Post: Cryptids…
The work of Cryptobiologists (I always thought that it was Cryptozoologists…whatever) always serves as a valuable cautionary tale. It is so easy to go along with the herd, in thinking about things as they are, as we see them, and to feel content in our surety. Some of these searchers have found things of value, but most don’t, and are professionally reviled (so much for the impartiality of the sciences…).
The call of the weird: In praise of cryptobiologists
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028176.000-the-call-of-the-weird-in-praise-of-cryptobiologists.html
LAST December an 8-second amateur video went viral. Shot in remote northern Tasmania, the blurry footage featured a long-tailed mammal trotting across a meadow with an oddly stilted gait. According to the film-maker, Murray McAllister, the animal was a Tasmanian tiger.
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, is a wolf-sized marsupial predator that has been presumed extinct since the last known specimen died in Hobart zoo in 1936. Yet despite its apparent demise, reports of Tassie tigers refuse to die. Hundreds of sightings, many from seemingly credible observers, have been recorded, both in Tasmania and on the mainland.
When I saw the video there was something vaguely familiar about it. Then it hit me: the animal moved like a red fox. I’d raised a fox as a boy in the western US, and they have a peculiar way of trotting. Soon, others were saying the same thing. Then a fecal sample McAllister collected was analyzed for its DNA: it was a red fox.
McAllister has been searching for the Tasmanian tiger since 1998. Though he might not describe himself as such, he is a cryptobiologist, a chaser of mythical, mysterious, or supposedly extinct species. Cryptobiologists are a diverse lot, ranging from conventional scientists to eccentrics far from the mainstream. All share a dream of discovering elusive or unknown creatures unrecognized by conventional science – and with it their share of instant fame.
Everyone knows about fabled creatures like Nessie and Bigfoot, but cryptobiologists actually chase a far larger menagerie of exotic beasts which they collectively term "cryptids.” Some, like the Tasmanian tiger, clearly once existed. Others, such as giant vampire bats, conceivably might exist, having somehow escaped the attentions of conventional scientists. The third category, oddities such as the Jersey devil and the mothman, are strictly on the fringes.
But for mainstream scientists, being a cryptobiologist isn’t easy. Some have paid for their efforts in more than money. Roy Mackal, a dedicated chaser of Nessie and mokele-mbembe, an aquatic dinosaur that supposedly lives in the Congo basin, was booted out of the biology department at the University of Chicago; few if any dispute that his cryptid-seeking was the chief cause. Others endure sneers from their colleagues, a loss of credibility and even academic isolation.
Why tolerate such treatment? "The search for the fringe and fanciful captivates many people," says Mike Trenerry, a biologist with the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management who uses automatic cameras to search for rare beasts. "We want to believe there is more out there than what we already know about."
And the truth, of course, is that even in the 21st century, the natural world is still brimming with mystery. Tropical biologists commonly find that half or more of the insect species they capture in the rainforest canopy are new to science. Undiscovered fish and other species are frequently found in the deep sea. Up to half of all the plant species in the Amazon are still scientifically undocumented.
Legendary cryptids that turned out to be absolutely real
http://io9.com/5814976/cryptids-that-turned-out-be-absolutely-real
The Platypus
You might want to argue that, while the animals on this list were certainly once cryptids, they belong in a different category from the likes of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, both of which are massively unlikely to exist and clearly the stuff of fringe theory and pseudoscience. And while I would generally agree with that assertion, I’d still have to say – have you looked at a platypus recently? Never has a real animal more completely looked like the work of a hoaxer, and not a particularly imaginative hoaxer at that.
The platypus is a venomous, egg-laying mammal with the bill of a duck, the feet of an otter, and the tail of a beaver. If you were a European naturalist in the 18th or 19th century, wouldn’t the sane reaction to receiving the corpse of such a creature from its supposed home in Australia be to say that it was a practical joke? While describing a carcass of the creature for the journal Nature’s Miscellany in 1799, the well-respected English zoologist George Shaw began and ended his description with the acknowledgment that this might just be a crazy hoax:
Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means: the very epidermis, proportion, features, manner of opening, and other particulars of the beak of a shoveler, or other broad-bill species of duck, presenting themselves to the view: nor is it without the most minute and rigid examination that we can persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout of a quadruped…
On a subject so extraordinary as the present, a degree of skepticism is not only pardonable, but laudable; and I ought perhaps to acknowledge that I almost doubt the testimony of my own eyes with respect to the structure of this animal’s beak; yet must confess that I can perceive no appearance of any deceptive preparation; and the edges of the rictus, the insertion, and when tried by the test of maceration in water, so as to render every part completely moveable seem perfectly natural; nor can the most accurate examination of expert anatomists discover any deception in this particular."
Shaw was, it seems, basically convinced that the platypus was real, but he also was obviously trying to cover himself in case it turned out he had been hoodwinked. According to the famous surgeon Robert Knox, Shaw’s contemporaries were less charitable, with many writing the thing off as a forgery made by Chinese sailors, who had earlier perpetrated a similar hoax with a supposed mermaid. It wouldn’t be until nearly a century after Shaw’s time that the platypus’s existence was definitively confirmed, and it endures as the ultimate proof that nothing is too ridiculous to be real.
