cryptozoology
tetrapodzoology | July 15, 2008I suppose it's not every day you get to appear in a TV series called MonsterQuest. I appear in two places in one episode (first screened last week): once for a little while in the section embedded here, and again much later on. The bit with me starts 2 minutes, 20 seconds in (let's not worry about the bit later on). Things to note: the lion skull that previously featured in one of the articles on the Functional Morphology Conference and (right in the background, covering a small cupboard that contains keys) Steve White's drawing of the big cats of Rancho La Brea...
And am I really an '…
tetrapodzoology | July 12, 2008One last thing for sea monster week... but don't get your hopes up too much. We looked earlier at the Moore's Beach (or Santa Cruz) sea monster, a carcass that was identified as that of a Baird's beaked whale Berardius bairdii. I mentioned the fact that the skull was retained by the California Academy of Sciences. Well, here it is...
As in all beaked whales (or ziphiids), the skull bones posterior to the external nares are elevated, forming a crest that Moore (1968) termed the synvertex.
In most beaked whales, the anterior margin of the synvertex extends dorsally so steeply that it's…
tetrapodzoology | July 11, 2008
Better late than never; I was at the office of a London-based publishing company yesterday, so didn't have time to get anything ready before today. I know you'll all forgive me. Anyway... so, how to finish sea monster week? With a predictable and familiar set of images that you've seen a hundred times before? Maybe. Or with a striking photo (or series of photos) that will blow you away in offering hitherto unappreciated, obvious evidence for the reality of giant marine cryptids? Well, I wish...
My original, rather boring plan, was to finish sea monster week (this article is part 5) with a…
tetrapodzoology | July 9, 2008
Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially encountered by a group of farmers who chanced upon it in the dead of night* (apparently when it was still alive), they kept it secret for a week but eventually informed the Tecolutla mayor, Professor César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane (this story gets better and better), he organised a…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2008
Faked tadpole monsters and misidentified dead whales are one thing - are there any real sea monster mysteries left out there? The good news is yes, but as we'll see it's not just the identity of the creatures concerned that is mysterious. This is day 3 of sea monster week, and we here look at a case brought to attention by Dwight Smith and Gary Mangiacopra (their article is essentially the only one I consulted while writing the following). It concerns a photo that's been republished twice since its first appearance in a Californian newspaper, and must have been seen by thousands, if not…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2008Welcome to day 2 of sea monster week. This time the featured 'monster' is a beached carcass: it washed ashore at what was then called Moore's Beach (it's now Natural Bridges State Beach), just north-west of Santa Cruz, California, in 1925 and, while identified correctly in virtually all of the cryptozoological literature I've seen, is still identified here and there on the internet (particularly on pro-creationism sites) as an unidentified anomaly that had the experts baffled.
Nope: the real identity of the carcass - usually dubbed the Moore's Beach monster (sometimes the Santa Cruz monster…
tetrapodzoology | July 7, 2008
Welcome to sea monster week. Yes, a whole week devoted to the discussion and evaluation of photos purportedly showing marine cryptids, or carcasses of them. Why do this? I'm not entirely sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We begin with a fantastic image that - hopefully - you've seen here and there yet may know little about (again, to those who know the cryptozoological literature, I apologise for insulting your intelligence). Judging from comments I've seen on the internet, people nowadays assume that this image is a photoshop job unique to the digital age, whereas in fact it…
tetrapodzoology | June 15, 2008
The image depicted in the previous brief post is one of those famous iconic photos that many people have seen but few know anything about: it's an alleged yeti track, photographed by Eric Shipton and Michael Ward on the 8th November 1951 on Menlung Glacier during their exploration of the Gauri Sanker range in the Himalayas (Heuvelmans 1995). Together with the Sherpa Sen Tensing, Shipton and Ward apparently followed a trail of large, human-like tracks for about a mile but, unfortunately, only photographed one track. There have been several efforts to interpret this track as one made by a…
tetrapodzoology | June 3, 2008
Here at Tet Zoo we've looked at lake monsters on a couple of occasions now: at alleged Nessie photos here, and at the sad death of the Lake Khaiyr monster here. For a while I've been planning to add to this list, and to write about one of the most famous, most iconic lake monster photos: the Mansi photo [detail shown in adjacent image: © Sandra Mansi]. This reasonably good colour photo is well known to everyone interested in cryptozoology, but I suppose is not so familiar to those who haven't read the cryptozoological literature. So if you're familiar with lake monster literature, nothing I'…
