Tigers of Korea and Sumatra

Wandering through the world of the tiger, the most magnificent cat that ever lived....

The tiger is believed extinct on the Korean peninsula, although there are occasional sighting reports.  Now Korean scientists, while speaking of their nation's tiger in the past tense, report they have identified its proper classification and affiliation. Studies from tiger remains up to a century old indicate the Korean specimens were of the same subspecies as the Amur tiger, which is still hanging on (about 400 survive in the wild)  in eastern Russia.  Professor Lee Hang takes heart in this: "The fact that the Amur tiger and the Korean tiger are of the same bloodline means the Korean tiger is still alive."
There was an article linked to on FaceBook recently saying a Javan tiger had been caught in a camera trap, but I can't locate it now, and it was likely old or incorrect: that would have been worldwide news, as the Javan tiger is widely considered to have joined the Bali and Caspian tigers in the darkness of extinction in the 20th century. The Sumatran tiger isn't doing much better.  it exists, but under extremely precarious conditions. So, as I wrote a few days ago, the global tiger population is up a bit, with some bright spots for subspecies like the Bengal tiger, but other populations (the aforementioned Amur, for example, and the South China tiger as well as the Sumatran) are still in deep trouble.
Everyone says William Blake's poem about the tiger was really about the Industrial Revolution or something, and Blake was a mystic who often melded themes, but has there ever been a better description? "Tiger, tiger burning bright / in the forests of the night / what immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry?" 

This was the Caspian tiger, photographed on exhibit in Berlin in 1899.

Major Ferret Find!

The black-footed ferret was declared extinct at least twice before being rediscovered by a mixed-breed dog named Shep who dropped one on the porch of his house in Wyoming.  Conservation biologists have put enormous effort into breeding them in captivity (there's a colony at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo here in my hometown of Colorado Springs) and releasing them into the wild.  A biologist from Columbus, Ohio has found something  startling and potentially very important: a new wild population.  Over fifty miles from any relocation site, Mike Gutzmer found three ferrets on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  While the status of the ferrets is still being double-checked, the chance of introducing new genes into the population - all known ferrets are descended from 18 animals taken into captivity in a last-ditch effort to save the species - is exciting biologists. A "population bottleneck" is never a healthy thing, since the individuals bred from a small group will likely share some genetic weaknesses.  Gutzmer may have made a giant step toward the permanent survival of the little black-masked outlaw of the prairies.

R.I.P., Ivan Mackerle

Anyone outside cryptozoology will likely be unfamiliar with this name.  Ivan was a cryptozoologist, certainly the most eminent in the Czech Republic, but anyone can be "a cryptozoologist." What mattered, and why Macklerle mattered even though he never found a new species, is that he put his life where his mouth was.  Over four decades, he traveled, paying out of his own pocket, to New Guinea, Australia, Brazil, Madagascar, and other far-flung places.  He wanted to see everything for himself, look with his own eyes, follow up reports in person. Science depends on such people, be they amateur or Ph.D.  Read Karl Shuker's tribute here.

Cryptozoology is not Parapsychology

There's always been a little disturbance in the force known as cryptozoology, one that gives the field some of its difficulties in achieving scientific credibility.  Some zoologists look askance at the whole endeavour because of the perceived focus on animals such as sasquatch which are perceived as highly unlikely, if not absurd.  I have no problems here: as long as the chance of finding an animal is not zero, people can look without making the field scientifically invalid.  In science, most long shots don't pay off, but some do.  The key is whether searching is being done in a scientific manner, proceeding from the evidence to gather more evidence and meeting Popper's classic criteria of the falsifiable hypothesis.  (There can be disagreement on how much negative evidence, or how strong a logical case, is needed to falsify a given hypothesis, but the point is that a hypothesis like "There is a large unknown primate in North America" is perfectly scientific.  The means to search every possible chunk of forest habitat definitively are not available, but the reasoning is fine.)

Then we get into another problem: the allegedly paranormal/psychic/parapsychological nature proposed for some cases.  I don't mean to pick on Nick Redfern, a very dedicated researcher, and a most enjoyable and often thought-provoking writer, but having just read his book Monster Diary, he is the example that comes to mind when thinking of people who class things that look like animals under cryptozoology, even if they are clearly not physical animals.  I'm well aware that sane and sober people have reported apparitions, and I have no particular insight into what mix of causes is behind that phenomenon.  It's not my field.  But here's the part where I and Nick depart ways.  He and other other like-thinking investigators argue that apparitions of animals are part of cryptozoolgy, and, as Nick puts it in his book, cryptozoologists in some cases will go on chasing sightings without results "unless the field of cryptozoology wakes up and and realizes that there needs to be a new approach to the subject."

I would flip that around.  My position is that, if there is no physical animal, or no reasonable chance of one, the case no longer pertains to cryptozoology or any kind of zoology.  If someone believes they saw a sabretooth tiger that disappeared into thin air, for example (and this happened, as Nick recounts) , then the fact that the apparition was in the form of an animal doesn't put the event under the heading of cryptozoology. It can be parapsychology or any other field one may think appropriate, but if it's not zoology, it's not cryptozoology.  People who thing sasquatch is so elusive because it's not a material creature are welcome to hold that opinion, but they shouldn't call that topic part of cryptozoology.  It's part of the whole business of apparitions and spirits and the paranormal. It also, critically, is not a falsifiable hypothesis (you can never prove such a belief to be wrong) and therefore is not part of the physical sciences.  If a definitive search (in the cases where it's possible) fails to find an animal, then it's because the animal either did not exist in the area, has gone extinct, or has migrated elsewhere.  

An animal is by definition a physical thing of flesh and blood. It's there or it's not.  I don't dismiss the possibility of a nonmaterial reality: as a Christian, I believe strongly that the material universe is not all that exists.  But an apparition is not an animal, any more than it can be a human being.  It may be reported sincerely to look like one, or even act or sound like one, but that's not the same thing.  

I wrote in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence that I was dismayed that a very good book by Healy and Cropper on Australian mystery animals spent a chapter on "zooform phenomena" after spending the rest of the book scientifically discussing unknown creatures. I feared that zoologists would dismiss the whole book because of this direction.  I don't know how to take a survey on this, but I have no doubt I was right, and still am.  Cryptozoology will never get the respect of zoology if paranormal entities are part of it. 

And, if cryptozoology is the search for hidden ANIMALS, then they should not be.  The experiences of people who see a big cat seemingly dive into the ground and vanish, or a small herd of camels appearing where none can be, are not beneath our notice. They are simply part of another field of study.

Death Star remains fiction: What about NASA?

The White House has responded to a petition by declaring it will not put a Death Star into the budget anytime soon.  Paul Shawcross wrote that the government is not into blowing up planets and can't find room for the $850,000,000,000,000,000 necessary.  Shawcross went on to point out there are some really interesting space hardware items already out there, including the ISS and the Mars rovers. "Even though the United States doesn't have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we've got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we're building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun. We are discovering hundreds of new planets in other star systems and building a much more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that will see back to the early days of the universe."
Shawcross doesn't mention a lot of htings, though. Like the U.S. being dependent on Russia for human access to space for the next few years. Like the Administration's goal of eventually (long after it has left office) landing on an asteroid being rejected by nearly everyone in the space and science communities as a bizarre detour from an intelligent program to explore the Moon and Mars.  Like the savage budget cutting of the planetary sciences program: the spacecraft now up there or now under contruction are essentially all there is.  The Administration and Congress have determined that NASA's one half of one percent of hte Federal budget is some kind of indulgence rather than a future-oriented driver of technical and scientific progress with very real economic benefits.  Darth Vader would find this lack of faith disturbing. 

