos might practise cannibalism) becomes accepted by a given research community, the chiming in from others in that community is often taken as verification, even though these addit­ional records are typically anecdotal (“I want to report that I’ve also seen hippos practising cannibalism”).

As was noted by both speakers, the possibility that unknown animals might really be at the bottom of sea monster reports should at least be considered as a possibility, and indeed it is already widely thought among biologists that large marine animals (large = more than 2m long) remain to be found. Animals of exactly this sort have been found in recent years and include several new cetaceans, an oarfish species and some deep-water rays. Furthermore, cumulative discovery curves for large marine animals suggest that – while discovery rates have slowed – there are almost certainly a few such species yet to find (between 10 and 50, depending on the study).

There’s no denying that many people (scientists included) have gotten involved in sea monster research because they really do like the idea that big, monstrous vertebrates might await discovery. But it’s evident that we should consider as many other options as possible before approaching this conclusion, and it can be argued that this hasn’t been the case so far. Hoaxing remains a problem. Sea turtles, leopard seals and other known species may account for some sea monster accounts, and Charles and colleagues achieved global notoriety in 2004 by proposing that the serpentine genitals of male whales might explain some sea-serpent accounts.

Whether sea monsters are real or not, the large number of catalogued sightings (over 1,000) means that a substantial amount of data is available for statistical analysis. Charles recently published the results of one such study in Journal of Zoology (a significant accomplishment) and some of the conclusions are surprising, especially to those who might assume that sea monster sightings all represent misid­entifications or hoaxes.
For one thing, most recorded monster sightings don’t normally occur at great distance, but at relatively close range. So the ideas that sea monsters (whatever they are) might be timid, or that people are seeing known species at great range and misidentifying them, are not supported by the reported data. A number of possibilities might explain the counter-intuitive closeness of the reported creatures. Maybe sea monsters are attracted to boats, maybe boats approach sea monsters in order to get a better look at them, maybe sightings are embellished in order to sound more impressive, and so on. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that the reporting of anomalous marine phenomena is biased, and that people only tend to report observations made at relatively close range. More distant objects, whether they’re anomalous or not, are less likely to be reported. This implies, suggested Charles, a strong reporting bias that might swamp any original biological signal.

Moreover, Charles discussed the results of experiments which show that people consistently underestimate the distances involved when viewing objects on the water. And while descriptions of an object are generally good, size estimates are not so hot, with women generally underestimating sizes while men generally overestimate them (insert hilarious wisecrack). One nice point Charles made is that what is reported is not the same as what is remembered; what is remembered is not the same as what is perceived; and what is perceived is not the same as what is seen.

The second talk of the day (my own ‘Sea monsters and the prehistoric survivor paradigm’) was more concerned with the various sea monster identities that have been proposed over the years, particularly those invoking the alleged survival to the present of large tetra­pods known only from the fossil record, specifically plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and basilosaurid whales (zeuglodonts). The idea that such creatures might have survived to the present day without leaving any fossil record really is untenable based on what we know, and the annoyingly persistent suggestion that cœlacanths demonstrate how a group of Mesozoic marine animals might persist without leaving any fossil record is a red herring. [1]

In any case, the prehist­oric survivor paradigm (or PSP) really isn’t the best explanation for the crypto­zoological data. Modern sea monster reports really don’t describe creatures that sound at all like the fossil animals they’re sometimes likened to. Long-necked sea monsters sound only very superficially like plesiosaurs; the modern creatures are reportedly hairy, have whiskers or external ears, can hold their heads and necks well out of the water in an erect pose, and are sometimes noted as lacking tails. If such creatures are real, it seems reasonable to interpret them as weird marine mammals (perhaps as large peculiar seals), not as strongly modified post-Cretaceous plesiosaurs.

Long-bodied sea monsters – apparently able to form hoops, loops and a series of waves along the body – cannot be basilosaurid whales, which were incapable of oscillating in this way and are absent from the fossil record for the last 30 million years at least. The fact that basilosaurids were conventionally (but very incorrectly) reconstructed as serpentine creatures capable of furious vertical wriggling has helped fuel the notion that they might have been the ancestors of modern sea serpents.

