Is this what Lerius's big white Brazilian lizard looked like? (modified from an iguana photograph © Carlos Andrés Reyes/Wikipedia – CC BY 2.0 licence) One of the earliest mystery beast reports emanating from the Americas came from the pen of French pastor and explorer Jean Lerius (aka Jean de Lery), writing about the notable encounter in his very informative, highly influential book History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America (1578), which formally documented a wide range of South American animals for the first time by a European. He was in the company of Admiral Nico ..read more

  Front cover of the current issue (#446, dated July 2024) of the British monthly magazine Fortean Times, featuring yours truly as its cover star! (© David Sutton/Etienne Gilfillan/Fortean Times/Diamond Publishing Limited – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only) One of ShukerNature's several sister blogs and now in its fifth year of existence, my film review blog Shuker In MovieLand hits the big time! A selection of its Fortean (and especially monster)-themed creature feature reviews has been compiled by me in the form of a monstr ..read more

    Publicity poster for Carnifex, showing the characters gazing up in awe at some formidable claw marks left upon a  tree trunk by a large unknown animal of seemingly arboreal ability (© Sean Lahiff/Dancing Road Productions/Arclight Films/Universal Pictures Content Group – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only) Thanks to longstanding Australian FB friend and crypto-enthusiast Tim Morris kindly making it available to me - thanks Tim! – my movie watch on 26 October 2023 was the fairly recent Australian cryptozoology-theme ..read more

  Daniell's quagga (left) and Ward's zebra (right) (public domain) Following on from my previous ShukerNature article concerning the beautiful but long-forgotten isabella quagga (click here to access it), here are another two eyecatching but exceedingly obscure striped curiosities of the equine kind, retrieved from the annals of zoological history.   DANIELL'S QUAGGA – THE MOST EXTREME QUAGGA OF ALL? Yes indeed, this particular quagga specimen is so extreme that it makes even the isabella quagga seem positively commonplace by comparison! The specimen in question is a truly remarkable ..read more

  A beautiful vintage (1800s) full-colour engraving of the unique isabella quagga (public domain) The quagga Equus quagga quagga is nowadays famous for two very different reasons. Firstly: it is – or was – the only semi-striped form of zebra, its striping being confined to its foreparts. Secondly: although once common in its South African veldt habitat, it was hunted into extinction there during the second half of the 19th Century, with the very last captive specimen's death in Amsterdam Zoo on 12 August 1883 marking the tragic disappearance of this highly distinctive equid from the face ..read more

  Hoop snake in hot pursuit! (© Richard Svensson) Following on from my previous ShukerNature blog article chronicling what may well be North America's most familiar folkloric Fierce Critter of any kind, the truly monstrous hodag (click here to access my article), I am now documenting the most (in)famous Fierce Critters of the serpentine kind – namely, the horn snake and the hoop snake. I must not forget, in these random sketches, my old friend and neighbour, Uncle Davy Lane...Nothing could move him out of a slow, horse-mill gait but snakes, of which "creeturs he was monstrous 'fraid." The ..read more

  Fibre-glass hodag statue in front of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce (© Gourami Watcher/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence) Back in the pioneering days of North America, when European settlers were attempting to tame the vast wildernesses full of unfamiliar creatures in what to them was the new and very strange, even somewhat frightening continent of North America, rural workers such as lumberjacks and loggers would often spend appreciable periods of time away from their families and homesteads. Consequently, for company and to keep safe, they would bond together by gathering aro ..read more

  The snake cat photograph (© unknown to me, despite in-depth searches made by me online; AI-generated, via person(s) unknown to me – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only) During early March 2023, I noticed a certain, very eyecatching photograph doing the rounds on social media and inciting all manner of speculation as to the creature that it portrayed. As seen above, it is a close-up head-and-shoulders image of a very spectacular cat, ornately adorned with vivid black and yellow markings. According to claims accompanying this ph ..read more

  Deep within the green secluded forest kingdom of Ruwenzori (© Diego Tirira/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence) Ruwenzori (aka Rwenzori and Rwenjura) constitutes an East African mountain range at the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and Uganda. Below their peaks' snowy caps and alpine meadows, these mountains are covered in lush tropical rainforests and are rightly deemed to be a biodiversity hotspot, with many regions still only sparsely explored scientifically. Not surprisingly, therefore, some interesting potential cryptids have been reported from Ruwenzor ..read more

  My very own giant dragonfly, chanced upon in a charity shop recently and now residing in my study (© Dr Karl Shuker) This ShukerNature blog article of mine documents an entomological enigma of the cryptozoological kind that has long fascinated, me but which I've never previously blogged about. Namely, the extraordinary possibility that extra-large dragonflies, veritable giants in some cases, exist unrecognised by science in our modern-day world. Consequently, I have gathered here an exclusive selection of such reports for your perusal. First of all, however, I'd like to set the scene fo ..read more