Giving up on China's Wildman?

The buzz about a "wildman" (presumed to be an unknown upright primate) in the undeveloped regions of China has  periodically made it into the popular, and even the sceintific, press, as hairs or body parts not immediately identified have been found and eyewitness reports collected.  Now, though, an anthropologist who has followed the topic for half a century reports "...a Chinese Wildman of biological significance still has not been shown to exist, and simply may not exist." All the biological samples in Bejing anthropologist

Zhou Guoxing's collection have turned out to be from known creatures, and he classes the most detailed eyewitness accounts as fabrications.  His disappointment is evident - he was once an enthusiastic field investogator of Wildman tales - but this is where the evidence has led him. 
COMMENT: Darn.  There were times when this case looked really intriguing.

A better look at "hobbits"

Just over a meter tall, the "hobbits" of Flores weren't very impressive physically. They had longer arms than legs, and their sloping foreheads and chinlessness made them look less like us than we might picture.  However, they were still, as further confirmed by new fossils, genuine humans, as in a species in the genus Homo.  While their brains were the size of, or at least not much larger than, those of chimpanzees, those brains were developed enough to allow them stone tools and the use of fire.  (Intelligence is correlated with brain size and brain-to-body-size ratio, but isn't directly equivalent - the structure of the brain matters more.)   The tool-making is interesting, because their wrists and hands were more "primitive" (essentially, more apelike) than ours, but they managed. It seems too much to ask of "hobbits" that they should have oversized feet, but they actually did.  So where did H. floresiensis come from? The popular theory is that they were an "island dwarfed" population of Homo erectus, although H. erectus fossils show some features more advanced. DNA studies on the bones haven't been done yet, and we still have only one complete cranium, so there's a lot more to learn. 

The first great predatory reptile

What replaced the fearsome Dunkleosteus terrelli as top predator of the seas? The sharks survived the Permian extinction, but the large marine reptiles arose much more quickly than we previously thought. This 8-meter monster appeared at least 244 million years ago. It was shaped something like an oversized four-flippered dolphin, but the head is unmistakeably that of an apex predator.  Thalattoarchon saurophagis ("lizard-eating ruler of the sea") was the first of the icthyosaurs, which would go on to produce giants three times this length - or more. 

Giant Squid - coming on Discovery Channel!

Not many years ago, Richard Ellis, writing on the subject of giant squid being taken for "sea serpents," notes one problem was a lack of comparative observations: "No one has ever seen a healthy giant squid doing anything." While we now have video of a hooked squid and various other observations, what we still don't have is video of Architeuthis hunting in its natural habitat.  Well, now we do, and it's coming to Discovery Channel on January 27.  The squid was about three meters long and was videotaped at a depth of 640 meters.  (It would be "more giant" than 3m, but it was missing its two long tentacles, presumably bitten off by a whale or shark.)  A Japanese expedition got the footage by using a custom-designed camera that operated on a wavelength of light that squid can't see. 
Here's the question we still don't have the answer to: how giant does the giant squid get? Confirmed lengths  of 18-20 meters are probably not the uppermost end of the scale. There are several 25-30m claims, and one of nearly 55m (OK, I'm writing that one off.)  But the appellation "giant" still fits in any case.

Tune in!

Tigers: A little Good News

Tigers, as a whole, have taken it hard fro m humanity for the last two centuries. The Javan tiger is extinct; the Sumatran and South China tigers are on the edge; continued poaching and habitat destruction have ground down the remaining populations.  So it's very nice to see this article. While the The Wildlife Conservation Society estimates there are only 3,200 tigers in the wild, that's actually an uptick.  Years of all-out effort by the WCS, the government of India, and other conservation organizations have resulted in a surplus (from a total population of 600 or so) of tigers in the region containing the Nagarahole and Bandipur National Parks. Efforts in China, Russia, and Thailand are making progress, including rising or at least stable tiger populations thanks to increased arrests and stiffer punishments of poachers. 
I was pessimistic in my 1995 book Rumors of Existence, quoting the IUCN's Peter Jackson (not the filmmaker) as saying, “It is my belief that the end of the tiger is in sight, probably within ten years."  The situation is still critical, especially for the Sumatran subspecies (or species, depending on which authority one references), but we've shown that we can do some good for tigers in the wild.  We need to keep it up.

How big was the biggest bear?

How big do bears get - and how big did they use to get?

The 500-kg range seems about the upper limit for modern brown bears, with polars getting a little bigger.  There are always stories of bigger ones (the best attested being a polar bear who weighed roughly a metric ton) and we have, of course, the prehistoric giants. My favorite, the short-faced bear, was longer and taller than any modern bear, although there is disagreement over whether he was heavier. Recent fossils from S. America, though, indicate he had still bigger relatives, bears that would make a huge modern Kodiak poop in his fur.  This researcher has collected a lot of the accounts of outsized modern Kodiaks and polars.  It's not all scientific data - skins are stretched,  weights get exaggerated, and so on - but it's pretty darned eye-popping. 
He leaves out Samson. Samson was a bear trapped alive by John (not James) "Grizzly" Adams and hauled to antebellum New York to be exhibited.  He made a sensation.  He was the biggest bear Adams had ever seen in many years of hunting grizzlies, and when put on a hay scale he weighed 1,503 lbs.  (It's possible he had gained some "cage fat" by this point, but still, Adams' description of him as a "moving mountain" seems justified.  I've never read what happened to his remains. 

Mapping Bigfoot

How do you map a creature not proven to exist? It's not easy. It inevitably involves subjective judgments about which sightings, footprints, etc. are considered credible enough to include. 
But this fellow has put an enormous amount of effort into the attempt, and I salute him for that. The sightings he includes reflect human population in many areas, notably Florida and the Northeast.  The Pacific Northwest has, as you'd expect, a cluster of sightings that exceeds what you'd see if sightings were strictly a reflection of human population density or numbers. 
This map shows one of the problems with Bigfoot in general. It is impossible - not unlikely, impossible - that a large unknown mammal exists in nearly every US state and Canadian province.  A range covering most of North America, including the most populous areas, argues against the chance such a species exists at all: the odds of it going undiscovered are too great.
IF Bigfoot turns out to be real, I'd expect a cluster of up to a few hundred in the Northwest, possibly with some small relict populations as geographical outliers, reflecting a wider distribution thousands of years ago.  Despite the number of sightings and the dedicated efforts of searchers, I'd be stunned if anyone ever turned up solid proof of such an animal in the Northeastern or Southeastern US. 

Humans, Be Not Proud: Last Vietnamese rhino extinct

One of the startling large-mammal discoveries of the recent years was the finding that the critically endangered Javan rhinocerous, long presumed extinct on the Asian mainland, survived in Vietnam. 
Well, not anymore.
The Vietnamese subspecies of the Javan rhino was down to one animal in  Cat Tien National Park in 2009. Someone should have made the decision to take it into captivity: in April 2010, it was shot by a poacher and its horn stolen.
There are maybe three dozen Javan rhinos left in Indonesia.
Sometimes I want to resign from my species.

