Forensic Science

How To Catch A Coelacanth

Indonesian fisherman Justinus Lahama holds up a rare coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct at the time of the dinosaurs. (Reuters) Scientists excited by Indonesian-caught coelacanth fish Two months ago Indonesian fisherman Justinus Lahama caught a rare coelacanth fish that has now lured an international team of scientists to investigate how he caught it. French experts equipped with sonar and GPS asked Mr Lahama to reconstruct in his dugout canoe, exactly what it was he did that enabled him to catch the coelacanth fish, an awkward-swimming species among the world’s oldest. Last May 19, Mr Lahama [...]

This “Chupacabras” Is No Mystery

Frankly, I get so tired of these Texas (and other states’) “chupacabra” stories, that these annual versions of the Chupacabras have become non-mysteries. I figured my Cryptomundo-mate Craig would post on his home state’s latest, and he has here, a few moments ago. It’s hot, the season is right, and “they” have turned up for years now. This latest one looks like a coyote, perhaps a fox, with mange. Mange is a parasitic infestation of the skin caused by mites. Mange comes in two forms, red mange (not generally contagious) and sarcoptic mange. Sarcoptic mange is a highly contagious infestation [...]

Discovering The Bili Ape

Dr. Shelly Williams holds the Bili Ape cast for media photographs in 2003. Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the [...]

Going Dodo Over Tassie Tiger Doodoo and Dodo Bones

While it is a long shot, there are still people today who report sightings of Dodo birds. Needless to say, even when new fossil remains are found of these avian wonders, the media tends to go a little dodo itself. Reporter Ed Harris of Reuters learned from Julian Hume, a paleontologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum, of the new discovery of a nearly complete skeleton from a dodo dig on Mauritius, and the news is centering the globe. The new find, Hume shared, is bound to tell more about the elusive bird than perhaps ever known before. The discovery was [...]

Something’s Savaging Lee Straw’s Sheep

Something’s killing Lee Straw’s sheep. Most of his flock is kept safe on remote islands, just off the rugged New England coast. But many of the rest, over the past week, have been slaughtered by a mysterious and vicious killer. If this were most parts of rural North America, dead livestock would just be part of the cycle of life. But in Maine — where Stephen King-approved dark imagery covers every unexplained and bloody happening — the twin mass killings of Straw’s flock is quickly becoming the stuff of legend and speculation. Last Sunday [June 3, 2007], the frustrated herder [...]

1981 Champ Conference

Were you there? Did you attend the August 1981 conference in Vermont, the first scientific seminar devoted to a study of the cryptids that have been reported lurking in the waters of Lake Champlain for the past 300 years? It sort of was the Woodstock of Champ. I was there. I wrote about the conference in Mysterious America. Here’s a sample what I saw and heard: In the morning session, Joseph Zarzynski ran down the historical background of the Champ sightings and introduced the audience of 200 people to the Sandra Mansi photograph. Projected on a wall-size screen in an [...]