Isn’t IMpossible (as naturespotter said) = could be possible
That’s another one that sort of falls into the Bigfoot category for me, hard to believe something as big as a sauropod dinosaur could remain hidden into modern times. Although the area it is supposed to be found is certainly less accessible to the “civilized world” than Bigfoot’s purported stomping grounds, and it would certainly be cool if it turned out to be real
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I remember reading that when images of animals were shown to locals they identified one of them as Mokele-Mbembe, it was a Rhinoceros, which do not live in the jungle, so it was thought that a vagrant rhino was responsible for the myth
Whoops! I read that wrong. I thought naturespotter was saying it isn’t possible for Mokele-Mbembe to exist. Sorry!
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Since “Peanuts” was launched in 1950, Linus is a “Boomer.”
Maybe he’s on iNat, and while he’s still waiting for the Great Pumpkin, he spends his time documenting Squash Bugs, Aphids and Cutworms…
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You better be!
PBS Nature has a new episode (season 43, ep 9)with Sir David A that includes part where they tackle the Bigfoot question. David also describes Gigantopithecus, a gigantic ape from the fossil record and contemplates the evidence to support its possible survival.
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What really annoys me is, “That’s NOT a SEA MONSTER, that’s JUST an OARFISH!” Sea monsters exist, but apparently if they have actual names, it doesn’t count.
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I have a soft spot for water cryptids. Sea serpents, lake monsters, etc. I was a HUGE cryptozoology nerd when I was a kid, and those have always stood out as the most “realistic.” The aquatic world is so vast. Why can’t there be real sea serpents down there? I mean, the oarfish is right there.
That fascination partially comes from having actually seen something in the water as a child. Of course, this is memory tainted by decades of age, and I now recognize that what I saw was (probably) just a really weird water bird doing bird things. I’ve also since seen an otter frolicking in an unexpected place and 100% believe that they can be behind some other sea/lake monster sightings. That’s the magic of these reports, though.
A boat wake, a log, a group of fish, gas erupting from the bottom of a lake: all of these things can be someone’s monster. And maybe, just maybe, there’s something more lurking there. Probably not a plesiosaur, but that would really be something, wouldn’t it? (IIRC, there were theories of a species of long-necked seals being behind reports of similar sea and lake monster sightings when I was last reading up on cryptid stuff. Slightly more realistic, if flawed, theory.)
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Maybe but fire moving over water seems hard to explain away.
Megalodon - especially if it is essentially a scavenger, and not a hunter.
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Don’t you think we would have noticed a shark that big? Or at least find teeth from it?
Well, there’s people who claimed they have…
I think it would be possible for megalodon to still exist albeit unlikely.
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I think it would be possible for an extremely large shark to have remained undiscovered until now, though not megaladon. It would be awesome if they were still out there, but we really would have found teeth or other evidence of them by now. Instead, I’d lean towards something like a sleeper shark, something that stays out of sight 99% of the time. Or, heck, maybe there’s another massive filter feeder swimming out there with the basking and whale sharks that’s somehow eluded us all this time.
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If it scavenges in the deep, yes. I don’t see it is just a big Great White that actively comes into shallower water to hunt.
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Thought of this thread in light of this news: Thriving Antarctic Ecosystems Found in Wake of Recently Detached Iceberg, which reads in part:
“We didn’t expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.”
and notes:
Little is known about what dwells beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves.
edit to add: This one especially (there is a photo) seems “cryptid-friendly”:
A giant phantom jelly is documented in the Bellingshausen Sea off Antarctica, at an area where the shelf break and slope are cut by several underwater gullies. This jellyfish can grow to a massive size: the bell to be more than one meter (3.3 feet) across with four ribbon-like oral arms that can grow more than 10 meters (33 feet) in length.
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I love speculating about things like this. Shame that we only discovered it under these circumstances, but really, what could be under there?
I recall once watching a video on reports of giant jellyfish/jellyfish-like cryptids. Some were more fantastical than others (one allegedly stunned and ate a large shark in front of an observer…), but it was thought-provoking. We know of some absolutely massive, bizarre jellies - the giant phantom jellyfish and that one that crashed an oil rig camera come to mind. Plus, there are siphonophores. I wonder what other monstrously-sized jelly-like creatures might be down there?
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Ever see the movie, “The Abyss”?
