What is a "cryptid," anyway?

"Cryptid" is a word coined by cryptozoologists (no surprise). It refers to any animal which is reported but not confirmed, including never-caught species and presumed-extinct ones. Michael Woodley here examines the use and misuse of the term. He rejects Dr. Charles Paxton's advice, which is that theorizing about cryptids is pointless, and we should use reports, not hypothesized creatures, as the basics for theorizing.
COMMENT: I see Charles' point. For example, cryptozoologists are not really studying a "cryptid" called sasquatch, they are studying reports of large unclassified primate. Sometimes, there is something to be said for focusing the discussion with at least a general outline of a "cryptid," but it's unscientific to name a solution, to the exclusion of other solutions, when there is no animal in hand.
This reminded me of how the late Grover Krantz aimed to spark scientific discussion when he published a paper naming a specific presumed-extinct species, Gigantopithecus blacki, as the source of sasquatch reports. The problem is that he named it based on footprints when we have only teeth and jawbones of Gigantopithecus and no one can say what the feet looked like. Almost no one in the anthropological community accepted such a reach, and it did not do anything to burnish the reputations of cryptozoology in the "mainstream" scientific world, nor the reputation of Krantz (who was a genuine expert with well-respected work in human evolution.) Still, Krantz was never sorry he did it: he thought he achieved his primary objective.

Origin of the Chupacabra

I never thought the chupacabra (that is, the spiny-backed, blood-sucking animal, as opposed to the oddball canids tarred with the same name) was a real animal. It turned up in the 1990s, on an island of all places (Puerto Rico), and real creatures just don't pop out of the ground. There wasn't even any folklore about them before that. Ben Radford here traces the idea of the "goatsucker" to the creature in the movie Species. I'm not sure this is original with Ben, as I seem to recall some cryptozoologists floating it a year or two back, but I do think he's right here.
It was cryptozoologist Loren Coleman who mused that the chupacabra was "cross-cultural, sort of like Jennifer Lopez." This raises the interesting idea of a spiny-backed monster judging American Idol. I'd watch.

A Skeptic Visits the Cryptozoology Museum

An enjoyable visit to Loren Coleman's museum by self-proclaimed skeptics who nevertheless think it was a great experience, recommend it to everyone, and even pitch for donations. Um... an important note. That is NOT a life-size replica of a yeti, it's a sasquatch. VERY few even among the cryptozoology community think sasquatch and yeti reports concern the same animal. Skeptics should be more careful about terminology.

Meet the Science Cheerleaders

Is "science cheerleader" a contradiction in terms? Nope. On this site, NBA and NFL cheerleaders are cheering for science policy, science education, and greater involvement in science by students and adult citizens alike. And yes, there are videos of attractive women cheering for science, for those who like that sort of thing. GO TEAM!

The gorilla that walks like a man

All gorillas can walk bipedally a little if they need to. But in England's Kent Zoo, a male named Ambam apparently decided this bipedal thing was really cool. He has become a very popular exhibit because a human-like walk has become normal for him. With their short legs, gorillas are not going to do any long-distance running, but it's speculated that Ambam liked having the vantage point to see things before his fellow gorillas - a keeper approaching with food for example.

A one-fingered dinosaur?

Yep. A very small dino from China has stubby little arms (stubbier and littler, in proportion, than T. rex arms) with a single finger on each hand. It may have dug up terminite mounds with its long digits. Linhenykus monodactylus died out with the rest of the dinos at the end of the Cretaceous period - unless it died of embarassment amid the laughter of other dinosaurs first.
COMMENT: Seriously, the thing looks ridiculous. The platypus has more dignity.

New jelly species: the "Pink Meanie?"

The jellies, or sea jellies (or jellyfish, a term marine biologists have tried to banish without success) include an astonishing variety of forms, from animals that can hardly be seen at all to species three meters across. The new species found off Florida, Drymonema larsoni, is so different from its nearest kin that a new family had to be created. (Different due to "allometric growth of the bell margin distal of the rhopalia, an annular zone of tentacles on the subumbrella, and ontogenetic loss of gastric filaments," if you want to know.) It was nicknamed the "Pink Meanie" for its unusual diet: other jellyfish. And this species is huge, up to a meter across. Not a creature to mess with.

Puzzle: Hybrid minke whale

Sometimes closely related species (and even some non-closely related ones) hybridize successfully. But here's a puzzle: hybridization of species from opposite ends of the Earth. How does a northern minke whale even meet an Antarctic type? The two both venture to equatorial waters, but six months apart (their respective winter seasons). So someone's migration time was drastically off. We don;t know why. This article also asks whether the hybrid found in 2007 was a fluke (get it?) or part of a trend. Again: we don't know.

NASA Remembers

Tomorrow is NASA's Day of Remembrance, when the astronauts of Columbia, Challenger, And Apollo 1 are honored.

I wrote this one year after Columbia:


Columbia: Per Ardua ad Astra

One year ago….