Physics: reaching impossible temperatures

It's sometimes said that the politics of the extreme right and the extreme left merge, creating a circle rather than a continuum.  Could the same be true of temperatures?
Well, no. When all atomic motion is stopped, absolute zero (0 Kelvin) is reached, and you can't go any further.
Only you can.
It turns out that a situation can be created where atoms are impossibly cold. At the same time, they are impossibly hot.  Negative temperatures - essentially temperatures for which the all-inclusive Kelvin scale does not exist - have been demonstrated in a lab.  Atoms in this state attract each other.  This state can only exist at negative pressure.  It is, in other words, impossibly weird.
In theory, this could one day be put to use, with engines that are more than 100% efficient.  Can's wrap your mind around that?  Me neither. Such engines would not only absord energy from hotter regions, but colder ones as well.  It's way off.  But it's only the beginning of theorizing about a realm we thought could not exist. 

Where be dragons?

Everyone loves dragons. Fictitious ones.  As Ben Radford notes here, there are some bits of fact mixed with the fun.  One comes from paleontology: bones of dinosaurs and giant prehistoric mammals were naturally ascribed to monsters, especially those already established in such sources as the Bible's Old Testament.  Another source is the exaggeration of real creatures, such as crocodiles.  Naming the world's largest lizard the Komodo dragon is a demonstration of the fascination we have with such creatures. (Douglas Adams wrote that his mind reeled when seeing one on display-  "...ten feet long and a yard high is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be.") In modern fiction,  J.R.R. Tolkien gave us Smaug, plus occasional references to "worms" with names like Scatha and Ancalagon the Black.  Anne McCaffery gave us the Dragonflight books, and dragons appear in countless other stories (to cite one of the more obvious examples, see the Dungeons and Dragons games and  books).  In Chinese folklore, dragons were wise and snakelike: in European tales, they had batlike wings and died out at the hands of Saint George and his kind. (The European dragon, incidentally, is almost always drawn with unrealistically small wings for any living creature, compared to the body size: when Chinese dragons fly, they do it by magic and dispense with the whole business of wings.)
Real modern dragons? Well, without dinosaurs in the world (with apologies to some fellow cryptozoologists, we're not going to find live dinos of any sort in Africa or anywhere else), crocodiles and Komodos are the best we have.  And occasional "dragon photographs" circulated on the Net are beyond silly.  The sirrush, that odd dragonlike creature on Babylon's Ishtar gate, is interesting, though there's no reason to suppose it real. Maybe it, too, was born of the imaginative interpretation of dinosaur bones.  Modern studies of dinosaurs have given us creatures so fantastic that they outshine their make-believe counterparts. 
So we had dragons. We just came along too late to see them. 
P.S. In addition to a new book Ben mentions, Karl Shuker wrote a splendid dragon book.

The onza - a success for cryptozoology

The onza, the mysterious big cat of Mexico, is a cryptozoological success story.

That may sound funny, considering the only whole specimen examined was a definite member of the known species Puma concolor, the puma, panther, or cougar.  But bear with me. 

First, the story. Inhabitants of western Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental region were  reporting a strange big cat since Aztec times. Records left by Europeans go back to the Spanish conquest, when the invaders saw both a puma and a leaner, unrecognized type of "lion" in Montezuma's royal zoo. 

     The onza was generally consigned to folklore, despite reports from Americans such as Dale Lee.  Lee, a professional hunting guide who had shot nearly 500 panthers, reported killing an onza in 1938.  He wrote that the slender, long-eared animal "differs from any of the cat tribe I ever saw."   J. B. Tinsley, in his 1987 book The Puma, reproduces photographs of this cat and of a similar beast killed by a trapper named Ruggles in 1926.
     The onza story languished until  1985, when Mexican rancher Andres Murillo shot a cat he didn't recognize.  Fortunately, the man had heard of the legendary onza and was curious enough to contact an interested friend who knew American zoologist/cryptozoologist J. Richard Greenwell.  Greenwell teamed up with a leading mammologist and puma expert, Auburn University's Dr. Troy Best, and the two brought the carcass in for study. They also tracked down two other onza skulls.  One of these dates from 1938 (it is not from Lee's specimen, so it seems two onzas were killed that year) and the other from about 1975. The onza, from the specimen, looked like a panther, but with longer legs and

a slimmer build.  The ears were long, and on the inside of the tawny cat's front legs were dark horizontal stripes.  The type specimen, a female about four years old, weighed less than 60 pounds, considerably less than a normal panther its size.  The researchers wondered at first whether the specimen was starving or diseased, but it proved to be healthy and well-fed.
     As Dr. Best explained to me even before the studies were complete, one specimen and two skulls don't provide enough material for a conclusion about the onza's classification.  I wrote in 1995 that "We may be dealing with a panther subspecies, a local variation, or even just a recurring abnormality born of normal panther parents.  A complication is that there are few "normal" puma specimens from that region of Mexico to compare the onza with."

     Well, eventually a full analysis was done and published, and there was no longer any doubt about the puma identity.  It wasn't even named as a new subspecies.  It appears to be an oddball, born occasionally the way the strikingly marked "king " cheetah of Africa is, to normal-looking parents.  We don't know how common an occurrence this is, but it certainly isn't frequent: no one has claimed a new onza specimen since.

     So why was this a success? Because the animal was identified. A proper scientific  investigation was done.  And, most importantly, in the late 20th century on a relatively well-known continent, a strikingly different animal reported by witnesses recent and historical was confirmed to exist. That the appearance is essentially skin-deep, and the animal wasn't a new type, is secondary. Like the elephants of Bardia National Park (huge, dome-headed specimens of the Indian elephant), the most crucial thing is that witnesses who said they saw a weird-looking large mammal were right. Such witnesses are not always right, but they were this time. Mother Nature, it turned out, still had her secrets.

Bille, Matt.  1995. Rumors of Existence. Hancock House.

Best, Troy.  1993.  Personal communication, January 15.

James, Jamie.  "Bigfoot or Bust,"  1988. Discover, March. 

Greenwell, J. Richard. 1992. Personal communication, July 7.
Marshall, Robert E.  1961. The Onza.  New York: Exposition Press.
Shuker, Karl.   2012. The Encyclopedia of New and Rediscovered Animals. Coachwhip Publications.

Tinsley, Jim Bob.  1987.  The Puma.  El Paso: Texas Western Press.

  

Is this life?

Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow thinks it's close. He's developed iCHELLS, small bubbles based on "large polyoxometalates derived from a range of metal atoms, like tungsten" that duplicate some functions of life, like letting in "nourishment" and maybe, soon, evolution in response to their environment.  Oh, and a kind of photosynthesis is in the early, but promising, stages. 
COMMENT: Life? No.  What he's created, to me, is more of a micro-robot that functions by aping some life processes.  And evolution by itself is something many software programs have demonstrated.  But that's not to knock the rather fascinating experiments going on here.  I wonder if these bubble cells, tweaked for different environments, can be used in an adaptive swarm to explore or, eventually, terraform other bodies like asteroids.

Any live moas out there?

