Jurassic Parks and Rec

So, where were we? Ah yes, dinosaurs! Let's crack into a couple of examples, shall we? Mr. Wikipedia, if you please?

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Most reports of allegedly surviving dinosaurs come from African rain forests in the Congo Basin and the rain forests of South America, although others include those from Australia and Scotland.

 

 

• Emela-ntouka, allegedly a living ceratopsian.
  
• Kasai rex, allegedly a living theropod.
  
• Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, claimed to be a living stegosaur.
  
• Mokele-mbembe, claimed to be a living sauropod.
  
• Muhuru, allegedly a living ankylosaur.
  
• Nguma-monene, allegedly a living Spinosaurus.
  
• Ngoubou, allegedly a living Styracosaurus.
  
• Other Mesozoic reptiles such as the winged pterosaurs have been reported as well.
  
• Kongamato, hypothesised to be a living Rhamphorhynchus.
  
• Mahamba, hypothesised to be a freshwater mosasaur.
  

Just for reference, Mokele-mbembe is by -far- the most "well-known" (or infamously still at large) out of all those listed. Also, I think it's somewhat unusual that out of all of these, almost half (Mokele-mbembe, Emela-ntouka, Mbielu-mbielu-mbielu, and Nguma-monene) come from the same rough area, the Likouala region of the Congo. All I'm saying is it's not the only time things have gotten a bit weird down there...maybe they have a King Kong situation up ins? All the same, for as far fetched as the the idea of living dinosaurs may sound, stranger things have happened, so maybe it's too early to discount it quite yet.

 

 

Land of the Lost

 

How goes it, Earthlings? Today we're going to start a two part discussion about a very unusual trend in cryptozoology, that of the living dinosaur.

So what is a "living dinosaur", exactly? Well, at it's simplest, it's the idea that a resident reptile (or species of reptiles) from a bygone age has somehow remained undetected until modern times. A good example of this in practice would be the popular hypothesis that the Loch Ness Monster is supposedly a plesiosaur (or family of them) and survived the mass extinction event because it was able to camp out underwater for long enough. Any creature that could prove the idea in and of itself would basically be considered one of the Holy Grails of cryptozoology, as the discovery of the possibility of a dinosaur surviving through to modern times would basically open up the creature catalog of the entire fossil record to possible discovery. Think kind of like the Ark of the Covenant, minus this.

Anyways, where did this idea even come from and get started? Good question. Actually, the idea itself started getting circulated quite early, as the identification and reconstruction of dinosaurs started all sorts of imaginations as to the similarities between them and the hitherto firmly-in-the-camp-of-the-mythical dragons of legend. Once that germ of an idea began to spread, combined with the occasional "living fossil" finds such as the coelacanth and our reconstructed records of forgotten fauna expanded, it became easier and easier to justify the inclusion of "dinosaurs" as a viable hypothesis to explain sightings of unusual or mysterious creatures. Bigfoot, Champ, Ron Paul...all became possible examples of something unexpectedly surviving until modern times.

So, if the theory is so widespread, why don't we have any examples of it actually occurring? Well, nature, mostly. You see, the theory in and of itself is kind of a reach, even for cryptozoologists. See, if we look through the fossil record, you can damn well find almost anything that you can imagine, so one can always use it as an alternative hypothesis. Also, the likelihood of even a small herd of dinosaurs surviving undetected while still being able to have enough food to continue to flourish in incredibly small, even in the (few) areas that have little to no human habitation/traffic. Lastly, even if one of these wonder-herds did exist, nobody seems to take into account the fact that these things would have had thousands of years to evolve into completely new creatures. But still, the idea is an attractive one at least at the romantic level, so it persists to this day.

Aaaand that's it for today. Friday I'll go into specific famous and not-so famous examples of supposedly still-living dinosaurs. Take it easy!

 

From Out Of The Ashes...

So, when one thinks of the phoenix, you usually think of one of three things: the decent basketball team, the ridiculously ill-fitting-with-it's-surroundings retirement megapolis, or the Western mythological warhorse of a mystical bird that symbolizes eternal life through it's reported combustion and rebirth through it's own ashes. Being that you're a regular reader of the blog (hopefully), I'm going to assume you're familiar with it, but if not, here's somewhere to get a good overview...

