Yes, exotic pets can be a challenge. There was an African serval — not a Savannah cat, which is a hybrid and a legal pet — running around northern New Mexico several years ago. It was presumably an escaped illegal pet and was captured pretty quickly … but if not it could’ve led to all kinds of reports from the public that might’ve been hard to explain as known local wildlife. (Closest would be a long-legged bobcat.)
True. I remember many years ago a Nebraska sheriff shot an African lion that had been running loose for a while.
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Darren Naish did an interesting piece on the “Plesiosaur Effect”, basically as people became more familiar with plesiosaurs how they described “sea monsters” changed.
https://tetzoo.com/blog/2019/4/27/sea-monster-sightings-and-the-plesiosaur-effect
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I think the Bathysphaera are pretty likely at least as far as there being undescribed fish in the deep ocean that Beebe may have observed.
The “'Beast” of Gevedaun was also probably real in the form of a particularly aggressive wolf pack in the area.
As far as completely unknown megafauna like Bigfoot with no credible evidence, I don’t think they exist.
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Here’s a recent “cryptid” that looks suspiciously like a large housecat of some breed. Maybe a Maine Coon cat.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2023/11/15/mysterious-animal-seen-in-phoenix-mountain-preserve-leaves-officals-puzzeled/71598409007/
Given that the location is known, would be easy to send someone up that hillside to get an estimate of the cat’s size based on surrounding rocks.
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I couldn’t hear clearly, but was it calling? I wasn’t sure if it was the animal or just background noise. Wondered if it might be identifiable by its call . . .
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That’s pretty obviously a House Cat IMO
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I think it was background but not totally sure. My opinion, regardless: it’s a housecat. But some folks want it to be something more exciting, which is how cryptids come to be in many cases.
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I have to admit, when you’re out in the Arizona deserts at night, it’s very easy to believe in skinwalkers.
I have experienced things that could have several different explanations. However, when you’re out there, you are never quite sure enough.
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It’s true there is something about the desert. I remember my visit to Hovenweep, when I arrived with just enough daylight left to walk the trail around the ruins. I heard flute music coming from somewhere, and honestly, I doubt that I would have been overly surprised to meet Kokopelli.
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Jaguarundi are imo highly likely to be in the Southeast US. I have seen one animal that fits the description very well, crossing the road one morning in central MS.
Copy and pasting my sighting here from when I described it 2 years ago as to keep the story consistent, I know memory is a bad way to recount events that happened over the course of only a few seconds.
Couple years ago me and my mom were driving home, rural road in south/central MS, and an animal runs across it to the left. Me being an animal person, my first thought was “thats a Fossa??” then I began thinking about how unlikely that was, so I’ve been defaulting to “weird young displaced cougar.” Now I’ve come across the possibility that someone released Jaguarundi into Florida back in the 40s or so, and sightings apparently happened in southern Alabama not too long ago either, so I was thinking that that may have been enough time for the population to have expanded west into MS, even though its so unlikely. I know for a fact that it wasnt any other extant native cat, because the defining features of it were as follows:
Reddish brown fur that was short, size was in between a Red Fox and a Cougar, but it had a long, distinct tail, which is why I originally thought it was a Fossa. Was the oddest creature when I saw it, despite it only being for a couple seconds.
Makes more sense to mistake a Jaguarundi for a Fossa than to mistake a cougar for a Fossa in my opinion, but I guess I’ll never truly know unless another individual of what I saw is found. Not trying to sound like every crazy southerner here who thinks they’ve seen a puma, haha."
Who knows… Imo a jaguarundi is an exact match for the animal I saw running across the road, but with no evidence other than my firsthand account, I cant say that for a fact, or really prove anything.
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In terms of other “cryptids” I think may exist, I have a whole list of species listed as extinct that may still be out there(mostly things like gastropods and remote taxa), but I do hold out the possibility that a small species of ground sloth may exist in some remote valley in South America, as well as perhaps one of the fossil lemur species from Madagascar, or, more likely, Cryptoprocta spelea. People living in Madagascar say there are two versions of the Fossa, a larger, black fossa and a smaller, reddish one.
Many cryptids imo can be explained by ancient stories of long extinct species surviving into the modern day. The stories survived, and the emotion people felt when they saw these species survived, but the species themselves did not, over time leading to a jumbled mess of a description with a vague shadow of the original taxa.
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Trilobites are another extinct taxa that if some deepsea dive pulled one up from some remote part of the ocean I would be completely unsurprised. It would put the coelacanth record to shame though
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All my camera trapping in Australia to determine the existence of an Australian cougar have turned up hundreds of feral cats, albeit big ones. One I saw measured almost a metre tall at the shoulder, and a local shot one that weighed 14.9kg; so they do get quite large. It’s usually easy to see that they are cats though, completely different build and body shape.
When I was a young boy living in Papua New Guinea I saw a very large flying creature fly past while out in the bush, but I never got a proper look as it was dusk. I still doubt if it was any sort of cryptid, but I do still wonder was it was. I was familiar with the large fruit bats and birds but It wasn’t anything like that. I’ll never know, mostly because it’s impossible to trust memories from childhood 
Since then I’ve heard many similar stories from people that grew up there and people that worked there, someone even claimed they once saw a pterosaur-like creature in the highlands. Of course there’s very low chances of anything prehistoric existing in the jungles out there, but it’s fun to speculate.
EDIT- years later I did do research on the area’s cryptids, apparently they have stories of a ‘ropen’ which seems to be some sort of pterosaur- here’s an interesting group of investigations
https://www.animal-discovery.org/2021/04/27/about-the-ropen-pterodactyl/
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The ropen was mostly dreamed up by the guy who made that website to sell creationist books on the basis that if a pterosaur survived evolution must surely be fake. A surprising amount of the “living dinosaur” cryptids have the same backstory
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dont-get-strung-along-by-the-ropen-myth-78644354/
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Yes that makes sense and probably is the case, It’s definitely never a good idea to put much stock into stories put online. Then again though, why have I heard multiple stories from people that lived out there for most of their entire lives and have never heard of the ‘ropen’ stories online?
As I said, I don’t think it’s wise to waste too much time fantasizing about cryptids- there’s many weird and wonderful critters we already have to study!
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Not really a cryptid - but a cryptid-adjacent that turned out to be real is Darwin’s Hawkmoth. Short summary is that Darwin saw a Star-of-Bethlehem orchid and predicted the existence of its coevolved Hawkmoth. The moth was a “sort of” cryptid until it was discovered for real 20 years later:
https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/darwin’s-hawkmoth
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It would be wonderful if a pterosaur survived! And it would do nothing at all to disprove evolution. Sometimes the logic of these claims is, well, more missing than the pterosaurs.
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Exactly, I don’t think anyone would be more excited about extant pterosaurs than biologists
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Tomato-tomato, a mean large tabby cat should be feared as a cougar, and a cougar is as cute as an orange tabby cat IMO.
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