The hilarious irony is that sharks pre-date dinosaurs by millions of years. The famous plesiosaur hoax with a decayed basking shark was actually trying to replace a more evolutionarily ancient “living fossil” with a more recent one. If “living fossils” disproved evolution, we wouldn’t need any surviving dinosaurs.
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…pretty sure whatever I saw in the mirror at 2 in the morning was some kind of cryptid.
Also, I think that a big cat population might exist almost anywhere. Mountain lions live in cities and are not seen or known to exist by most people. It’s not necessarily common, but more common than is generally known.
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I think there may very well be some validity to giant sea serpent myths. So much of our oceans are unexplored, surely some kind of very long, slender, sea-dragon like creature could exist. In fact I would go so far as to say that the already-discovered oarfish looks like something out of a storybook. Who’s to say something even bigger couldn’t be out there?
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I think there probably are large undiscovered species somewhere in the ocean, and they could easily be elongated, but would not be literal reptiles, as an airbreathing species that has to surface regularly would have been discovered by now
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I’m afraid thaat I can’t put much faith in eyewitness accounts. Just two days ago I thought I saw a blue bird like an Indigo Bunting which have all migrated south by now and should not be here. I took photos. When examining the photos, it became clear. It was how the light was striking the gray breast of a Chipping Sparrow. Note: even in the thumbnail photos, the bird looked blue and appeared to be an Indigo Bunting. It wasn’t until I was able to examine the photo that I saw it was a Chipping Sparrow.
So I really distrust eyewitness accounts. It’s so easy to be mistaken in what you see. It’s even possible to be mistaken with photos unless you have a good camera with decent resolution and software that allows you to home in on your observation. Because as I said, the bird even looked like an Indigo Bunting in the thumbnail. So if the photo was lower resolution and I didn’t have decent software, I might still be thinking the wrong thing.
I’m afraid that unless the cryptid is small–like some kind of bug or even small bird–or marine (because the ocean is deep and we haven’t explored all of it)–or located in some totally remote area where humans can’t go–I just don’t see it as very likely. Humans are all over. We’d have stumbled over something by now. I love watching those shows like “In Search of…” but I’m afraid it’s really just entertainment, not something to be taken seriously.
Final Note: one of those shows asked my husband to be the “expert biologist” on it for an episode on the Beast of Bladenboro. He did, but came home laughing because of how the show is done. They’d see animal prints (supposed “The Beast”) and my husband would say, “I can see how you’d think that…” He’d crouch down and begin to point out how the prints were actually from a big dog, and then point out that at a nearby house, there was a huge dog (I think it was a boxer or mastiff–can’t quite remember) that had gotten off it’s leash recently and run through the area.
So they kept his first sentence, showed him crouching and pointing at the paw print, and then edited out the rest of what he’d said.
I can’t tell you how many “black panthers” there are here in NOrth Carolina, even with photos. My husband was always getting reports. THey were always black house cats. He’d look at the photos and point out the size of the animal relative to the vegetation, etc, but people just don’t want to hear that. THey believe there are black panthers here and they have photos to prove it!
So I’m a little cynical to say the least.
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This article about finding species thought to be extinct reminded me of this thread …
“I’ve read old reports about a mythical beast in north-east India, which I suspect are based on some kind of giant salamander – the world’s largest amphibian. That would be worth investigating.”
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Even then, I’d need to know the backstory behind any “documentation.” The audio of the “bloop” sounds a lot less convincing when you find out that the playback was sped up a lot to make it sound like a bloop.
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[insert famous Cryptid name] “I found one, but unfortunately it was being barbecued by a local family”
Best quote of the article.
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I was recently in Costa Rica, and my guide claimed to have seen elves on several occasions. He described them as very short nocturnal bipeds with no faces that live in the highlands. My guide was very knowledgeable about the ecosystems in the area and I doubt he would have mistaken anything else for them. I met some other people who claimed to have encountered them as well. I’m not entirely convinced, but I’ve never met a more reliable person claiming to have encountered a cryptid, either…
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With experiences like this, my early post is very relevant:
Having emphasized the above, many experiences of these beings are usual represented in the local cultures. Besides a verbal description, did your guide give you any visual representations?
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Many years ago I talked to a rancher who had spent his life near the US-Mexico border and seemed very knowledgeable about the local wildlife. Except he said he once saw a pack of monkeys traveling across the grasslands on his ranch. I didn’t know what to make of that … it sounded delusional and I suddenly had some doubt about this guy’s veracity. Until I realized later he was describing a troop of White-nosed Coati, a species that was known from there but not all that common. Sometimes you have to work a little to interpret a person’s description of some creature.
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In northeast Argentina and Bolivia in the andean region, there is a cryptid called Ukumari, an analogue of the yeti/sasquatch hominid and also identified with another folkloric character, the zupay or devil. It is said to be a giant hominid who dwells in caves. The origin of the Ukumari tale is the spectacled bear, the only bear species from South America which meets its austral distribution limit in that region. It is still discussed if the species is or has ever been present in Argentina, and supposedly evidence of it has been found (as feces and footprints). Some of these are present in iNaturalist as RG-observations. - but to date an actual bear was never found.
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In the sand dunes of California, the Sandsquatch, a coastal Yeti type creature that can sometimes be seen naked wandering the dunes. Mostly feeds on ice plant.
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I totally agree with this. I’ve seen so many cases where a person’s conclusions based upon their observations are simply a misinterpretation or they’ve put a common label on something that when you dig deeper and get the actual description, you realize is something else entirely. Like the Coati. People want to label things–I’m just as guilty as the next person–and if they don’t have the right label, we think the person is delusional when the reality is that they have simply mislabeled what they observed. I think a large number of weird cryptids fall into this trap.
(I was top-tier support/computer administration in a large network for a long time and found that when other administrators called me with problems, the best way to help them was to ask for a description of the problem–not what they think it is. Because 9 times out of 10, they would mislead me if I “just took their word for it” as far as a conclusion. But once I heard the actual description of the problem, I could dig deeper into that and find the actual problem. It’s not a deliberate attempt to mislead, it’s just the best the person could conclude based upon their knowledge. I’ve been led astray too many times by other people’s conclusions so I now just want descriptions… It holds for almost any situation, even iNaturalist…)
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So this just appeared in my news feed today: “Study finds bigfoot sightings correlate with black bear populations”
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/study-finds-bigfoot-sightings-correlate-with-black-bear-populations/]
There’s a citation for the published paper (Journal of Zoology) at the end of the article.
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So now we know something new about Bigfoot’s ecology: it obligately co-occurs with black bears. Maybe a symbiosis?
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From the Arstechnica article:
“The paper also suggests that this finding could be helpful for bear conservation, as the frequency of bigfoot sightings may provide a proxy measure for the number of black bears present and thus could provide an independent method of tracking population changes.”
Now that would be interesting for wildlife managers. Send us your bigfoot sightings to help us monitor our bear populations.
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While the analysis in that paper is rather simplistic (doesn’t account for spatial relationships for one thing; preprint here for folks interested in the whole thing: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.14.524058v4.full), there are a couple other papers that also examine the potential link between black bears and sasquatch sightings.
A “classic” is Lozier et al 2009 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x) (open access) which models the ecological niche of Sasquatch and finds a surprising correspondence to the niche of the black bear.
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