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I’ve seen so many black panthers in the US, UK, and Aus and other locations in local news stories that were obviously black domestic cats. But some are also black dogs. Surprising number of GSDs. One clip on YouTube (linked from a legitimate news site) with breathless comments was a black pony, and another was clearly a wild boar.
It’s extremely difficult for us, with the way our vision processing works, to get an idea of the size of things at a distance without a good frame of reference. Our brains use all kinds of things like color temperature, depth perception, and nearby objects to guess what size something will be, but it’s not a perfect process, and all sorts of things can throw it off. It’s just a tricky field mark to use to assess what we’re seeing for that reason.
The people who understand not to trust their sense of size without references are going to be the people already experienced with trying to identify things at a distance. It’s a common mistake for beginner birders, for example, to assume that their impression of the size of a bird is accurate, and have their IDs be off for that reason. Most of us on here can’t imagine seeing a house cat and thinking oh, that’s cougar-sized, but that’s because we learned skills to see that along the way, and exercise it regularly.
We’re also used to being extremely disappointed when we hope we’ve spotted a rare animal and then realize it’s a common one we already have on our lifelist. Haha. So most of us have likely learned to be critical of what we’re seeing.
Also, people who love identifying creatures can tell you the differences in shape between a domestic cat and a jaguar even in silhouette but if you showed most non-animal obsessed people one after the other, they could tell you it was different, but not really be able to articulate it yet. That takes practice.
I’m not sure I believe in people who don’t spend most of their waking hours honing their living-thing-identifying skills, but I’m told they do exist out there, and I don’t have enough evidence to say otherwise.
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My own experience with an out-of-place animal is that as a passenger in a car driving through Beaverton, Oregon, past Quatama Station, on April 3rd, 2009. I was gazing out the window at the apartment buildings when I saw an animal perched on the railings on the second floor, and I exclaimed, “Is that a Japanese macaque?!”
Not, “Is that a monkey?” – I hope if anyone appreciates the compulsion to identify to species an extremely out-of-place animal on a high apartment balcony while driving past at 25 miles per hour it’s folks on iNaturalist. My partner, who was driving, responded, “What?”
Just as we rounded the bend in the road, I noticed a group of people on the sidewalk below the balcony armed with (what I assumed were tranquilizer or similar) guns.
When I got home I checked the local news and it turned out that it had escaped from the OHSU Primate Research Center. It was the only one who had gotten past the perimeter fence. I have no documentary evidence of my sighting, alas, but I did feel the need to record it on iNaturalist as a casual observation. Definitely one of the strangest animal encounters I’ve ever had!
For cryptids that might exist, I don’t believe any of them do in the absence of evidence, and some have a preponderance of negative findings that make their existence so unlikely that I think there is nothing like the mythology describes. For example, after environmental DNA studies and mapping with sonar and everything else, I think we can say with high confidence that there’s nothing big in Loch Ness that isn’t expected to be there and is already well-documented. So whatever people have seen that they have attributed to Nessie is not something unknown; it’s a mix of misidentification of things both living and non-living, as well as hoaxes.
I do, however, think that some sightings of “out of place animals” have been legitimate, even if not fully substantiated. Obviously many are just misidentifications, like the house cats and black dogs being mistaken for “black panthers”. I don’t believe there is an established, self-sustaining population of “ABCs” (Alien Big Cats). I would say it is possible that at least some, however, have been sightings of escapees from private collections.
One example of a cryptid you’ll find on cryptidwiki and wikipedia is the “phantom kangaroo”. There have been been a handful of confirmed kangaroo sightings in the United States, for example, that were actual escapees. (Though many “phantom kangaroos” were escaped wallabies and wallabies have established introduced populations in some areas.)
My favorite cryptids are the ones that are so zany they’re obviously not real – fearsome critters like the Splintercat, which goes around killing trees by bashing its head into them, which is how snags are created. Splintercats are always grumpy with a migraine. There’s even a Splintercat creek near where I grew up in the Oregon Coast Range. I believe in you, Splintercat.
I also love Not-deer. Just deer where something is off. Their eyes are the wrong kind or color, their legs are too long, or their gait isn’t right, or they’re doing something very not-deerlike. Obviously there are deer out there that do fit those descriptions, often because of a mutation (pied deer often have skeletal deformities as well as depigmentation), an injury, or an illness. But not-deer as a phenomenon gives them a more supernatural vibe that is much better than the sad reality.
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I’m not sure I understand what you are saying, my comment is not meant to explain it away but to confirm its existence