Photos

Patio Puma

I’ve received the following four photos so many times lately, I figured I better address the flow of alerts to me about them. The email usually is labeled “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” The location is given as someplace familiar and near you. I saw copies of these, wow, first about five years ago. It is amazing they are making a return appearance. Therefore, let me just mention them here as they are not what they seem to be. These are nothing more than what must be termed an internet rural legend! I guess some would call them a hoax. They are [...]

Arthurian White Stag Reported

Almost mystical in nature, white animals garner human attention, as this new story demonstrates. There is nothing truly cryptozoological about albino or nearly albino animals, any more than there is about melanistic ones. Neither are hidden, certainly, as their very appearance and finding them makes the news. Actually, their appeal has everything to do with them being very beautiful and visible. In the world of weird animal news, white animals tend to get more than the usual attention from humans, and thus the media. Ghostly, phantomlike, mythical, and legendary are words often associated with albinos and near-albinos (leucistic) specimens of [...]

Robert Rines: “Are They All Liars?”

It reads like an obituary. And after a fashion, it is a pre-obit, a reflection on how it must feel as the end is in sight. The Boston Globe looks at the final and waning days of the Loch Ness Monster hunter Robert Rines. The article carried in today’s New England newspaper is detailed, joyous, and, I must admit, a little sad to read. In 1999, along with my sons (one of whom has a very Scottish name and it’s his birthday today), I came upon Rines and one of his sons in a teahouse on the shores of the [...]

First Photo of Cyprus Spiny Mouse

This is a small version of the first photograph of Acomys nesiotes (TUR: Kıbrıs dikenlifaresi, ENG: Cyprus spiny mouse), by Mustafa Sozen. For information on obtaining the full-sized image, please refer to the Trek Nature link noted below. The Cyprus Spiny Mouse is endemic to Cyprus. It lives in rocky areas. We captured 4 individual on 22.10.2007 around Lefkoşa (Nicosia) area at an altitude of about 600 meters asl in Turkish Republic of Northern Cypruc. No considerable effort has been made since the 1980s to verify its presence and it may persist in small numbers. For this reason, the IUCN [...]

Mystery Bones

Okay, folks, your cryptozoological mystery bones fieldwork assignment is to identify the following. Examine the two separate specimens brought before you, and record your best guesses as to what they are. They have nothing to do with each other. 1) Mystery skull 2) Mystery “teeth” What do you think they are? You be the investigator.