
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
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Cryptozoology is the investigation of animals not yet recognized by science, but whose existence is hinted at by eye witness accounts, photos, or traces. I provided a major review of Australian cryptozoology in my book. This blog aims to continue reporting on that research.
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
5M ago
Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science by Jeff Meldrum (2007), Forge Trade, 320 pp, paperback and Kindle.
Dr Jeff Meldrum is Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho University. He has extensively studied the adaptations of the feet of African primates with their implications in the evolution of human bipedalism, and was the senior editor of the scientific book, From Biped to Strider: the emergence of modern human walking, running, and resource transport. In short, he is an expert on human, monkey and ape feet and gaits, and the sort of footprints they ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
6M ago
When Roger Met Patty by William Munns (2014), Createspace Independent Publishing, Platform, 510 pp, paperback and Kindle.
In October 1967 Roger Patterson rode into the area of Bluff Creek, California hoping to film a bigfoot. And he did! This was just nine years after the whole concept of bigfoot had been publicised by the appearance of some remarkable footprints at Bluff Creek, and by John Green's discussions on the sasquatch in Canada. What incredible good fortune! And nothing like this has filmed since. Yes, especially since the advent of digital photography and ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
2y ago
Who knows what mysterious creatures might walk out of the jungles of southeast Asia? Rumours abound of strange bipedal apes sequestered in those rainforests. Many US troops saw them in Vietnam and called them "rock apes". (See also here.) But it is on the Malay peninsula that things get really weird.
A year and a half ago I reported on Harold Stephens' expedition in search of the orang dalam, and his discovery of humanoid footprints consistent with something 8 feet or 2.4 metres in height. The orang dalam would thus appear to be similar to the North Am ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
2y ago
Readers will no doubt be familiar with the name of Ivan T. Sanderson who, along with Bernard Heuvelmans, was one of the founders of cryptozoology. All sorts of other Fortean phenomena captured his imagination, if not always his critical faculties, with the result that he founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU), with its journal, Pursuit. Now, in my old age, I am going through my own copies of this journal, and thus happened to come across an article inspired by a clipping from a Japanese newspaper. So, as this blog seeks to rescue stories which ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
3y ago
Personally, I consider sea serpents more credible than lake monsters. It's the logistics of it all. The sea is vast, and we move across it with noisy vessels along narrow sea lanes. Anything could be there. Lakes are small, and tend to be surrounded by people. What lives there ought to be seen a lot more often. Yet, when I was researching the digitalised files of Australian newspapers for Australian and foreign sea serpents, I noticed something peculiar: up to the Second World War, it was respectable to see and report sea serpents, often uncritically. However, once t ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
3y ago
The jungle clad mountains and valleys of New Guinea, just north of Australia, have turned it into a vast patchwork of "ecological islands" with new, rare, species just waiting to be discovered. By following up clues left by the natives, one of our more prominent zoologists, Dr. Tim Flannery managed to locate two new species of tree kangaroo concealed in localised pockets. The possibility that the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, believed to be extinct in Australia, may still exist in the Indonesian half of the island, is something I have discussed in this blog (here an ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
3y ago
When researching reports of mystery animals in Australia, the ones which give me the most headaches are not alien big cats (which shouldn't be here), nor the bigfoot-like yowie (which definitely shouldn't be here!), No, they are the ones describing thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, on the mainland. The reason is, firstly, they were never recorded there in historic times (at least, not in the areas where they are now being reported) and, secondly, it is just so easy to mistake a mundane animal for a thylacine. The most disconcerting thing is, there still remain a resid ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
3y ago
Let's be realistic: the idea of a big hairy ape stomping around North America, all unnoticed by science, is weird. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is definitely counter-intuitive. Even weirder still is the idea of monsters, which don't breathe air, lurking in our lochs and lakes. But there is nothing weird about pygmy elephants wandering the trackless depths of the African jungle. The jungle is big enough to hold them all. The pygmy elephant was described back in 1906, and named Loxodonta pumilio, and since then they have been repeatedly sighted in the wild, and liv ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
4y ago
I was a foundation member of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC) in 1982, even contributing to its peer reviewed journal, Cryptozoology, and continued until it folded in 1998. Recently, I was going through the old Newsletters, and found an article I remember well: of a close encounter with Ogopogo which, I am sure you are aware, is the monster of Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Reading it again, I realised that it had never been published elsewhere. As you are unlikely to have any copies of the ISC Newsletter, I shall share it with you. The auth ..read more
Malcolm's Musings : Cryptozoology
4y ago
The yowie, for those who are unaware, is the Australian version of the North American bigfoot. Of course, it shouldn't exist, because Australia is marsupial country, and no non-flying, non-swimming placental mammal larger than a rat has ever arrived here without human help. I didn't believe in it, until the evidence became too strong to ignore. In their definitive work on the subject, The Yowie, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper catalogue sightings and encounters from the south of the continent all the way up to north Queensland. Newspapers have not been as active in reporting s ..read more