ShukerNature (Book 3): Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, Jungle Walruses, and Other Belated Blog Beasts
Dr. Karl Shuker
Coachwhip Publications, 2023, 404 pp.
In this collection of essays on zoological, cryptozoological, and animal folklore topics, Dr. Shuker goes back to some topics previously visited in his ShukerNature blog and adds information he’s developed or received since they were first posted. The results are invariably interesting.
For example, it turns out Africa’s “Nandi bear,” a classic
cryptid sometimes explained as large hyena, is a more complex and interesting
matter than I knew. Shuker adds more recent accounts of something like this
dangerous predator, from widely separated locations, and examines their
connection to an ill-defined hyena variant colloquially called the “giant
forest hyena.” While the subject remains surrounded by controversy and
confusion, Shuker reports famed anthropologist and museum director Louis S. B.
Leakey sent a carcass and color photographs to the British Museum, where it
seems to have gone uncatalogued.
Shuker spends some time on Loch Ness looking at the fallout
from the “Surgeon’s Photograph.” It bothers some cryptozoologists that
Christian Spurling’s 1992 confession to faking the photograph was accepted
uncritically, despite inconsistencies and the lack of any supporting
evidence. While a hoax is (nearly)
always more likely than a huge monster, and Shuker wears on a bit repetitiously
about the topic, it's worth reflecting on. I’ve read a lot about the case
and didn’t know an altered version, without the hump or crown at the top of the
head, had been published: this led to something that’s always bothered me, a
reference by the late Roy Chapman Andrews to the photo’s showing a killer
whale fin, which it certainly does not.
Other posts touch on the famed Crystal Palace dinosaur
statues, Albert Koch’s fake monstrous prehistoric skeletons, puzzling rock art,
the African-Indian elephant hybrid Motty, an embarrassingly misidentified
“giant flea,” an intriguing collection of giant lizard reports from New Guinea,
and the discovery that manta ray markings can be much more striking and varied
than scientists used to think.
There are many sources, illustrations, and a good
bibliography to round out the book. This is a thoroughly entertaining
collection.
Matt Bille is a science writer, novelist, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.
