Cryptozoologists

Baiji Declared Extinct

A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat. The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat — busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said. * * * Randall Reeves, chairman of [...]

Who Coined “Skunk Ape”?

Just as I was curious about who coined “blobsquatch,” I’ve been wondering if there’s a clear history to who invented another term in our field. Who coined the phrase “Skunk Ape”? If you work your way over to the “Skunk Ape” entry at Wikipedia, you will find a simple answer that someone added there to that question. It is presented, as a fact, under the first subsection entitled simply Name. The following single sentence is given: The term “skunk-ape” was coined by David Shealy who heads the Skunk-Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee, Florida. I’ve known the term “Skunk Ape” has [...]

Yahoo: “Salt & Pepper Squirrels” #1

The Once And Future University of North Texas White Squirrel. A Cryptomundo correspondent at Princeton University just passed this along: I see that your salt-and-pepper squirrel article made the # 1 spot (always reserved for cute critter pictures) on The 9 at Yahoo.Com. — my absolute favorite, must-watch M-F wrapup of the weird and wonderful on the World Wide Web: Vote For #1 = “Salt & Pepper Squirrels” Now you’ve really arrived, my man! Congratulations! I appreciate this. Actually, the readers at Cryptomundo are the keys to our success. Thank you all for visiting, reading, and voting us Number #1, [...]

Pynchon’s New Cryptofiction

Most people have heard the rumors about alligators-in-the-sewers, in large part, because of Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel, V. Pynchon wrote of the cute little pet alligators purchased as Florida souvenirs, eventually discarded, then growing and reproducing in the sewers of New York City. Moving through the underground system, Pynchon told us, they were big, blind, albino, and fed off rats and sewage. Pynchon envisioned an Alligator Patrol going into the depths of the sewers, working in teams of two, with one man holding a flashlight while the other carried a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun. As no one before him had, Thomas [...]

Again, Bear Lake

I enjoy reading stories about new sightings of Lake Monsters as much as the next guy, but what is up with retreading stories from the 1800s, so often? There’s been another local Utah article written about the Bear Lake Monsters. It revisits the same old stories that you perhaps have read before. What I find surprising is they hardly ever talk about the Utah Lake Monster sightings that are known from the 21st century, as documented elsewhere and mentioned by, for example, Karl Rose. There is no disputing that evidence for the Bear Lake Monsters was established by early leaders [...]

The Real Lost World Screens

A reminder: The Real Lost World airs tonight on Animal Planet – December 10th and then again on December 17th, 2006. It screens on Discovery HD Theater on December 14th, and in Canada on OLN Cable, December 17th, 2006. The documentary’s director Peter von Puttkamer was also the director of the successful 2002 series, Monster Hunters, and my all-time favorite “people” documentary about the quest, Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot. This image of the movie poster may be clicked on to enlarge.

Was It A Shunka Warak’in?

In December 2005, a strange wolf-like animal started killing livestock in McCone, Garfield and Dawson counties, Montana. By March 2006, it had struck six herds of sheep in McCone and Garfield Counties, wounding 71 and killing 36 ewes. The thing had even reached the status of being named; it was called "The Creature of McCone County." News articles appeared throughout the next few months, and it went national with an article in USA Today in May 2006. The number of livestock the "Creature" killed finally reached about 120, by the end of October 2006. Now comes word in a December [...]