(I wanted to title this, "Are there any moa moas?" but the pun was too bad even for me.)
New Zealand's ecosystem was dominated for millennia by birds, especially the giant moas. We mostly think about the giants, the predatory moas who dwarfed ostriches - and the early Maoris, who may have roasted the last giant moa over a campfire.  But what about the smaller ones, especially the meter-tall upland moa, known scientifically as Megalapteryx? Karl Shuker here discusses an impressive sighting from the 1880s and a scattering of other reports and rumors that might indicate the species survived until recent years - or still does. 

Doubtful News - Sasquatch 2012

Sharon Hill of Doubtful News rounds up the skeptical viewpoints and weak/silly stories on the Big Guy for 2012.  The year was dominated by claims, from Melba Ketchum and others, that progress was being made on the most important goal of sasquatch-hunters: getting a DNA profile published in a scientific journal. We're not there yet.  Then there are the endless blobsquatches (Loren Coleman  should have trademarked that term:)  ....  she does not mention the interesting nighttime photo from Washington state (not conclusive, but interesting) or the Oxford DNA project, which promises to come as close as we ever have to a definitive Yes or No.  The story strides on....

Free book - NASA at 50

NASA turned 50 in 2008, so this might seem a little dated. But the History Office has made available a download of the book NASA at 50.  The description reads: 
"The 50th anniversary of NASA on 1 October 2008 found an agency in the midst of deep transition. In the closing year of the presidency of George W. Bush, only a month before the presidential election and in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, the Agency was implementing a new Vision for Space Exploration intended to return humans to the Moon, to proceed onward to Mars, and to study the cosmos beyond.
It was in this milieu that the History Division at NASA Headquarters commissioned oral history interviews to be undertaken with NASA senior management. This volume is the result and provides a snapshot of the thinking of NASA senior leadership on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and in the midst of these sea changes."

If you want to better understand how our space program developed and the thinking of some of its luminaries on the past, present, and future, it's available here.

Review: The Journal of Cryptozoology

 

The Journal of Cryptozoology

Volume One

November 2012

It’s been over 15 years since there was a peer-reviewed journal of cryptozoology.  The often-excellent pioneering journal Cryptozoology shut down with its patron, the International Society for Cryptozoology, and other attempts have stalled. Now we have a new journal, with the well-known Dr, Karl Shuker as editor. (The peer reviewers are, as standard for a scientific journal, anonymous.)

If the first issue of this slender journal (3-4 papers accepted per issue) is anything to go by, it’s a worthy effort.  After Shuker’s introduction (in which I appreciate that he  specifies the Journal is only concerned with flesh-and-blood animals, no paranormal topics), we get to the first paper, on digital search techniques for finding an unknown object in its most likely range, using a probability map as a starting point for a Digital Search Assistant. This isn’t my area of expertise, so I’ll just say it makes sense the way it’s described. Malcolm Smith contributes a paper on identifying a “Queensland Tiger” footprint sketched in 1871.  That seems a slender reed on which to base analysis, but slender reeds are often the starting point for cryptozoologists (and for "mainstream" zoologists, too!), so the “true unknown” conclusion is intriguing. Markus Hemmler writes on “pesudoplesiosaurs,” the oft-reported carcasses of decaying sharks which tend to look like prehistoric or unknown animals. Hemmler explains how varied these carcasses can be and how easy it is to misidentify them, particularly with respect to skull features. Finally, the always-formidable Dr. Darren Naish takes on an odd mammal carcass in Australia and identifies it with certainty as a domestic cat.  

The journal is professionally done, with such features as keywords for each article, well-referenced entries, and drawings and B&W video/film images. It closes with Instructions to Contributors, the most notable of which specify that personal belief in a cryptid isn’t relevant to a scientific paper, and anyone who posits a particular identity for an unknown animal needs to argue scientifically for that identity, not presume it.   

Overall, this journal is a big step in the right direction for cryptozoology as a scientific field of study.  I’ll be getting every issue, and, hopefully, making some contributions in the future.

God and cryptozoology

There are cryptozoologists who think approaching crypto from a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) position leads to the truth, while some other cryptozoologists are adamant that it can't. A very budy thread on this on the Journal of Cryptozoology page has been removed, apparently because it became a repeated volleying of arguments over creation and science.  On cryptozoology itself - that is, searching for new or presumed-extinct species - my point was that one's motivation and viewpoints didn't necessarily have anything to do with the methods used to find animals. From a YEC viewpoint, finding animals that should not, according to the accepted scientific timeline, exist is ammunition for the argument that the timeline is wrong. As a cryptozoological researcher and a Christian who views the Biblical creation as allegory rather than literal, I have no problem with anything we learn from science, and I can't believe God does, either. We can debate  the implications of a discovery AFTER we make the discovery.

33 new spiders from the US

From the deserts of hte Southwest comes a reminder that we don't even know all the species in the US - far from it.  Would you believe 33 new trapdoor spiders?  Arachnologists have gone a little silly with trapdoors lately, naming them for Stephen Colbet, Angelina Jolie, and President Obama, among others. Best name among the new group?  Aptostichus sarlacc for the Star Wars creature you might call the ultimate desert-dwelling underground predator.

A Christmas trove of new species

From the Mekong Delta of Southeast Asia, the WWF announces the results of a recent survey (done in 2011: it takes a while after these efforts to sort out what's new and what's known.)   Here are "126 new species (82 plants, 13 fish, 21 reptiles, 5 amphibians and 5 mammals)." The Delta, which most Americans know as a site of savage fighting in the Vietnam War, also includes parts of China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand. 

Remember: that's ONE expedition to ONE area of this still-vast planet.  

Pygmy right whale finds its family

That's one way to put it.  Media headlines, though, seem to be getting it all wrong. It's always a variation on "Living Fossil Whale Discovered." We need to straighten that out. The pygmy right whale Caperea marginata was discovered in 1846 and has been around ever since.  It's always been rare (it appears on CITES Appendix I, the list of the world's most threatened species) but we've always know it's out there.  What's new is research showing the pygmy should not be lumped taxonomically with the larger right whales (which, incidentally, got their name by being the "right whale" to kill, as they were easy prey for whalers and floated well when dead.)  Instead, the skull morphology points to a family called cetotheres which arose about 15MYA and were thought to have died out about 2MYA.    While scientists generally dislike the term "living fossil" (seeing as it's rather self-contradictory), it means this rare whale is a window into the past of the cetaceans. Here's the actual paper. 

Pygmy right as photographed by NOAA mammologist Robert Pitman. 

New species: Spider that makes its own decoys

Decoying is not unknown in the animal worlds, but a creature usually decoys an enemy (or food source with part of its own body, as those weird deep-sea anglers do by hanging little "lanterns" to lure prey in.  Actually manufacturing a decoy that looks like the original animal, though, is a new one.  This spider does that.  This species from the genus Cyclosa is only about 6mm across, but it makes a ghostly decoy of itself more like 25mm across.  Arachnologist Linda Rayor said exactly what I would have said.  “That’s really kind of cool."  It's hard to even speculate on what series of events over time led natural selection to produce a creature with this capability buried in a brain the size of a pinpoint.  Hundreds of new spiders are found each year - biologist Jason Bond just named one for his favorite rock star, christening a new trapdoor spider from Alabama Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi - but sometimes it's what a new species does, not how it looks, that's really mind-blowing.

