Cryptozoology

Merry Cryptomundo Weekend to All!

Everyone at Cryptomundo Wishes You All A Very Merry Holiday Season for ’06! Our thanks to Ted Bastien for allowing us to post and use his wonderful cartoon to get this message of joy out there to our hundreds of thousands of loyal readers.

Bulletin: First Live Giant Squid Filmed

It is all over the televised news channels and wire services: The National Science Museum of Japan has videotaped a giant squid (Architeuthis) live – perhaps for the first time. It was a modest giant, about 21 feet (seven meters) in length, a young female; older giant squids can be around 55 feet (18 meters) long. One specimen found on a New Zealand beach in 1880, reportedly, was 65 feet in length, with 40 feet of that being tentacles. The Associated Press is alerting news organizations that the event took place on December 4, 2006, off the Ogasawara Islands, near [...]

Black Panthers in Illinois

Black panthers in Illinois are not merely melanistic jaguars far from home. I grew up in central Illinois (1947-1965, 1969-1974) and went to undergraduate school at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (1965-1969). I was out searching for black panthers when I was 14, for example, in Macon County, doing field work on big mystery cat sightings in southeast Illinois when I was 16, and slushing through swamps in southern Illinois more than I was in some classes during my college years at SIU. Needless to say, all those first few years, I wasn’t writing too much about what I was doing, because [...]

Johor: The Other Side

Last Wednesday, as part of Zainul Arifin’s column, this editorial appeared: DATUK Sazmi Miah, please don’t rain on our parade. We want our Bigfoot, real or otherwise, please. The parliamentary secretary to the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said there was no evidence – droppings or hair samples, for examples – to suggest the Johor Bigfoot existed. It is a hoax, Sazmi declared. He also said that since we have only found single footprints, the creature can’t be hopping on one foot all this while. He has a point there, unless of course, Bigfoot is actually a one-legged creature, or [...]

Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006

Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006 by Loren Coleman, coauthor, Creatures of the Other Edge. As often happens with fossil finds, sometimes they are stored away, forgotten, rediscovered, even exhibited, but then all of a sudden, an old find experiences a grand new awareness. The fossil is significant again. Or the fossil might be a recent or actual new find gaining its fifteen minutes of popular media fame, often before the journal articles are written. Such has been the case regarding the following selections, all from extinct species (supposedly). It is a roundup of certainly a unique collection of [...]

Borneo’s Lost World: 52 new species

Glyptothorax exodon: Courtesy of Heok Hee Ng. In some media accounts, it is being called another "lost world." In others, the "Heart of Borneo." Over 52 new species of plants and animals have been discovered there from July 2005 through September 2006. "The more we look the more we find," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International coordinator for the study of the "Heart of Borneo," a 85,000-square-mile rain forest in the center of the island where several of the new species were found. "These discoveries reaffirm Borneo’s position as one of the most important centers of biodiversity in the world." And.. [...]