Cryptozoologists

Update: New Clouded Leopard

Of course, the media has gone wild and over-reached a bit in highlighting the “new species” discovery of the Borneo/Sumatra clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) as such a remarkable find in many news articles. Indeed, the cat was there all the time, and has been “in the books” for 184 years. Of course, as has been mentioned within previous comments, I first talked about the reclassification of the two clouded leopards via this blog, on December 15, 2006, here: “Clouded Leopards: Two Species.” It is exciting to find something that’s been under our noses all the time, but let’s be realistic [...]

Eastern Puma Survey Media Analysis

A copyright-free image of the cougar from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911. Do eastern pumas exist? Are they an endangered species? Should these “ghost cats” be removed from the endangered species list? Are the eastern subspecies actually different from the western subspecies? These are a few of the questions that the United States federal government will answer by the end of the year, they promise. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced some time ago it is formally reviewing the status of the eastern mountain lion to determine if the felid should stay on the [...]

New Debate Over Luneau Footage

You knew it was going to happen. The debate about the ivory-billed woodpecker’s re-discovery has boiled over to the frame by frame analyses, con and pro, of the 2004 Arkansas video on a level comparable to that we’ve seen with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage. In the journal BMC Biology on March 13, 2007, the latest is a discussion of the frame by frame analysis of what has become known as the Luneau video by a Scottish scientist Martin Collinson. Collinson just is not buying the fact that the ivory-billed woodpecker has been found. He thinks the video is of another [...]

Honshu Wolf Survival?

The world’s smallest variety of wolf, the Japanese wolf, also called the Honshu Wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax), supposedly became extinct in 1905 in Nara prefecture. But did some survive beyond that date? And was there physical proof of this, in 1910 in Fukui prefecture? Sightings of the Japanese wolf persist to the present. A new debate is occurring currently in Japan that the extinction date may have been incorrect, almost immediately. Intriguingly, finding a taxidermy example of the Honshu Wolf presently is quite difficult. Only five mounted specimens are known worldwide, three in Japan, one in the Netherlands (which is [...]