Beware the robot swarm (actually, it's ok)

The University of Colorado has developed robots one inventor compared to living cells. The size of ping-pong balls, the 20 robots built so far form a mini-swarm, and cooperative mass like "a liquid that thinks." Future versions have a variety of uses in space, including assembling structures and reconnoitering planets for humans.  As the team points out, what are human beings but masses of cooperating cells - kind of like tiny robots?

North Korea's first satellite kaput

Here's an excellent article recapping the North Korean satellite launch.  From this article and other sources, here's my FAQ on the launch:
 - Did they get a satellite in orbit? Yes.
 - Was the launch legal? Under a broad reading of the Outer Space Treaty, yes. According to specific UN resolutions, though, No.
 - Did the launch test components for a ballistic missile? Likely the first two stages and some other hardware, probably including the guidance system, were "dual use."
 - Will there be any consequences to North Korea? Not likely.
 - Did it function in orbit? No.
 - Is there any danger to the surface when it reenters? Possible, but unlikely: it's pretty small.

So North Korea can legitimately claims to be an orbiting space power, the first new nation to join that "club" since Iran.  But so far, there's not much of significance to the feat.

The Moon and Sally Ride

NASA ended its GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) missionlunar research mission by crashing two lunar probes, Ebb and Flow, into the moon yesterday. The probes were at the end of their useful lives and added one last data set by hititng the lunar surface, creating seismic shock waves that lunar-surface instruments could "hear" to learn more about the stucture of the moon (which is surprisingly complex for a onetime chunk of Earth that pretty much doesn't so anything except get hit by meteors and stomped on by astronauts).
The impact site was named for a national hero - America's first woman astronaut, Sally Ride. (If you find a new feature on the moon, you get to name it, and the same is true when you create a new feature. ) So it's the Sally K. Ride Impact Site.  Given that her whole life was about making an impact on science and exploration, I think she'd appreciate that. 

Loren Coleman's annual Top 10 Cryptozoology books list

Every year, America's best-known cryptozoologist, Loren Coleman, brings out a list of the ten best books on cryptozoology.  It's said, with some truth, than many cryptozoolgy books spend most of their length rehashing old cases: such historical cryptozoology can be important, but Loren also tried to find fresh material, which makes his list particularly worth reading.

This year:

 Best Cryptozoology Book of the Year : The Beast Of Boggy Creek, by Lyle Blackburn (investigation of the case that started a movie franchise)


=
Best Cryptozoology Encyclopedias of the Year

All-New: The Bigfoot Filmography: Fictional and Documentary Appearances in Film and Television, by David Coleman

Updated/Revised: The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals, by by Karl P.N. Shuker

Best Sasquatch/Bigfoot Book of the Year

Sasquatch in British Columbia, by Christopher Murphy

Best Lake Monster Book of the Year

The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America’s Loch Ness Monster by Robert E. Bartholomew

Best Sea Monster Book of the Year

Sea Serpent Carcasses: Scotland – from The Stronsa Monster to Loch Ness by Glen Vaudrey

Best Autobiographical Cryptozoological Book of the Year

Monster Diary: On the Road in Search of Strange and Sinister Creatures, by Nick Redfern

Best Cryptozoology Journal of the Year

The Journal of Cryptozoology: Volume One (Matt’s note: I’ll be publishing a separate review of this important publication.)

Best Skeptical Cryptozoological Book of the Year

Investigating the Impossible: Sea-Serpents in the Air… by Ulrich Magnin

Loren adds some regional cryptobooks as well: see the list on Cryptomundo.com.

Indiana Jones' journal found?

Well, sort of.  Strange things can be set in motion on eBay!    (EBay is turning up in plenty of fiction, as well. My favorite example so far: Harry Dresden, Jim Butcher's wizard character, is captured by an opportunist who descide to auction off Harry to his many enemies via eBay. If you haven't read the Dresden Files novels, there's no excuse not to: think part Spenser and part Buffy.) 

Book Review: Encyclopedia of New and Rediscovered Animals

The Encyclopedia of New and Rediscovered Animals


By Karl P.N. Shuker

Coachwhip Publications, 2012


Building on two of Shuker’s earlier works, The Lost Ark and The New Zoo, the Encyclopedia deserves its title. This is a mammoth collection of scientific achievements from 1900 to the present. It’s information-packed, sumptuously illustrated, and just plain fun.

Shuker does not, of course, try to include all discoveries, since the beetles alone would merit a library. He goes for creatures which are relatively large or scientifically important, and those are more than sufficient to fill this large-format 368-page book. Shuker is a highly knowledgeable writer (as you’d expect from a Ph.D. who’s been poking into the odd corners of zoology for four decades). He discusses both species and important subspecies (including those where there is some dispute about taxonomy: it’s not clear whether Rothschild’s giraffe is a subspecies, species, or just a local variation.) The zoologically inclined reader will enjoy every page of this romp through monk seals, giant stick insects, megamouth sharks, monitor lizards, and other discoveries simply too numerous to mention.

One thing Shuker does not do is set all the material into a context by showing any species discovery curves or discussing just how many new vs. known species are being found. He does, though, amply demonstrate his main theme: that discovery didn’t end with the “golden age” of the 1800s – indeed, it’s continued at a steady and often surprising pace right up to the present day.

Being a Shuker work, this book has plenty of mysteries along with the definite discoveries. Some are well-known: some, like a slow loris with a thick bushy tail, not yet recognized although it’s been held in captivity and photographed, surprised even a well-read aficionado like myself. Likewise, some of the stories of discovery, like the coelacanth’s, have been told many times (though Shuker always tells them well), but how many know the tragic tale behind the discovery of Flecker’s sea wasp jellyfish, or how Rudie Kuiter saw a flounder swimming along and discovered it was the most amazing mimic in nature: an octopus pretending to be a flounder?

Shuker also includes stories of animals which didn’t quite live up to their hype as new species, like Mexico’s onza (not a new species of big cat, just an odd puma.) He closes with a few words on possible future discoveries, a note on taxonomy, and a bibliography running 33 pages.

There are hundreds of images here to go with the text, ranging from photos to Bill Rebsamen’s wonderful color illustrations.

This is one of the classic books, not just of cryptozoology but of modern zoology and conservation biology. Readers will love it enough to revisit it many times. It’s a great achievement.

Saving the slow loris

For those who enjoyed the article on the discovery of a new species of primate, here's the attempt by one of the scientists involved to make the world realize just how much trouble these creatures are in.  The pet trade, hunting, deforestation... the name loris always makes me think of Dr. Suess' Lorax, who said, "I speak for the trees." God bless Professor Anna Nekaris for speaking for the Loris.

Meet a new primate

Yes, we still find new primates! (I say things like that a lot, because I think they bear repeating.)  Meet Borneo's newest known inhabitant, a cuddly big-eyed nocturnal member of the group called the slow lorises.  Nycticebus kayan, take a bow! The lorises are the only primates with poison glands, but they are so cute they're being critically endangered for the pet trade anyway. 