Waking on a clear weekend morning here in Colorado, casually logging on to check my Email, seeing the AOL banner, "NASA Loses Contact With Columbia." Turning on CNN. Watching more CNN. Explaining it to my daughter, then 11. Wondering how it had happened, what it would mean.
A year later, the technical answers are out. The human answers, as always, are not simple. They drift out in fragments over the course of history, debated, challenged, finally settling but never quite settled.
Worth it? Of course it was not, in any logical sense, worth losing seven people for a science mission whose returns would not have been of great importance. Death, as Ulysses S. Grant once said of war, "is cruelty and you cannot refine it." Nor can you romanticize it. Nor, when there gross errors in judgment made, can you excuse it.
I submit, however, that any calculation about the worthiness or foolishness of the voyage is incomplete, nay, unfair, unless it takes into account the desires and motivations of the voyagers. The seven people on Columbia did not just accept the risk of venturing, in a craft built by fallible humans, into the most hostile realm we know. They sought the risk. They spent years training, competing, and sometimes demanding the right to take the risk. Whatever judgments we might make on the costs vs. the returns of their efforts as explorers, the explorers themselves had no doubts. Every one of them was a bright, accomplished, highly educated human being. Not one was foolish enough to think there was no risk, or low risk. Not one hesitated. Indeed, they did everything they possibly could to qualify themselves to stand out among their peers and earn the chance to risk their lives in a cause they deemed worthy.
By that standard alone, they were the best our species had to offer. They were sent forth into the last unknown ocean, explorers in an age when most people in their society place high value on safety, comfort, and surety.

Godspeed, Columbia.

Matt Bille
OPINIONS IN ALL POSTS ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR

Follow the Whale

At this link from Oregon State University, you can follow the path of Flex, a radio-tagged Pacific gray whale. What is interesting about Flex is that he's following a migration route never before documented for his species. What is he up to in the northernmost reaches of the Pacific?

Newest wild cat is actually TWO wild cats

Until 2007, the beautiful clouded leopard was believed to consist of one species (Neofelis nebulosa). In that year, scientists showed the species living on Borneo and Sumatra was distinct, and it received a new scientific name (Neofelis diardi). It is so little known the first video was released only in 2010. Now the species needs to be split again, as further study has shown the cat known as the "Sunda clouded leopard," is two cats. The Sumatran and Bornean populations, it turns out, are also distinct. The more we learn, the more we learn there is to know...

Alien hand syndrome (for real)

Alien hand syndrome sounds like bad fiction, but it's difficult reality for a New Jersey woman whose left and right hands often act in opposition to each other, without her conscious intent. Her left hand has even punched her. It seems her brain hemispheres are not operating together. They are competing for dominance.

Cold fusion returns?

Italian researchers claim they have gone beyond the original (and much criticized) experiments in cold fusion (often called low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR). They not only have produced cold fusion, but have a marketable product that produces 31 times the energy fed into it.
They made the claim at a press conference after their paper was rejected by a journal and their patent was rejected by the Italian government. The chief complaint is that they can't explain the mechanism by which the LENR are produced. Do they really have something, or is this another dead end?
COMMENT: I hope they have something real, but I'm waiting for an independent verdict.

Giant new crayfish from Tennessee

Important new species are everywhere. That's something I've harped on in this blog since the beginning. Now a really surprising one has literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee. (Someone else has already used that line, but I don't care.) Hiding in freshwater stream beds is a crayfish twice the size of known species. That's still only 12.5 cm long, but it's pretty amazing no one has ever noticed a crayfish that should stand out from its fellow appetizers. Never stop looking!

Lake of Mystery

A note on Antarctica's huge, deeply buried Lake Vostok. Russian researchers are drilling (it's summer down there) the first borehole to sample the lake's waters. They expect to find new species -not, unfortunately, the dinosaurs of popular imagination, but a new ecosystem on the one-celled level. It's potentially exciting and important stuff.

Microspace News: Nanosail-D deploys!

The little solar sail that could has not only come back from its presumed demise, but has deployed its 100-square-foot sail. It's the first solar sail deployed in LEO (there have been failures, and Japan's IKAROS is testing one out on its trip to Venus.) It's a step forward for a promising technology and for the use of tiny satellites to carry out important testing.

The animals we've lost

A photo essay on ten animals believed lost in the last decade: two amphibians, three mammals, and five birds. Farewell to the Pyrenean ibex (subject of an attempted cloning procedure), the colorful Spix's macaw, Holdridge's toad, and too many more.

New Zealand's butterfly man

Collecting butterflies is a hobby for some - an obsession for others. This charming article tells the story of a man who has made over 3,000 collecting trips, 20 of them to other nations, and netted over 200 new species.

Microsat News: NanoSail-D suddenly turns up

NanoSail-D, a Cubesat-based nanosatellite carrying a solar sail experiment, was written off after it failed to eject from NASA's FASTSAT after launch last month. Yesterday, it suddenly ejected. Engineers are unsure of what happened here, but are now hoping the experiment will "wake" and start sending data. Help is being sought from the global amateur radio community in the search for signals.
The NASA release says:
"The NanoSail-D science team is hopeful the nanosatellite is healthy and can complete its solar sail mission. After ejection, a timer within NanoSail-D begins a three-day countdown as the satellite orbits the Earth. Once the timer reaches zero, four booms will quickly deploy and the NanoSail-D sail will start to unfold to a 100-square-foot polymer sail. Within five seconds the sail fully unfurls."

COMMENT: Solar sail experiments are on a very unlucky streak. Fingers crossed.

Microspace News: Kedr microsat celebrates Gagarin

This year is the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. One of the first events in the celebration of this half-century of achievement is the launch of the 30-kg microsat Kedr. Named for Yuri Gagarin's call sign, the microsat will go up on the next Progress craft to the International Space Station. A cosmonaut will hand-launch it from there. It will broadcast greetings in 15 languages, using the ham frequency of 145.95 MHz.