Breaking News

In Search of African Dragons

Jon Downes has announced that his Center for Fortean Zoology will attempt to track down recent accounts of “dragons” or monitor lizards in West Africa. In early July 2006, a six-person team from the North Devon-based UK group is travelling to Gambia to investigate these folktales. They may find the trail a little cold. Back on June 12, 1983, 15-year-old amateur naturalist Owen Burnham discovered the fresh carcass of a strange beast on the remote Bungalow Beach in Gambia. The stranded dead cryptid was around 15 feet long and looked like a cross between a crocodile and a dolphin. Owen [...]

Greenwich Cougar “Credible”

According to local media reports of June 1, 2006, a “cougar” is being seen near Greenwich, New Jersey. The police are taking the sightings seriously because they’ve seen them too. Since May 11, nine people have said they’ve seen a large cat roaming in several areas of the township, including near a day-care center, a youth-sports complex, and the DuPont Repauno Plant. A police officer has been assigned to patrol the area on a bicycle. Two police officers saw the cougar in broad daylight. One saw it chasing a herd of deer, [Detective Sgt. Joseph ] Giordano said. “Every one [...]

Indonesian Coelacanth Filmed

Updated at 11:15 PM, May 31, 2006, plus image. A capture of an image from the Japanese research team videotape of a one-meter long coelacanth taken off Indonesia on May 30, 2006. No date for the release of the video has been given. Robin Stobbs, a coelacanth researcher in South Africa, has informed me that an individual of the Indonesian coelacanth was filmed at the depth of 170 m, 17, at 8:30 am on May 30, 2006, off shore Buol, about 350 km west from Manado, Sulawesi Island, with a ROV operated by the Aquamarine Fukushima Survey team. This town [...]

Bizarre Baffin Skull

The "what-are-theys" are happening faster than I can post them all before my trip to Texas this week to speak at the Bigfoot exhibit at UT. Now comes this Baffin Island mystery. Here’s another one for May 30th. Canadian Canoe reporter John Thompson, through a dispatch from Iqaluit writes: A mysterious skull discovered on the edge of the Arctic Circle has sparked interest in what creatures roamed Baffin Island in the distant past, and what life a warming climate may support in the future. Andrew Dialla, a resident of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, says he found the skull protruding from the frozen [...]

Chinese What-Is-It

There is a May 30, 2006, news item that is one of those tidbits that have you scratching your head. It is running in the China Daily under the headline "Bizarre Creature Puzzles Thousands." The entire article (note: it sometimes becomes a deadlink, having mysteriously vanished 12 hours after it was first published) reads: Thousands of residents of Tianmen, Hubei Province, have flocked to see a rare turtle-like creature caught by an elderly man in a nearby reservoir. Some think that the animal, weighing in at 8.3 kilograms, looks like an alligator. It has three rows of horns on its [...]

More Hobbits

Peter Brown (above with the LB1 skull) passes along word that another Homo floresiensis volume is due out soon. The book is Little People And A Lost World: An Anthropological Mystery (ISBN: 0822559838) by Linda Goldenberg Atkinson. It targets the juvenile readership, at 112 pages, from the Lerner Publishing Group in their Twenty-First Century Books Series. Set to be published in September 2006, it will have a library binding. More information on Mike Morwood’s and Penny van Oosterzee’s new book, entitled The Hobbit’s Tale: Discovery, Significance and History of a New Human Species on the Island of Flores, Indonesia can [...]