Off topic: The Questions of Connecticut

As a parent, I did my share of crying yesterday. All of us did.  When you get into the policy - and medical/scientific - questions of what to do now, here's one that sticks in my head.   People are calling for gun restrictions and access to mental health services, and I see some merit in both. But turn the clock back 50 years. There was no gun control at all - you could buy a Tommy gun with no ID. There were no public mental health services (and psychiatry was still taking baby steps.) ). All the modern causes of stress: crime, unemployment, illness, poverty - were present. And yet, these kinds of school shootings were not only unheard of but unimaginable. What was different? A more widely shared Judeo-Christian moral system? A belief in self-reliance? The absence of pervasive violence-glorifying media? What prevented such things back then and is no longer working? 
It seems out of place in a blog devoted to science, but it's a day that makes me think about my mother's Catholic belief that the material universe is a fallen world, one where supernatural as well as natural evil has free reign.  We may never "understand" this shooter.  All I can say to my fellow parents is, "Love your kids."  

But Jesus called them unto him, and said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God."

Ecology: A message from Midway

For those of us who are history buffs, Midway Atoll is a name always associated with the crucial battle in 1942 when the U.S. Navy turned back the Japanese.  Some accounts of the period mention how personnel stationed on  Midway's two islands liked to watch the "gooney birds" - albatrosses, which are designed for life primarily in the air and are humorously clumsy in takeoff and landing.  This film is showing a new battle - one we're not winning.  Midway is Ground Zero for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, maybe the biggest blot we humans have made on the world's oceans, and plastic pollution is endangering the albatross and many other species. This situation is worse - a LOT worse - than I knew.  Filmmaker Chris Jordan is asking for contributions to finish post-production.  
Thanks to Dr. Cherie McCollough for posting this on Facebook, where I first saw it.

Cryptid Canines: Unknown Predators?

This is one of my favorite topics in cryptozoology: I'm not sure why, since the evidence is pretty thin, but maybe I just like dogs and wolves and doglike critters. Karl Shuker writes here of some predators reported across North America, from New Mexico to Greenland. They form a mixed bag of real wolves, spirit wolves, and something called the waheela which has been labeled a dire wolf (Canis dirus) or an amphicyonid, or "bear-dog," which is a really fierce-looking creature kind of like a short-legged wolf after some serious steroids and weight-lifting.  To add confusion, there is the wolf-like, or maybe hyena-like, Shunka Warakin, a stuffed specimen of which has actually turned up, but I can't find any report that testing has been completed.  Chad Arment, in his book Varmints, also chronicles some weird sightings of a scary carnivore from Arkansas.  To summarize, some of these look like giant wolves, some like much more robust canids, and some barely like canids at all.
There may be nothing unusual behind all this business. After all, humans just about wiped out the known wolves, so it's problematical that larger relations could have survived.  But I'm not quite ready to write off all the creatures of this type.  All you need is one big, really remote valley....

Cascade of new species

Are we finding new species? Heck yes. The California Academy of Sciences alone described 137 in 2012.  In environments from California to China, CAS scientists described  83 arthropods, 41 fish, seven plants , an amphibian, a reptile, and.four sea slugs. The descriptions came in 29 papers and included the first new spider family from North America in a century and a small deep-water shark nicknamed the "jaguar catshark" because of its similarity to the fictitious "jaguar shark" from the movie The Life Aquatic. 

The strangest ever "sea serpent"

It's the 107th anniversary of the most authoritative and puzzling sighting of all time concerning what appeared to be a long-necked unknown species of large marine animal (a sea serpent, if you must).  The only suggestion that this thing, well attested to by two British naturalists of major accomplishments and repute in a scientific journal, might be a known species is Richard Ellis' notion in his excellent 1994 book Monsters of the Sea that a giant squid might have been swimming tentacles first (they certain do that when approaching  prey) and might have been holding one tentacle out of the water (a possible but puzzling notion).  I think this one is still unexplained, and highly suggestive of something we still have not caught or classified. 

Bigfoot and Big Confusion

Well, the Bigfoot DNA thing is not about to quiet down. Dr. Ketchum asks everyone to calm down:  "The paper is still under review and the rumormongering is counterproductive. The science will speak for itself once the manuscript publishes."  OK, I say yes to that, but some people think the process is over, or will be soon.  Doubtful News reports the paper was rejected by one journal. Igor Burtsev in Russia, who keeps popping up in this thing, says it was rejected in the US and is now in submission to a Russian journal.   Unfortunately, he also has hauled out the "science refuses to give sasquatch a fair shake" card.  I'm tired of that one. Yes, the bulk of scientific opinion can be very conservative, even unreasonable: but if your evidence is undeniable, you will eventually "win." 
I don't know what's left to do here except hope some form of publication gets the data out.  Now Ketchum says she has good Sasquatch video to go with this, but I can't figure out any reason to not release the video now - it would make reviewers take her paper much more seriously. 

Sasquatch DNA Circus continues

There seems no end to the articles and comments in the online world on the claims about sasquatch DNA.  Sharon Hill's always-worth-a-read Doubtful News is one example.  Most coveraged has leaned to the skeptical: not just because of doubts sasquatch can exist, but because of the atmosphere of oddity that surrounds the project.

Here is my unsolicited advice to Dr. Ketchum and everyone else involved in the current sasquatch DNA kerfluffle: go quiet. Drop off the radar. Don't even give interviews. If you think you have something important, keep working keep gathering data, but do it with no reality-TV cameras, no press conferences. Be patient. Let the peer review process and the Oxford DNA study work, and make no more announcements about anything until final, hard, unquestionable results - one way or the other - come out. Peer review isn't perfect or sacred, but it should at least tell us whether there's any foundation for new investigations. Likewise the unrelated Oxford work: those folks will be cautious and only publish results they think will stand up. Being patient is hard if you genuinely think you have something earthshaking, but it's the right course if you want the end result to be respected.

 

 

Touring Loch Ness

People often send me links to their business or books, and ask me to post them.  (OK, not all that often - this isn't io9.com here). Anyway, Tony Harmsworth sent his collection of links on Loch Ness, and I found them to be a lot of fun. Tony runs the kind of tours I'd like to take if I ever get over there. He has a judicious eye for monster hoaxes, a broad knowledge of the local history and culture, and the good sense to not guarantee you a sighting of any strange creatures.  He has been doing this for a long time and so has many tales to tell.  Enjoy!

Tony's message:
I have a number of Loch Ness websites including:
www.Loch-Ness.info my Loch Ness Information website
www.LochNessNessieAndMe.com my book and info about me
www.LochNessUnderstood.com a way to read my book free of charge.

Lazarus species... back from the abyss

I'm not sure how the author picked a Top 10, but the species on this inventory of rediscoveries are a good mix, demonstrating that extinct species can reappear on any continent (the Bavarian pine mole, missing for almost 40 years, qualifies) and after very long times - over a century in some of the cases here.  (The all-time champ among warmblooded animals, the Bermuda petrel or cahow, is not mentioned here - it spent some 300 years on the "presumed extinct" list. )   The record here belongs to the La Palma Giant Lizard Gallotia auaritae, which had been thought extinct for as much as 500 years before it was found in 2007.  We should never give up. 

Cryptozoology: Some mysteries will never be solved

Cryptozoologists, concerned as we are with the rare and the missing species of the world, have a very unsettling dilemma on our hands. And it’s not one we’ll ever solve. More than anyone else, even the mainstream of zoologists and biologists and paleobiologists and so on, we live in a world where some answers will never be found.

