What cryptids might be real?
There is so much talk of Bigfoot. But I have yet to see any really good evidence that a Bigfoot could be real.
But what about other cryptids? Which, of them, might actually pan out to be real? Abominable snowman? Yowwie? Chupacabra? The Cat Man of 4th Street? Thunderbirds? Bronies? |
Ivory-billed woodpecker?
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I was going to say Australian drop bears. But those are not cryptids.THEY ARE REAL!!! :eek:
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Orang Pendek might exist; plenty of areas sufficiently remote in Sumatra for it to hide in.
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There is reputed to be a death worm thingy in Mongolia which may one day turn out to be a simple snake.
Mike |
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No, you are beautifully right! A cryptid is any creature or plant, the existence if which has been claimed but not yet recognized by scientific consensus. |
So would claims of an extant thylacine not be cryptid-ic?
Mike |
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Hmmm. Does a creature, known to have existed but which becomes extinct, qualify as a cryptid if people then claim to still see it? And what if it is then actually rediscovered and its existence confirmed? This happened with a fish called a Coelocanth. They were once known only from the fossil record; believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous, until a fisherman caught one off the east coast of South Africa in 1938. |
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Now, Giant Squid have panned out to be real. |
According to the now defunct International Society of Cryptozoology, cryptids would be "animals of unexpected form or size, or unexpected occurrence in time or space."
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Well, Chupacabra's been pretty well debunked, hasn't it? Carcasses and sightings have turned out to be coyotes and similar animals with mange. One investigator noted the similarity of the first description of Chupacabra to the alien in the film Species. He then talked to the woman who made the first report and she admitted that, yes, she'd watched Species when it had been on telly the previous week and that she could well have become confused because of it.
Given that evidence, I'd say that the chances of El Chupacabra being real are very slim. Incidentally, is it just me or when you hear the phrase "El Chupacabra", does anyone else think of this:
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Call me a close-minded radical denialist, but I would say zero.
The candidates presented so far (*) never had their equivalent of BFRO or BFF, such as a Giant Squid Research Organization (GSRO) or the Coelacanthus Forums (CoF) and their fauna... These animals were described, their specimens were collected by biologists and not by cryptozoologists. Actually cryptozoologists never found anything, despite quite often trying to bask in or use real biologists' works to vindicate their beliefs or bring legitimacy to their claims. even if you bring out-of-place-animals in to the fray, compare the quality of evidence backing sixgill sharks at Seattle with big cats in England... Now, that's "habituation", not the Fox bigfoot tall tales... Crackpotzoology, I mean cryptozoology is not about real animals; its about fantasy. Living dinosaurs, giant apes at your backyard (*) ETA: as cryptids shown later to be real. |
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Oh, I should point out that Bronies are real.
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...on-d35wy2j.gif http://chzbronies.files.wordpress.co...rp-with-it.jpg |
The Snow Snake. Any GI ever stationed in a cold climate knows of this creature.
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I'm not sure if coelocanths would count. While it's true that they were believed to be long-extinct until extant specimens were found, as far as I know there was no community of believers claiming to have seen them before proof was found. Thylacines and ivory-billed woodpeckers on the other hand do have people claiming to have seen them in recent times. |
I really hope Thylacines still exist, but I doubt they do.
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Ivory-billed thylacines.
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Maybe the Tsuchinoko? Small cryptids in general are more likely to be real.
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What I think is really cool are the things that would have been considered cryptids if anyone had thought of them, like the 5-foot frugivorous monitor lizard!
Like many 'new discoveries", this animal was well known to the locals, but hadn't been cataloged by science. Of the true cryptids, I have to think that a whopping huge goanna (spelling?) in the Outback would be the most likely. The Aborigines claim there are big ones out there, or were in their grandfathers' time anyway. And I look at all those camels as a lot of meat with no apparent predators, and I wonder... Sure would be fun to find, wouldn't it? |
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The process is long, it's tedious, it requires a lot of effort, it requires you to read thousands of pages of the most arcane text anyone has ever even conceived of (seriously, scientists think this stuff is too tedious to put into regular journals), most of it occurs in stuffy offices where the most dangerous thing is the coffee maker (seriously, scientists get some REALLY weird ideas about coffee)--it's nothing like what a Bigfoot advocate would have you believe. You won't be trampsing through the woods with your buddies; you'll be spending evenings looking at photos and tracking down references. Frankly, almost everyone will find this sort of thing mind-numbingly boring. It takes a unique person to do taxonomy. The rewards are far greater, though. The thing about focusing on reality is, the skills are transferable in almost every case. The skills you learn in examining species allow you to notice--and, more importantly, remember--nuances of morphology that most miss. Name a single cryptozoologist that has revised a single clade due to their research. In contrast, I can't name anyone who's named more than a handful of species that hasn't. Most revise taxa outside of the clade they work with--for example, a professor of mine that focused on decapod paleontology also developed a morphospace model for decapod evolution, revising our understanding of the mechanisms by which these animals evolved. Gould studied mollusks, and changed how we view evolution itself. You also get to have fun moments like I had yesterday, when you see something that to others is perfectly ordinary, and suddenly numerous connections click into place and you can see the history of the groups spread out before you. That paragraph isn't off topic, really. Those clicks are fitting organisms into their evolutionary framework, allowing one to predict what organisms are possible. Cryptozoologists don't work that way--they assume something exists, then try to find evidence. A real taxonomist already HAS the evidence. Think of it this way: Cryptozoologists are Barney Stinson. What you're asking is "Which of his pickup lines might be true?" Quote:
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The various large cat cryptids are probably the most likely, but still very unlikely to be found to actually exist.