That said, here's an analog that I was -not- aware of...the Chinese Phoenix. While so-called, it's not so much like a phoenix as it is an amalgam of many different animals and portrayed as the King of the Birds, or avian ideal in Chinese culture. Used more as a symbol of luck, balance, and prosperity, the Fenghuang actually struck me as having more than a passing similarity to another Western beastie, the Cockatrice. Which itself is related to a variety of other petrifying creatures, such as this, this and this.

Anyways, the point of this post is currently lost on even the author, but I'll end this somewhat link-heavy and disjointed entry by saying that I was at the very least surprised that there was anything like an Eastern analog to the concept of the Phoenix, even if it turned out that the Chinese Phoenix moniker was of mostly Western invention as well. Also, this.

Cryptid Synthesis: The Lindwyrm

One of my favorite cryptozoological mysteries is that of the Lindwurm (or Lindworm, or really simply a Wurm/Worm/Wyrm, since this little entry is going to be talking at a general level [I just happen to enjoy the way Lindwyrm sounds {and yeah, I'm aware I'm spelling it differently each time I type it, let me go on my little  homophonic spree}]), a European legend. Granted, there are many different variations of it, but the basic description of a Wyrm is a large, long, snake-like reptilian creature with either no arms or a small pair of front arms only. They are miscellaneously described as having a poisonous bite, breath, claws, and/or having wings, depending on the tale and who's telling it. However, the basic premise of a giant snake terrorizing various parts of Europe (sometimes simultaneously) gives me that "to much a coincidence to not have at least a kernel of truth" tickle that makes me think that it might be plausible a creature like this existed.

Why? Well, call it a hunch, but also keep in mind I'm talking kernels, not the whole shebang. I certainly find the idea of a poison-breathing land-dwelling leviathan completely implausible. However, I just think that the idea that they could've been the last vestiges of a dying species that may have experienced convergent evolution with (or possible was from the same ancestor stock as) anacondas or boa constrictors isn't necessarily too hard to swallow. Poisonous? Probably not, but Europeans in general would be familiar with their smaller, more venomous cousins and could easily have added that feature in each tales' retelling.

Maybe I'm being too naive in assuming that something like that could be possible, but it just strikes me as odd: that while you hear stories of different -wurms- and we are supposed to assume they're all fantastic creatures that are completely fabricated from the basis of a common snake, you never hear tales of anyone fighting a giant spider, or rat, or other animals. Why choose snakes? Sure, they can be poisonous, but there are other things as well; did snakes truly fascinate and terrify our ancestors that badly? Something in my gut tells me that there may be a bit more to it than that...

 

As a little "case study" for you, let me boil down the legend of the Lambton Worm, pictured above...keep in mind, however, that there are almost as many tales of different Worms are there were municipalities in Europe, so this is by no means the only tale of a Wurm out there. Basically, the tale goes like this: a fisherman (the eponymous Lambton), not having the appropriate level of piety as was socially decreed at the time, decides to skip church in favor of getting a jump on the prime fishing that was available to the sinners like him that cut church. Well, sure enough he catches something, but instead of a fish, he catches what looks like a small white eel. Thinking it useless, he gives up, chucks it into the well and promptly gets recruited for the Crusades. Well, while homeboy is gone, rather than expiring, the eel becomes bigger and bigger, eventually growing big enough to not only escape the well, but end up coiling itself around the hill the well was on a total of seven times. As you can imagine, the now fully-grown worm was pretty much it's own boss and didn't take sh-t from anyone, instead terrorizing the countryside, eating livestock and small children, and basically making the already sucky life of a peasant even worse. Well, after seven years, John the Fisherman (yes, his name really was John Lambton, though I did like having the opportunity to slip a Primus reference in there) comes back from the Crusades to find his village wrecked and everyone super-depressed. So, consulting a local witch/wise-woman, the ever-pragmatic Lambton was told to affix speakheads to his armor so that when the Wyrm undoubtedly began to try and crush him to death, the Wurm would instead inflict damage unto itself. The unusually knowledgeable wise-woman also let him know that after he killed the Worm that if he did not kill the first thing he saw afterwards, his family would be cursed with non-peaceful deaths for the next nine generations. So, while the local blacksmith was busy filling what was undoubtedly both the most unusual and bad-ass looking order he'd ever gotten with the spear-armor, John talked with his father and basically had the idea that once he killed the Wurm, they could let his favorite dog out and he would then slay it when it ran to him (pretty d-ck move, guys). So, after the armor is ready, Lambton heads down and defeats the nefarious Worm, and gives the signal for the dog-slaying to commence. However, Lambton's dad, obviously showing a bit of the Jackass Tree that his son's Dumbass Apple fell from, instead completely effs everything up and runs out to meet his son with a warm hug and some more than likely asinine platitude ("A Wyrm in pieces is worth two in the well", or something like that, I'd guess). So, thinking that they can escape a prophecy by faking it, they let the dog out and kill it all the same, but it's too late...the Lambtons are thereby cursed for the next nine generations to violent deaths thanks to animal cruelty and/or the inability to follow directions. And supposedly, the curse really did end up following their bloodline, which I guess sort of makes up for skipping church and killing a perfectly innocent dog, right? Anyways, the end ;)