Cryptozoologists have a habit of endlessly mulling over some classic cases of animal sightings that don’t fit known species. The Shipton yeti tracks, the Valhalla sea serpent, Steller’s sea ape, and other examples of encounters that, in and of themselves, are compelling, but have never followed up by better evidence, or in some cases, any good evidence for continued survival.

Take one of my favorite cases, the Valhalla sea serpent. Two well-qualified naturalists, members of the Zoological Society of London, got a good look, directly and through binoculars, at an animal which didn’t fit – remotely – with any known species. Despite my respect for Richard Ellis, his suggestion of a squid behaving bizarrely doesn’t convince me at all. This is either an unknown animal or – well, there really isn’t another explanation. It’s a better case than any of the individual sea serpent reports before or since.

But if it’s an unknown species, why have we gone 107 years without proof? It may be this is a huge deepwater eel seen only on rare and fortunate occasions. I tend to think it is. But there’s another explanation: it’s a rare species, already on the way out when encountered. If, as one witness suggested, it was a mammal, I think it likely there are few of them left, and maybe none. Dr. Roy Mackal once wrote that the long-necked sea serpent, presumably related to the pinnipeds, might be an ascending species. He may have had the animal right but its status wrong. If so, cryptozoologists a hundred or a thousand years from now may still be debating the animal’s existence.

That’s the conundrum cryptozoologists must exist with. That no matter how hard we work, we won’t resolve every case. In some situations, no one will ever be certain.

It’s our duty to science, though, to think about such things. If we don’t run the risk of exploring what may be blind alleys, we run the bigger risk of writing some important discoveries – and that includes discovering a species is recently extinct.  Finding that yarri skull, or the skin of one of those parrots in a museum, will still tell us much. Even negative investigations matter in science. If a given creature did not survive in a given era or environment, that tells us something about nature as well.   Still, there have been, by one count, 13 recent mammal rediscoveries. Another study found only 36 percent of reported mammal extinctions were definite. So if it was there – whether established by a type specimen, or only hinted at by sightings—it may still be there. And that’s why we keep looking.

North Korea at it again?

Those wacky North Koreans.  Now they are going to launch a polar-orbiting satellite.  It will, of course, be "peaceful."  I would not bet my losing Powerball ticket on their chances of success.  They have failed repeatedly to launch a lower-inclination satellite, and a polar one is harder, not least because you are giving up roughly 1000 miles per hour from the Earth's rotation that you get as a free bonus of you launch eastward. So the rocket needs to be more powerful for the same payload weight.  (Israel, for political reasons, has to launch west, or retrograde, over the Mediterranean, so their Shavit booster has to add power to overcome what is in essence a 1000-mph headwind.) Also, an Earth observation satellite is going to be more complex and presumably heavier than the little propaganda-broadcasting satellites they've already dumped in the Pacific (I call this achieving CLO, or Clam-Level Orbit.)  So I think they have approximtely the same chance I do of being named the next Secretary of Defense (if you're reading this, Mr. President, I actually would take that job.)

Sasquatch and DNA news - updated

Dr. Melba Ketchum, a veterinarian by training, has been chasing sasquatch a long time.  She has submitted a paper to an unnamed peer-reviewed scientific publication which indicates, oddly (as if  the whole notion of sasquatch isn't odd enough) that it's much close to humans than anything else: indeed, the DNA is predominantly Homo sapiens.  Contamination or revelation?  While I've maintained what I think is a logical "show me" attitude toward existence of a huge North American primate, I'm willing to be convinced, and we'll wait and see what the science says. 
UPDATE: There's a heck of a kerfluffle going on, from people defending Ketchum to those calling her nasty names.  Here's Cryptomundo's coverage of Dr. Jeff Meldrum's commentary.   It hit news sources all over the world, some reporting the news with a straight face (see this story), some breathlessly, and some with a side helping of ridicule. Ketchum agrees the news slipped out too soon, given how long the whole peer review and publication process can take even if her findings are unambigiously accurate.  As to the more extreme reactions: folks, we're doing science. Either her findings will be confirmed, or they will be rejected in the peer review process.  Yes, the whole thing seems unlikely, especially the human ancestry. But at least the proper review process is underway. 

Spotting a spotted zebra

Well, partly spotted, anyway.  And VERY distinctive:

"The mane is short and completely black; the hooped markings on its legs are completely different to normal ones; it has the shape of a donkey; it is much darker all over, but those spots are incredible."

So says the wildlife photographer who captured it on film.  Interestingly, other zebra seem to shun him: he has no herd. Could this be due simply to looking odd, or is it an unrelated circumstance? We don't know.

Nature certainly turns out some oddities.

Are sasquatch hunters wasting their time?

Well, this article argues that they are.  Brian Switek doesn't think much of the whole idea, basically arguing that we would have found the species by now.  It's a common argument: I've made it myself.  With each passing year, it does become more odd that a sasquatch hasn't crossed a birder's lens at short range or a hunter's gunsights or wandered across a logging road at the same time a truck was trying to occupy the same point in space. Switek pokes fun at Dr. Jeff Meldrum's idea of searching from a blimp.  (I understand Meldrum's logic, but I doubt he's going to have much success: still, it will be interesting to see him do some trials on known species, like bears, and find out how useful this approach might be for spotting large mammals in forest cover.)  Switek musters some worthwhile arguments from ecology and historical records of species discovery.  The no-fossils argument is important but not by itself definitive given the almost nonexistant fossil record of modern chimps and gorillas.  On balance, he successfully argues sasquatch is very unlikely, but he doesn't quite reach the finish line of proving it's impossible.

New data on old mystery (Flight 19)

In 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo planes on a training mission near Florida, carrying 14 men, disappeared. The US Navy board of inquiry considered various scenarios but couldn't pin down exactly what happened.  That left the field open for theories of the Bermuda Triangle (a term not coined until years later) including UFOs, unknown natural forces, giant undersea gas explosions, time travel, etc., etc. A new book by ex-pilot Jon Myhre suggests we can, using radio transcripts, sighting reports, and other information, reach back in time to solve the mystery. He thinks that when the commander, Lt Charles Taylor, got the flight lost off the east coast of Florida, the other pilots stayed with him for too long, but they did not, as often suggested, ditch all together. According to Myhre, another pilot who had the right bearings broke away and tried to fly home, but by this point they'd used too much fuel, and the planes ended up in five locations - two of which may, he thinks, have been on land - as each ran out of fuel at slightly different times.  There is even a possibility that one aviator survived: he made it to land, contacted his family, but went AWOL from the Navy. 
COMMENT: I grew up with this mystery, so to speak, as a fascinated boy on Florida's East Coast. I've not read the book yet, but the idea that four planes broke off from Taylor makes sense: in the military, you follow your leader, and it's a desperate decision to leave him: If all five planes had survived, breaking up the flight would have led to disciplinary action, so it's understandable the other pilots waited until it was too late before they mutinied. I've not read the book yet, but it's kind of iffy that all Myhre's details work out, even if he has the central event right: his claim that three planes have been found and one raised is contradicted (as was a news item a couple decades ago saying all five had been found) by other sources saying the engine serial numbers were not matched.  Still, I suspect Myhre has the main course of events correct, and following his clues may indeed lead to a definitive discovery in the future.

