Saturday, May 25, 2013

Flying creatures or flying rumors?

This is a fun roundup of some aerial creatures that have, at some point, been claimed to exist.  Some, like the thunderbird of North America, are widespread, with variations from several Native American tribes and from modern sightings.  Others, like Africa's supernatural (and disgusting) popawaba, seem to be purely artifacts of one culture and one origin.
Ah, but are any of them physical animals? I don't think we'll find a thunderbird: sincere witnesses aside, the odds that such a bird has evaded millions of birders and a society of smartphone-camera-carriers have gotten unrealistic.  (There is a sort of side mystery to this: we have not yet definitively solved the case of Washington's eagle, a bird John James Audubon thought differed in size and other characteristics from the bald eagle.  Perhaps a few examples of what might be a striking subspecies hang on, maybe in Alaska, generally mistaken for ordinary bald eagles except in rare closeup encounters? It's not impossible, and it's certainly fun to think about.)
The giant bat reported by Ivan Sanderson in Africa, and its counterparts from that continent and Indonesia, might indicate a real creature somewhere in the legends and exaggerations.  Some "flying fox" bats have wingspans of nearly two meters. It doesn't seem beyond zoological plausibility to suggest a three-meter-wingspan bat, which, even if harmless, would be startling enough to make an observer jump out of his shoes. (Sanderson, an experienced wildlife observer, though his bat nearly four meters across, but I think some exaggeration is almost inevitable in such a scary encounter.) This business has gotten tangled up with the claims for living pterodactyls, which have turned up in many regions of Africa plus New Guinea, the southwestern United States, South America, and, in one instance, France, but a living pterodactyl IS beyond zoological plausibility. Even though there are witnesses, including the late Scott Norman, a cryptozoologist I greatly respected, I think the flying reptile is a collection of flying mistaken observations of known creatures - or, just maybe, a species of really big bat.  We are still discovering bats, like this really cute one.  Watch the skies...

8 comments:

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

I am confident Sanderson was telling a tall story about his own sighting as he seems to have practically advertised it as such. It reads as an obvious tall story complete with sightings of fruit bats just prior to it. Sanderson was not exactly a dead serious sort of person. I believe it was Sanderson himself who related his sighting to pterosaurs.

I am confident pterosaurs would not be outside the tropics. The reports I have read are mostly poor and some are absurdly fantastical. I hold out some hope for a discovery in the tropical rain forest canopies. I mean a much smaller descendant as the climate now would presumably be cold for them. The idea that, as you put it, their survival is "beyond zoological plausibility" I think involves certain fundamental modern Western worldview presumptions that are over-generalizations. For example, that evolution is a linear progressive process. Eminent paleontologists such as Niles Eldredge, insist that evolution is not a linear progressive process.

Matt Bille said...

Sanderson, in Investigating the Unexplained, considered the reptile similarities and dismissed them. I have no idea if he was throwing out a tall tale, but he stuck pretty close to the bat identity in his book.
Evolution is definitely not a neat linear thing, agreed. But I think any belief in such a progression is thoroughly outmoded: I can't imagine finding an authority in 2013 that deals with it as a linear progression, except when simplifying for a mass audience. And it's Western science that figured all this out :)

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

In that book Sanderson did say he was not suggesting they were pterodactyls. I believe he previously published the account without any such reservations.

It is a dogma that these prehistoric creatures do not exist. It is not science. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is Western science that they either still exist or will re-evolve, as many scientists have and do still believe, including Aristotle and Charles Lyell. Modern science first departed from Lyell's views to adopt progressivism only to relinquish it later. The niches may still exist and the creatures with them.

Matt Bille said...

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - Well, it depends. For example, the lack of hard evidence for sasquatch does not quite prove absence, because there are areas of possible habitat not thoroughly searched. At some point, though, when a habitat is throroughly known, the saying becomes false. The absence of evidence for suriving Wrangel Island mammoths, for example, does prove absence, because humans have explored the whole island. Where that tipping point is is probably different for every species.

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

Actually, mammoths were never demonstrated to be cold adapted. They were assumed to be presuming an Ice Age occurred when they lived in the north. Hans Krause has demonstrated they were not cold adapted in his book, The Mammoth in Ice and Snow? c.1977.

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

It has to be acknowledged that Krause was a creationist. However, his book does not rely on creationism. It is a careful scientific analysis that has not been refuted. I think his website is still up with further arguments and evidence.
http://www.hanskrause.de/indexEnglish.htm

Matt Bille said...

I am not sure who we got on the topic, but I can't find where anyone has tried to rebut Krause, which indicates to me he's not considered significant by any of the scientists who write on mammoths. Certainly I can't find any other scientist in a quick search who supports him. When you have one guy vs. the rest of the scientific world, the one guy can be right, but eventually he wins some converts as more evidence develops. This doesn't seem to have happened.

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

He is disregarded because he is a creationist. I found one professional who mentioned him only to dismiss him without answering him. I am an agnostic and think Krause is probably correct. Mammoths were never demonstrated to be cold adapted in the first place. They were presumed to be on superficial grounds.