The stories about feral panthers and other big cats in the Australian outback are fairly easy to find, but the evidence is always curiously lacking. That and the fact that we have a real feral domestic cat population that could easily be mistaken at a distance for a larger cat species probably contributes to the longevity of the stories. All the rest are pretty much just bunk. |
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Is this not what you were talking about, or are you thinking of some altogether bigger creature, like the 5.5m long megalania, which used to live there and was extant when the aboriginals arrived? Mike |
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0112201131.htm Thylacines are/were a great example of Mother Nature filling a niche; a marsupial cat filling the place occupied by tigers, lions and other big cats on other continents. |
We periodically hear about someone trying to resurrect the thylacine. Lets just say the practicality of such an endevour is quite different from the dream. I don't hold any hope for such a resurrection.
Would be damn cool though. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perentie |
I suspect several relatively recent finds in the Indochinese Region would make fans of cryptids look at the area with interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vu_Quang_ox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntiacus_putaoensis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntiacus_truongsonensis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntiacus_vuquangensis |
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I consider Ivorybills and Thylacines to be cryptids because people report seeing them but repeated attempts to confirm their persistence have fallen short.
Animals like okapis, gorillas, and saolas were not cryptids because there was no problem of repeated, failed attempts to find them. They just happen to live in remote places that weren't well explored until recently. Coelocanth - not a cryptid because no one was looking for it. As for giant squid, here's something I posted on them some time ago: “Giant squid have spawned mariner's tales for centuries, but some people mistakenly think they were finally discovered by science a few years ago - not so. Steenstrup appears to have published the first description of giant squid in 1857, and there have been literally hundreds of specimens examined since then. What's more, Aristotle wrote of giant squid in the 4th Century B.C., and Pliny the Elder provides a description of a specimen examined in the 1st Century. Wikipedia provides the references for those last items as follows: • ^ Aristotle. N.d. Historia animalium. • ^ Pliny. N.d. Naturalis historia. When Aristotle and Pliny are the references for something, then "science" has known about that something for a long time. The thing that was a recent discovery related to giant squid is that a live one was photographed in the wild for the first time in 2004. Very cool - yes. Cryptid - no.” |
Silly rabble! Cryptids for kids.
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Camel Spiders? (Or are they just misidentifed known species?)
ABCs in the UK possibly, but not jaguars or panthers... |
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Not cryptid at all, although their size and abilities are often wildly exaggerated. |
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Mike |
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Heuvelmans wrote two books that I read a while back. "In the Wake of the Sea Serpents" and "On the Track of Unknown Animals." Both of these stoked my young person interest (subsequent to my reading of Gardner Soule's "The Maybe Monsters," "The Mystery Monsters," and "Trail of the Abomniable Snowman").
I cannot say for certain if any alleged cryptid will be actually discovered by science and catalogued, but I can hope. (I am an optimist--that there are further large creatures (and small) still waiting to be identified and catalogued by scientists.) There are some of these claims for sea creatures that I find intriguing. Long-necked (excess of six feet in the neck) pinnipeds; claimed archaeocete-type critters; re-discovery of potential Steller's Sea Cow survivals; and so on. |
Since I posted, I was thinking about one other potential survival from a while back, the giant shark Megalodon.
Back in September 2012 on a local TV station, they were broadcasting a syndicated show on unsolved mysteries (produced in Canada, for young people--2007 was the date of the original show in the copyright section at the end), and it talked about giant sharks, and the sighting by Zane Grey and his son in the early 1930s (two separate sightings). They actually interviewed Zane Grey’s son for the program. It was off the coast of California, about 100 miles or so south west of Los Angeles. There is also a discussion forum called "monsterfishkeepers.com" that has a thread about Megalodon sightings in the 20th century, including about finding Megalodon teeth dredged from the bottom of the Pacific that were dated to 11,000 and 24,000 YBP. I am not yet able to post a URL link, but enterprising readers should be able to locate the thread I am speaking about via Web searching. |
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