Beast of All Hearts

So, I’m in one of my moods...specifically, one in which I'm feeling like I should give you an introduction to the sort of cryptozoological knowledge I'm familiar with by way of summarization of a legend-case known as the Beast of Gèvauden. Quite interesting, if you ask me, and please keep in mind this is all off the top of my head, so feel free to fact check me or cross reference in Wikipedia (which started this whole thing in the first place, actually), it has a very good article talking about it.

Anyways, the Beast of Gèvauden was an animal supposedly at fault for killing about 120 people and injuring about another 20 in France during the…well, specific times elude me, but it was back when France still had royalty, if that’s any help. It was sighted on multiple occasions, and was known not only for the savagery of it’s attacks, but also the fact it was virtually unstoppable (it had taken arquebus shots many times, and while it would be the sort of shots that would supposedly drop any other animal, in this case it merely wounded it and it seemed to recover fully from the shots within the period of a couple of days).

Ladies and peeps, this was the Great White Buffalo of werewolf stories. Specifically, there were countless reports and eyewitnesses to collaborate information, so the odds of this thing being completely mythical are virtually zero…there was something out there, and hoax or not, people were dying. It had all of the elements of a classic werewolf, in that it was a) had incredible strength and appeared to be completely implacable, b) seemed to regenerate from basically mortal wounds at an incredible rate, c) had a tendency to attack humans on sight in preference to any other prey (so even shepherds with a flock of sheep were preferable to the Beast over any of the smaller, slower prey), and also to gruesomely sit and eat its kills immediately after slaying them, and d) was completely undetectable outside of when it decided to hunt. You could think of it like an ancestor of Jack the Ripper, except involving an unidentified animal and a larger body count (I’m sure there were probably a couple of prostitutes involved, it was France back in the middle ages/dark ages/enlightenment/god I wish I could accurately pin this date down without compromising the freestyling of this off the top of my head).

So, we have a homicidal wolf thing (though it differed in a few key characteristics, such as supposedly having a tail as long as itself, and a large, rounded, feline-ish head rather than an elongated, canine one, upping the body count, with no stop in sight. What’s a peasant to do? Apparently, keep dying until the King of France gets irritated/scared enough to put his top two hunters on it, where they promptly fail to capture or kill it. Ticked off, the king sends out his personal arquebussist (think “ye olden bodyguard”) to try and finish what the hunters couldn’t, and in an almost “too-good-to-be-true” twist, he and a mob of local rifle hunters were able to bring down an absolutely huge (150 lb) wolf that was the biggest on record up until then, and after stuffing and shipping the thing back to the king’s court, the threat was considered over…until a couple of weeks later, when the killings resumed. At this point, the king didn’t want anything to do with it, so instead of sending someone else out, he simply passed an edict that severely punished whoever spoke aloud of the killings from then on out. Finally, a local hunter who had fallen out of favor was able to bring down a separate creature, this one being decidedly different from a wolf, but unidentifiable otherwise. The killings, though, were over once and for all, so mission accomplished.