Bernard Heuvelmans regarded two of his nine sea monster kinds as basilosaurids. However, rather than regarding the long-bodied, serpentine types as modern representatives of this group, he proposed that the armour-plated ‘many-finned’ and bumpy-backed ‘many-humped’ were both basilosaur­ids. His logic was somewhat obtuse: absolutely integral to his identification of the ‘many-finned’ was his interpret­ation of the 1883 Vietnamese con rit account conveyed by Dr A Krempf in 1921. Yet this account described a gigantic segmented creature, covered in plate-like armour sheets that “rang like sheet metal” when struck. This fantastic description remains an enigma, but Heuvelmans’s conclusion that the creature was an armour-plated whale is peculiar and rests on the idea that basilosaurids were armoured, a proposal that had been disproved decades earlier.

While it might seem like an unfair criticism, a major theme that emerges from these considerations of the PSP is that those who have endorsed it are often behind the times as regards the state of palæontological knowledge, or have indulged in a remarkable amount of special pleading and speculation. Ideas about plesiosaur and basilosaurid survival seem to have been influenced by popular artwork more than by technical data. Sea monsters might be real, but we’re really not at the stage where we can say what they are. Interesting things can be done with the data we have (whether or not it represents sightings of unknown giant creatures), but the main problem afflicting the cryptozoological literature concerns interpretation. It’s evident that more intellectual rigour is often needed within the field.

In the first workshop session that followed the talks, Charles – working with a bold volunteer from the audience – used ‘fishes’ (marked straws) in a bucket to show how biologists can generate hypotheses about species divers­ity in the deep sea. With every handful, a different combination of ‘spec­ies’ is trawled up, and by counting the new ones Charles was able to generate a discovery curve. As is the case in the real world, the curve of the discovery graph rose to a plateau, but problems in distinguishing the new ‘species’ from those encountered earlier on in the experiment echoed a huge, genuine problem that plagues diversity studies.

In another workshop event, we used a computer program to show how extinct­ion dates can be estimated for extinct (or supposedly extinct) organisms. When good ‘proof of life’ data (that is, dates) are available, the computed extinction results look robust. However, a spotty or gappy pre-extinction record results in uncertainty over the extinction date – and here’s the fun part – because the creatures affected by such results are sometimes those hypothesised to have survived later than ‘officially’ thought. Cœlacanths, Steller’s sea cows, thylacines, megatooth sharks and many others were all subjected to the treatment. This technique has great promise and enables hypotheses about ‘prehistoric survivorship’ to be properly tested.

Overall, the meeting was a great success, and our interested audience made wholly positive noises about the event. Frankly, it was good to be at a crypto­zoology-themed event where scientific approaches were very much to the fore. Indeed, what might be the take-home message from the day was that crypto­zoological data and hypotheses are very much amenable to scientific testing. It goes without saying that there remains an enormous role for amateurs within the field of mystery animal research.

In a 2004 Nature article (yes, Nature: one of the most august scientific journals in the world), Henry Gee – inspired by the then-new discovery of the small, recently extinct hominids of Flores – wondered whether it really is time for crypto­zoology to “come in from the cold” and be recognised as a valid scientific endeavour. Some might say this already happened back in the 1980s when the International Society of Crypto­zoology published its technical journal Crypto­zoology, but such efforts seem all but forgotten nowadays and the death of the ISC arguably created the impression that crypto­zoology is a fringe discipline best avoided by anyone serious about doing science. The fact is, we seem to be at the start of what is (I hope) a modest renaissance in ‘scient­ific crypto­zoology’. Charles and I – and others – have published several crypto­zoological analyses within the pages of technical journals, such as the august Journal of Zoology and Historical Biology, and we have other technical studies in preparation. How far can we go with this, and can cryptozoology really ‘come in from the cold’?

Source: forteantimes.com