It’s been joked about before, but I wanted to ask in good faith what would happen if someone were to earnestly put evidence they believed to be of a Cryptozoological creature? Using Bigfoot as an example, if a Bigfoot believer or researcher were to upload their evidence to the site, how should those observations be approached?
iNaturalist is already a place where evidence is examined and pontificated over, and not every observation reaches research-grade status. But since some evidence, like a full body picture or human-like prints, can either be faked or taken in earnest, is it better to mark it as “Human” as it’s commonly established that Bigfoot is not real, or should some room for potential discovery be left with a more general “Animals” identification? How far is too far? If hypothetically you captured a cryptid on camera, what would you do?
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Hi Dylan,
Your username checks out!
This topic comes up on the forum from time to time, so there are already a number of thoughtful threads about cryptids. If you search the forum for “cryptid”, you can find many of these threads. Here’s one to get you started:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-cryptids-do-you-believe-are-most-likely-to-exist/ (170 replies)
It looks like you’ve only spent about an hour reading the forum, so you might really enjoy diving into these threads. Happy exploring!
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Honestly, without a physical specimen or DNA sample that indicated the cryptid (e.g., Bigfoot) was actually something new to science, I’d mark the observation as Human under the assumption it was faked. If it was in fact a new species unknown to science, iNat would not have the taxonomy in place (yet) to properly assign it to species.
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Despite my username, my most relevant cryptid observation so far is a very non-abominable snowman
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/336633248
I appreciate the response, I’m new to the forum part of iNaturalist.
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I suppose our hypothetical bigfoot researcher would have to put together a project if he wanted to get any milage out of their data on iNaturalist. I’ll have to dive deeper into the forums to see how taxonomy on the site is updated when new species are found.