Yes, another flightless fossil bird blog entry… Darren Naish has published a new analysis on terror birds, entitling this one, “Raven, the claw-handed bird, last of the phorusrhacids.” I won’t even try to summarize the amazing things he has written about in his intellectually stimulating posting. Instead, I’ll share three of his remarkable images to encourage you to go look over there and read, firsthand, his answers to the questions: “Was Titanis really alive in the Late Pleistocene?” and “Did Titanis really manage to hang on this late?”
What Is Bigfoot?
Of the routine and infrequent fossil candidates submitted for consideration as to the origins of Bigfoot/Sasquatch, which one is your favorite? I begin with the premise that this unknown, yet-to-be-verified, hairy bipedal hominoid is an actual biological species. Getting beyond the argument of whether or not Bigfoot exists, what do you think might be the fossil candidate best matching the sightings and evidence of the classic Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot, Patty, and the specimens seen during encounters aligned with her, from the Pacific Northwest of the USA and Canada? The reconstructions of William Munns give some new views of how these fossil [...]
What Did A Dodo Look Like?
Besides my recent Cryptomundo postings on the dodo and the moa-nalo, I have written other past entries here, which have reviewed the following often cryptic flightless bird species: elephant bird, more dodo, terror birds, more terror birds, moa, more moa, and takahē. In line with a question during an earlier discussion about how might have the dodo really appeared, the famed artist and Hollywood special effects man Bill Munn, well-known for his reconstruction of Gigantopithecus (below), contacted me. Munns wrote: “I have done scientific reconstructions of the Dodo (of how they may have looked) with all coloration based on actual [...]
Moa-Nalo Superducks
Artist’s conception of the moa-nalo examples, Thambetochen chauliodous, and Ptaiochen pau. Image by Stanton F. Fink. Since the dodo was visited here yesterday, our island-hopping journey might as well continue with a view of the Hawaiian flightless birds, the moa-nalo. Moa-nalo are a group of extinct aberrant, goose-like ducks that formerly lived on the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific. They were the major herbivores on most of these islands for the last 3 million years or so, until they became extinct after human settlement. (Yes, the storyline sounds familiar.) The moa-nalo (the name literally means “lost fowl”; an “s” is [...]
Woolly Mammoths: Two Subspecies Discovered
Andrea Thompson, a senior writer at Live Science has written an interesting article on a new subspecies discovery regarding woolly mammoths. Two genetically distinct groups of woolly mammoths once roamed northern Siberia, a new study suggests, with one group dying out long before humans showed up. The finding suggests humans were not the only reason for the beasts’ demise, as some have suggested. Scientists had long thought that woolly mammoths were one large homogeneous group, but an international group of scientists studied the mitochondrial DNA – the DNA in the genes of the mitochondria structures within cells – to paint [...]
Call For Cryptozoology Papers
The Association Belge d’Etude et de Protection des Animaux Rares (ABEPAR) asbl have organized its 8th Symposium at Engreux, to be held in The Ardenne, south of Belgium, on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th September 2008. The thema is “Mysterious Animals from Waters and Woods.” They have opened, for consideration, a call for papers of fifty-minute long presentations (maximum lecture + questions/answers) in English, but best in French if possible. (They will not be paying for your travel expenses, even for accepted speakers. You must find your way to Belgium. I would love to give a formal analysis of Bigfoot [...]
Solomons Island: New Fossil Dolphin
It’s party time on Solomons Island. A new species of extinct dolphin is to be named in Calvert this week. The Solomons Island region is on the western shores of the Chesapeake Bay, in Maryland. Solomons Island, specifically, is on the north side of the mouth of Patuxent River, where it meets the Chesapeake Bay. (Solomons Island is not to be confused with the Solomon Islands, a nation in Melanesia, east of Papua New Guinea, consisting of nearly one thousand islands.) At 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Thursday, June 12, 2008, the Calvert Marine Museum (a typical exhibit is shown above) [...]
Dragons: Between Science and Fiction
Opening at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmondton, Canada, from June 14 through September 14, 2008, is the exciting “Dragons: Between Science and Fiction.”
Top 10 New Species of Old and Recent Discoveries
The above is a new species with the common name of the “shocking pink dragon millipede” and the scientific Latin name of Desmoxytes purpurosea. It was first found on 28 August 2006, and first described in Zootaxa 1563: 31–36, 2007. It’s May. The end of May 2008. But apparently there is one more “top ten list” for 2007 that needs to be published. The International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) has announced their list of the top ten new species described in 2007, which includes at least a couple extinct animals, as well. The media appears to be confusing this [...]
Neandertals Were Separate Species
A new, simplified family tree of humanity, published on Sunday, has dealt a blow to those who contend that the enigmatic hominids known as Neandertals intermingled with our forebears. Neanderthals were a separate species to Homo sapiens, as anatomically modern humans are known, rather than offshoots of the same species, the new organigram published by the journal Nature declares. The method, invented by evolutionary analysts in Argentina, marks a break with the conventional technique by which anthropologists chart the twists and turns of the human odyssey. That technique typically divides the the genus Homo into various classifications according to the [...]
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