Book Review: ShukerNature 1, by Dr. Karl Shuker

ShukerNature Book 1: Antlered Elephants, Locust Dragons, and other Cryptic Blog Beasts

Coachwhip Publications, 2019: 412pp.

Dr. Shuker’s curiosity about all things zoological is boundless.  In this volume, based on entries in his blog of the same name, the British zoologist plumbs the depth and breadth of of the animal world in fact, myth, and art.  Some topics will be familiar to most readers of cryptozoology, but what makes this such an enjoyable cabinet of curiosities is that many of them aren’t.  Shuker wonders about humans as much as beasts: why we put flying elephants in art, why monks put creatures half cat, half snail in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, and why stories of gigantic spiders drinking from whale-oil lamps popped up in cathedrals. We’ve all seen the silly postcards of a claimed half-man, half-alligator taxidermy fake (Karl loves “gaffs,” as these are called), but he’s uniquely identified how many of these were made (three) and how many he can locate (two).  Shuker explores his childhood fascination, Sea Monkeys™, tales of giant bunny rabbits, and Trunko, the bizarre “seagoing polar bear-elephant” that turned out, thanks largely to Shuker’s determined sleuthing, to be another dead whale.  And what was behind the poisonous “fury worm” classified first-hand by Linnaeus himself, but apparently nonexistent? 

Shuker also revisits the famous ape Oliver. While he agrees Oliver was just a chimp, he thinks the animal’s bipedal gait was too natural to be the result of training and there is still a bit of a mystery.  (I knew the man who gave Oliver sanctuary, Wallace Swett of Primarily Primates, and tried to help him out a bit, but I didn’t know Oliver had been cremated.) Concerning primates of another sort, the author explores legends and folklore about miniature humans from several Native American tribes and whether they are linked to Pedro, the mystery mummy from Wyoming, who has vanished despite serious attempts to track him down.   

Shuker closes with a mystery of his own, the dog-size, bounding mammal he met on a dark road in 2014.  He sifts through suspects and concludes this was likely a coypu, a species from South America that escaped captivity in Britain and bred its way to becoming a massively destructive pest and was supposedly wiped out by equally massive government campaigns. It seems to have slipped through the net. In one way or another, Shuker shows us, many creatures have. This is a book lovers of animals, odditites, and cryptids will wade into with gusto and finish anticipating an equally joyful experience when Book 2 appears.