What do you think the connection is between people believing in cryptids and the level of scientific literacy among the general public? Is there any one cryptid that you wish was real? DL: All of them. DP: I'm a paleontologist. I'd love to have Mokele Mbembe and a plesiosaur! This interview has been edited and condensed. Follow Rachel Hartigan Shea on Twitter. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.
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Travel My Hometown In L. Travel The last artists crafting a Thai royal treasure. Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? How viruses shape our world. He returned to New York City with a few dead specimens and not one, but two live komodo dragons. The dragons were put on display at the Bronx Zoo and inspired Merian C.
Cooper to write the classic King Kong. The second Governor of New South Wales, Captain John Hunter, sent a pelt and sketch of a platypus to scientists of the European community in , shortly after one was discovered.
Zoologist, anatomist, ethologist, and physician Robert Knox was convinced it was a hoax and that the pelt was made by an Asian taxidermist. He even convinced botanist and zoologist George Shaw; who at the time believed the platypus could be real, but had his doubts; to take scissors to the pelt to find stitches. Several years later, after many expeditions, the platypus was proven to be real.
Okapi — also known as the forest giraffe, the okapi is a blend of a zebra, donkey, deer, and antelope. Yet, its closest genetic link is giraffes. Because opakis are rarely seen and are extremely hard to find, they were classified as a cryptid for many years.
In , Sir Harry Johnston found an okapi skeleton and skin and sent it to the British museum, where it was classified as a new species. Most scientists today believe Hanno was describing either chimpanzees or baboons from his account. Yet, gorillas remained cryptids until , when Thomas Savage found gorilla bones in Libera. He, alongside Harvard anatomist Jeffries Wyman, wrote a formal description of the new species, calling it Gorilla gorilla. A decade later, anthropologist Paul du Chaillu hunted live gorillas in order to obtain specimens to be analyzed.
One gorilla species, the mountain gorilla Gorilla beringei , stayed a cryptid until , when German captain Robert von Berigne first identified one. Giant squid — Many people still consider the giant squid to be a cryptid. Similar to most cryptids, which tend to live in habitats that are difficult for humans to find, giant squid live in the deep ocean. Even though some people consider the giant squid to be a hoax, the scientific evidence says otherwise.
Its ties to Western Papua New Guinea mythology made the bondegezou a cryptid for decades. Flannery identified the animal as a tree-dwelling marsupial that looked like a tiny man. Shaw was, it seems, basically convinced that the platypus was real, but he also was obviously trying to cover himself in case it turned out he had been hoodwinked.
According to the famous surgeon Robert Knox , Shaw's contemporaries were less charitable, with many writing the thing off as a forgery made by Chinese sailors, who had earlier perpetrated a similar hoax with a supposed mermaid. It wouldn't be until nearly a century after Shaw's time that the platypus's existence was definitively confirmed, and it endures as the ultimate proof that nothing is too ridiculous to be real.
The platypus took a long time to gain zoological acceptance because it was so unlike any other animal and because its Australian habitat was so isolated from the European scientific community, which until the early 20th century had near exclusive domain over which animals were "real" and which were "fake.
Its central African habitat was well-known to European explorers, and it looked very much like some sort of zebra or donkey although, as it happens, its closest relative is actually the giraffe. Surely zoologists couldn't have missed something like that during all their expeditions?
And yet it wasn't until that the okapi was officially described. There are a few reasons for this. Their natural habitat which today is entirely confined to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in incredibly dense forest , and they are generally quiet, solitary animals. No other African animal of even remotely comparable size is quite so completely isolated from human experience, and that's why it evaded detection for so long.
To be fair, the indigenous Africans were definitely aware of its existence before , but even then it appears that their interactions with it were limited, and their knowledge of the okapi came more from hoof marks and tracks than direct contact. Sir Henry Stanley - most famous for asking, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume? It wouldn't be until that the zoologist and imperial official Sir Harry Johnston, with a lot of help from native inhabitants, was able to get his hands on an okapi skull and a couple skins, and it was with this evidence that the creature's existence as at last confirmed.
If you're looking to hide a gigantic, undiscovered beast, then really you need to put it in the ocean and no, a Scottish lake will not work as a substitute.
While some jungles are dense and remote enough to hide something like the okapi, only the ocean depths could hide something of the magnitude of the giant squid. This aquatic monster, along with its even bigger cousin the colossal squid, can grow to well over forty feet long, and yet more than two thousand years elapsed between its first sighting and its confirmation as an actual species.
Reports of the giant squid go all the way back to Aristotle, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder offers a reasonably accurate description of a giant squid in Natural History. In what has to be a first for ancient writers, Pliny actually manages to under estimate the size of the beast, saying it's only about thirty feet long.
The giant squid also might be the inspiration for any number of mythological monsters, including the Kraken of Norse mythology, the Scylla of Greek mythology, and the Lusca of Caribbean folklore.
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