Well, the question still remains...what the heck was that thing that did all of that? No one was able to figure it out, and though the beast was stuffed and sent to a museum, there was no records as to what happened to it after it was received; for all intents and purposes, it had disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, there were three major theories at play that I knew about, and now there's a new (and interesting one). The three that I knew of were that the Beast could have been a) a werewolf (pretty unlikely), b) a big, mean regular wolf (possible, but only in the most threadbare sense), or c) a dog-wolf hybrid (accounts for more peculiarities, but still kinda iffy). See, while we don't have any physical evidence of the Beast at this point, we do have very detailed, collaborated descriptions, including a tail almost as long as it, 42 teeth, a squarish head, and the ability to shear off limbs in a single bite. Each of those characteristics is right out for basically any kind of wolf, mutant or not, and other than the teeth and tail, for pretty much any dog-wolf hybrid, too. However, the new hypothesis put forth after the investigations by a cryptozoologist (at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I love those guys: they're like parapsychologists of biology, frontier scientists at their best!) and a forensics expert, they concluded that it was probably an especially large Asiatic hyena.

Now, that seems a little anticlimactic, but come on. A hyena in Europe would still be pretty cool. First, no one would know how to describe it, so they'd default to "wolf" due to it's predations and activities (which convergently evolved to have equivalently canid tendencies, even though it's more closely related to felines). They can get up to around 200 lbs. They have all the physical attributes described of the Beast, including the ability to shear bone and attack humans (the second is uncommon, but it happens). Everything seems to check out, even the backstory they pieced together on it.

Anyways, there wasn't a whole lot of point to this post, I just wanted to talk about werewolves for some reason...probably a conversation I had earlier this evening may have something to do with that. Take away the fact that you've probably never heard of this incident, but even so, mysterious, dreadful things have happened and continue to happen all around us, as long as we care to keep our eyes open. It seems like legends and myths have an uncanny habit of becoming real in the most inconvenient ways, so in my opinion it's better to study the little we think we know now and never need it than to simply stand in fear when the unexplained does occur (because it will). Because, if the Beast of Gèvauden teaches us nothing else, it's that the world was (and still is) much darker than we care to realize, and our ability to understand and control it is the arguably greatest myth of all.

Sweet dreams :)

Party Lines

I suppose a perfectly viable question for a reader to be asking right now is 'does he personally believe in the paranormal?' Well...yes and no.

Just as a preamble, I'm doing my best to go into all of this as unbiased as I possibly can. However, I do have two major sources of skew that luckily, courtesy of being from opposite ends of the 'believer-skeptic' spectrum, should just about cancel each other out. 

In the 'believer' corner, growing up I absolutely -devoured- anything I could find on mythology, folklore, the occult and unexplained, you name it...and I actually cleaned out the entirety of the six local libraries and most of the university's collection as well. So, put lightly, my working knowledge of what's supposedly "out there" is pretty freaking set. 

However, in the 'skeptic' corner, I have over seven years of working in some capacity (ranging from research assistant to primary investigator) with actual, honest-to-goodness research in both an academic and grant-funded sub-department setting. This experience has instilled me with a zero tolerance for unprovable hypotheses, appeals to emotion, and other "evidence surrogates" that I may come across...

So if we're talking about what I'd -like- to believe in, then the romantic in me wants to shout out "EVERYTHING!" as loud as it can for everyone to hear. The pragmatist in me, however, tempers that idealism with a healthy dose of "where's the proof?". So overall, I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to different phenomena (psychic, spiritual, etc.), with the notable exception being cryptozoology. When it comes to cryptozoology, I think that there's a much greater chance of proving that there is/was an undiscovered creature than an undiscovered form of consciousness or mental energy. So, if you're asking me if ghosts exist as such, my answer would be "maybe?". If you're asking if I believe in telepathy, I'd respond with "I dunno". It you're inquiring whether the Lindwurm could have ever been a real creature, I'd be much more optimistic. No matter what though, you better have something more solid than a good story to go off of.