tetrapodzoology | March 16, 2008
Regular readers will know that I am an unashamed fan of non-standard theories, aka fringe theories or whacky theories, and of course we looked just recently at the haematotherm theory. Doubtless you've all heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH): that strangely popular notion which promotes the idea that modern humans owe their distinctive features to a marine phase. While it still seems conceivable that at least some fossil hominins foraged on shores and in mangroves, all of the evidence so far put forward to document our aquatic heritage is demonstrably incorrect and fails to fit the…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: one of the best ways to invigorate your enthusiasm about a subject is to attend a conference on it, and to spend at least a couple of days talking with other people about that subject. I've (more or less) just returned from the third Big Cats in Britain conference, held at Tropiquaria at Watchet, north Somerset. What an amazing venue: picture, if you can, a 1930s BBC radio station [adjacent image shows the stonework above the main entrance] surrounded by gigantic towering antennae, the heat radiating from one of the antennae being…
tetrapodzoology | February 24, 2008
The third Big Cats in Britain (BCiB) conference is almost upon us: it happens from 7th-9th March 2008 at Tropiquaria (Watchet, Somerset). This time round, I'm speaking, and most of my research time is currently being eaten up as I prepare for the meeting (I'm also speaking in the first week of March on 'Britain's changing herpetofauna' for the Southampton Natural History Society... haven't really started preparing that talk yet). My talk is titled 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna' and is essentially a palaeontological/archaeological view of British cats. You could argue that…
tetrapodzoology | January 9, 2008
The large black cats that people report from Britain and elsewhere in the world are sometimes said to look odd, being occasionally described as unusually gracile and less stocky than leopards (for an example in the literature see Trevor Beer's description and illustration: Beer 1988). If this is true it makes these creatures a total mystery as no leopard-sized species matches this description. But what do you make of this peculiarly gracile large melanistic cat? Compare it with the melanistic leopard shown below...
I'll explain what's going on here later; I do know the answer. Yet again no…
tetrapodzoology | January 6, 2008It always seemed too good to be true. The story goes that members of a team of Russian geologists from Moscow State University - led by Dr G. Rukosuyev - were, in 1964, surveying Yakutia in Siberia when, at Lake Khaiyr (or Lake Khainyr), they saw a lake monster. But not just any old lake monster: one of the best described lake monsters of all time...
'Lake monsters' the world over are generally amorphous humps or 'inverted boat' shapes, but this one, described in detail by qualified biologist Dr Nikolai Gladkikh, was a huge, long-necked, blackish-blue quadrupedal reptile with a stout tail, a…
tetrapodzoology | December 23, 2007
One last thing before Tet Zoo closes down for Christmas but, don't worry, this isn't anything I've knocked up specially... due to an unfortunate series of misunderstandings it's something I produced 'by mistake' and have since decided to recycle. Hey, why not. Ironically, I post it just when I'm in the middle of two other pterosaury bits of work (more on those soon). So I never did get to finish the anuran series before Christmas, nor post about that big, personally-relevant publication which has just appeared, nor get through the titan-hawks, monster pigeons and whatnot. And what about all…
tetrapodzoology | December 13, 2007
In, as usual, a desperate effort to bring in the hits, I thought I'd go nuts and see what posting about the Loch Ness monster might do for my stats. Hey, maybe I could throw the word sex in there as well. There: sex, there, I said it again. But seriously... anyone who's anyone has heard of the Loch Ness monster. And most people know that various photos, allegedly depicting the Loch Ness monster, have been taken over the years. Many people have heard that some, or all, of these photos are dubious, or fake. But that's where it ends for the vast majority of people. I would imagine that - as…
zooillogix | August 1, 2007As you know, we rarely stray into the realms of cryptozoology. But when reports emerge of a monstrous, Amazonian sloth that shows no fear and has the power to hypnotize its victims, we just can't resist.
As it turns out, legends of the creature called the mapinguary (pronounced ma-ping-wahr-EE) have existed for centuries. Hundreds of alleged eyewitnesses have independently come up with very similar descriptions of the mapinguary, including members of different Indian tribes who have never had contact with one another. Could there be some truth to the rumors?
Eyewitnesses seem to agree on…