Zoology on the Shelves

I have a nice collection of books on zoology and cryptozoology, and it can be fascinating to pull a few old ones out of the shelves every once in a while. Often I forgot I had them.  If this sort of thing interests you, too, you've come to the right blog. Most of these are long out of print but can be tracked down (if expensively) in used form.

 Animal Fakes & Frauds

By Peter Dance (Sampson Low, 1976, 128pp.)

This slender hardcover is a unique book, with countless fascinating illustrations of manufactured beasties. Dance was a conchologist at the British Museum and saw many such creations for himself.  He discusses animals of myth and legend and includes old drawings with the histories of known fakes, such as “Jenny Haniver” mer-creatures, “feejee” mermaids, “dragons” made from skates or rays, fake yeti scalps, and Dr. Albert Koch’s elaborate 114-foot “sea serpent” skeleton.  America’s most enduring fake creatures, the jackalope and the fur-bearing trout, get in here, too. (The other modern American contribution, the “alligator man” does not, and I’m not sure why.)  He learned that Jenny Hanivers were still being made in Mexico for tourists whose fascination with the deep exceeded their ichthyological acumen. Dance also presents little-known fakes like the gruck (head of duck, body of a grouse), faked composite insects, taxidermied mammal crosses, a vole and a mole skeleton intermixed for a “new mouse,” fake fossils, and much more. It’s a wondrous read. 

The Sherpa and the Snowman   

by Charles Robert Stonor (Hollis & Carter, 1955, 209pp)

This is one of those now-quaint books from the days when the Western-centric view was that the rest of the world was exotic and strange (and of course primitive and unenlightened) and no one knew what discoveries might be made. Anthropologist Charles Stonor led a 1953-54 expedition looking for the yeti. He spent months in Nepal talking to witnesses and gathering modern reports, old tales, and myths as well as tromping through the snows looking at tracks and excrement and hoping the see the creature. He failed on the latter count, but came away thinking the yeti existed. What makes this somewhat meandering book enduring is that Stonor documented the cultural context of the yeti before radio, TV, and countless other expeditions and explorers mucked it up. Side Note: this is one of the cases where I prize my old hardcover copy but have no recollection of where I got it.

The Case for the Sea Serpent

Rupert T. Gould (Phillip Allan, 1930: reprint by Coachwhip in 2008, 191pp. The reprint is what I have, but I show here the original cover.)

Writing when many witnesses to the “classic” cases from the late 1800s and early 1900s were still alive, Gould constructed a brief for the sea serpent's existence that might still eclipse any later single book, even Heuvelmans’ massive In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. He introduces the subject and the cases that intrigued him, including chapters on the most important sightings, like those from the ships Daedalus and Valhalla. He includes the famous report of a creature seen in its entirety by the HMS Fly but cautions it depends on one person’s secondhand account of what the Fly’s captain supposedly told him, with nothing to corroborate it. He concluded there were three species at large: a long-necked seal, a reptile descended from (or convergently evolved to resemble) a plesiosaur, and a “gigantic turtle-like creature” which depended heavily on the closeup description of the Australian “moha moha.” He did not suggest any giant eel or eel-like fish or serpent. The moha moha as described is an impossible chimera, but the other two have appeared in some form in every marine cryptozoology book since.