It is Tuesday, May 27, 2008, and the History Channel, on behalf of “Monster Quest II,” is here in Portland, Maine, with a film producer and crew today to digitally film interviews with me about cryptozoology, in the context of a five hour tour of the International Cryptozoology Museum. Their snippets of the interviews, b-roll, and various background commentary on artifacts at the ICM will be used as web-linked support for Season Two of “Monster Quest,” which premieres tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28, 2008. Here are two trailers about the new season. Enjoy: MonsterQuest : Mutant Canines Airs on Wednesday May [...]
Hobbit Hoax Claim: “Complete Lunacy”
You may have heard that recently the Hobbit fossils, technically Homo floresiensis, were in the news due to the remarkable claim that they were hoaxes because the teeth showed dental work. What was incredible, as I read this, was that this new debunking was done on the basis of the skeptic’s visual examination of only the photographs of the teeth and other such non-first hand evidence. It sort of reminded me of claims about the Patterson-Gimlin footage being bogus based on bad published image prints that were enlarged on a photocopy machine, something that once did happen. I was waiting [...]
Hobbits Walk Was Distinctive
Tolkien’s hobbits walked an awful long way, but the real “hobbit”, Homo floresiensis, would not have got far. Its flat, clown-like feet probably limited its speed to what we would consider a stroll, and kept its travels short, says Bill Jungers, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. “It’s never going to win the 100-yard dash, and it’s never going to win the marathon,” he says. He presented his conclusion at last week’s meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio. By analysing the nearly complete left foot of an 18,000-year-old hobbit [...]
The Hobbit Hunt
The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth….Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.Henry Gee, editor of Nature, “Flores, God and Cryptozoology,” 2004 editorial. The time is assuredly upon us to expand the Hobbit hunt. The systematic study of Proto-Pygmies in Oceania seems tied to the probable findings of future fossil evidence for Homo floresiensis beyond Flores. What is being discovered in Palau appears to be the latest [...]
Micronesian Fossil Pygmies Discovered
Breaking news out of Micronesia appears to confirm both the notion that Homo floresiensis were “normal” and that “little people” tales are worthy of pursuing for more fossil evidence. Since the reporting of the so-called “hobbit” fossil from the island of Flores in Indonesia, debate has raged as to whether these remains are of modern humans (Homo sapiens), reduced, for some reason, in stature, or whether they represent a new species, Homo floresiensis. Reporting in this week’s PLoS ONE in a study funded by the National Geographic Society Mission Programs, Lee Berger and colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand, [...]
Hobbits Debate Heats Up
The Homo floresiensis debate has been reenergized again with the publication of a new paper in the journal Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1488. The following is a clickable link to the full paper, the abstract of which is below the link. Are the small human-like fossils found on Flores human endemic cretins? by Peter J. Obendorf, Charles E. Oxnard and Ben J. Kefford. Fossils from Liang Bua ( LB) on Flores, Indonesia, including a nearly complete skeleton ( LB1) dated to 18 kyr BP, were assigned to a new species, Homo floresiensis. We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic [...]
Hobbits At Harvard
The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth….Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.Henry Gee, editor of Nature, “Flores, God and Cryptozoology,” 2004 editorial. This Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 5:30 pm, an intriguing lecture will occur regarding Homo floresiensis. I was first alerted to this forthcoming talk by my son, Malcolm, who is enrolled in Dr. Javier Urcid’s “Human Origins” course at Brandeis University. I have written [...]
A Passion For Field Guides: Updated
Look, to be honest, I love field guides. I don’t merely have a shelf of field guides. I literally have a bookcase full of them, over a hundred different titles. With more in storage. I have such a passion for them, I wrote a couple and am planning on more. But what do we do with all of them? I recently saw this amusing photo on a bird books digest forum, with that birdwatcher out in the field with an armful of field guides. It is a paradox, indeed. You want to take field guides with you into the bush, [...]
Mini-Fossils: Flying Reptile & Island Dino
Perhaps they all owned iPods Nanos? Small cute fossil finds pointing to pygmy versions of extinct forms appear to be in the news lately. Being tiny goes back a long way. A new fossil species of flying reptile with a wingspan of less than a foot across (30cm) has been discovered in China. The nearly complete skeleton was unearthed in fossil beds from northeastern China. One of the smallest pterosaurs ever discovered, the new species has been named Nemicolopterus crypticus, which means “hidden flying forest dweller.” Read more here. Meanwhile, the discovery of a small dinosaur off the coast of [...]
New Alux Sighting
Alux hominids are Proto-Pygmies. The Aluxob (plural Maya) are seen in the Yucatan, Mexico, mostly by the Mayans, but sometimes by Mexicans and United States tourists, quite regularly. People in the Yucatan see the Aluxob, and when I was there in the 1980s, I was able to interview informants (mostly Mayans) who had firsthand sightings. In my 1985 book, Curious Encounters, I devoted a chapter to the lore, legends, and legacy of these Little People in that corner of the world. Things do not seem to have changed there. In one recent case, Dan Gannon, the moderator of an anthropological [...]
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