Will Lonesome George live again?

The Pinta Island subspecies of the Galapagos giant tortoise was represented for decades by a single animal known as Lonesome George.  Two attempts were were made to mate him with females from a closely related subspecies. One he ignored: the other he drowned.  No second dates for George.  Anyway, he died last June, but experts have determined at least 17 living tortoises have some of the Pinta Island genetic makeup. As this article (which sloppily mixes species and subspecies) explains, the good news is that George's subspecies can be brought back in nearly pure form. (The article says 100% pure, but I can't see how that math works: even crossing two turtles with 99% of the right genes won't give you 100%, although the remnant would be so small as to be irrelevant.) The bad news is it would take 100 to 150 years. We're not breeding hamsters here.

Describing new species a slow business

New species are collected all the time.  But unless they are big and spectacular, resulting in instant attention, they languish in museum collections and elsewhere for years or more - on average, about two decades.  Why? Money. Expertise.  Scientists like Terry Irwin may collect new beetles at a rate of thousands a year, but only an estimated 200 specialists are qualified to determine their taxonomic affinities and write descriptions on them. An item I saw in the 1990s said 600 new mollusks were being described each year, but two-third of those were from museum specimens rather than being in the field. 
The trouble with this is that we can't make intelligent conservation decisions without current knowledge of what's been discovered.  As Benoit Fontaine of Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris says, "Species new to science are almost never recognized as such in the field...it often happens that we describe species which were collected alive decades ago and which can be extinct now -- just as astronomers study the light of stars which do not exist anymore."
Cryptozoologists often wonder what exists in old museum collecting rooms, maybe crumbling to dust.  So, it turns out, do biologists.

Australia's Vanishing Animals

One bat may not seem like a big deal.  Mammologist Tim Flannery, though, thinks the extinction of one bat species - the Christmas Island pipistrelle - bodes ill for Australia's animals. In this touching and unnerving article, the discoverer of two tree kangaroo species, argues that Australia's unique fauna is on a steep downward slide that will see many more extinctions, including numerous mammals.  (Since mammals are, as a rule, the easiest types of animals to convince humans populations to conserve, a bad time for the mammals normally means an even worse fate for other orders.) He makes the interesting note that, in large regions of the country, the medium-sized fauna - between the size of a rat and a kangaroo - is simply missing.  Only one species (the salt-water crocodile) has recovered after being placed on Australia's equivalent of the U.S. Endangered Species List, and Flannery believes that many species of all types are sliding into extinction because of government inaction. The bat galls him because he believes he presented a sensible, affordable plan for its salvation to the government, which essentially could not be bothered.  One species  Flannery thinks is in imminent danger, the bridled nailtail wallaby, was in my 1995 book Rumors of Existence as a case of rediscovery after presumed extinction.  The celebration may have been premature.

How Well Can Big Land Animals Hide?

This is an important question for the sasquatch researchers, of course, but it applies to many other areas of cryptozoology. In 2012, how well can big land animals evade us? (Note I specified land animals: I'm quite certain at least a few large marine species are out there.)
The best data to start with is of course recent discoveries of big land animals. If we start about 20 years ago, we have the parade of new animals from Vu Quang, a couple of which are still known only as partial specimens (the slow-running deer and the black deer).  The Vu Quang ox is, I think, the last new full species to be accepted that can exceed 100kg.  (Van Roosmalen's giant peccary from Brazil averages maybe half the size of the 100kg standard, but it's still important to note as a distinctive and pretty big new animal.)
There are, however, several cases of large populations of known species, some of them distinctive, and these certainly count in trying to assess what new species could still be hiding.  We have the giant sable antelope of Angola: the odd-looking Asian elephants of the Bardia Royal National Park in Nepal: the mainland population of the Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam: the very distinctive Bili apes, the largest and strangest of the chimpanzees: and huge populations of two African giants, lowland gorillas and elephants. 
Seriously, we missed a hundred thousand gorillas.  Searchers for the dinosaur-or-whatever Mokele-Mbembe might be have not found the animal, but they have demonstrated how damned hard it still is to search the least-known regions of the world.  So reports of big animals in Africa and South America, like the true pygmy elephant, African mystery apes (those in particular, given the recent primate finds there) and Van Roosmalen's black-and-white jaguar, can at least be seriously considered, although the standard of a widely accepted holotype (see here about the elephant) has yet to be met. Certainly there are some areas on the Asian mainland, in Siberia and the Pamirs to cite two examples, where's it's not impossible further large species are hiding.
(I am, BTW, setting aside here the new species described from reinvestigations/reclassifications of existing specimens. New wild pigs pop up a lot this way.)
Than we get to the specific case of North America.  After throwing out the most recent of the 86 species of brown/grizzly bear the splitters of past centuries erected, we have exactly zero species new large animals from the 20th or 21st centuries. The best we can do for recent rediscoveries is the population of wood bison found in 1957 in Canada: significant, certainly, but having occurred 65 years ago, not nearly as significant as it used to be. Gerald Wood, in the popular (and still most enjoyable) book Animal Facts and Feats, told of an unusually large strain of grizzly bears found in Alberta in 1960, but I can't find a more scientific source on that.  You could sort of argue that finding brown/polar crosses in the wild, first done in 2006, is sort of like finding a new animal, but we don't know when those crosses began to occur, so I'm setting that one aside, too. A little better case could be made that the onza counts: while this strange-looking, long-legged puma has in fact been DNA-typed as a strange-looking, long-legged puma, it is an animal with a distinctive look and was reported many times from Mexico and dismissed until there was a specimen in hand in 1986.
And this brings us to sasquatch. There are other large cryptid species reported or suspected from various regions of North America, from the giant beaver to the dire wolf, but in none of these cases is the evidence remotely comparable to the hundreds of sightings of sasquatch. I realize I'm going in to opinion here after sticking to hard facts, but the chances of big hidden mammals existing on this continent is inevitably a judgment call, and I don't think it looks very likely.   I think that if we are going to find any new species of large mammal on this continent, it will be sasquatch - the others, aside from the occasional curious report, are not well supported and are going to fade out. (Where are the giant beaver lodges and dams? Why would the dire wolf have survived the rise of such successful modern predators as the wolf and the puma?)  If sasquatch is not hiding in N. America, no big animal is. 
We have large forested patches, mainly in the Pacific Northwest, where the trees stretch many miles over rough terrain and few humans have yet trodden.  I'll accept Pyle's book Where Bigfoot Walks as answering one big question - is the habitat suitable for a reported type of animal?  (The answer: it's not perfect, but Pyle argues an omnivore might survive in pockets against its major competitors, humans and bears.) But hiding gets hard.  It gets harder over time.  Despite our wilderness areas, this is not Africa or the Amazon basin (which are, themselves, increasingly intruded on).  The U.S. not only has increasing numbers of loggers, foresters, hunters, birders, and developers going into the woods, but there are no towns or hamlets and few houses in this country exempt from instant electronic communications with larger populations: phones and internet are nearly ubiquitious, and roads suitable for autos connect even the most rural habitations. Of course, witnesses may see sasquatch, think about possible ridicule, and not report it, but the stigma is fading as TV and internet bring more programming on cryptozoology in general and squatch in particular. My feeling is theat the likelihood of a good sighting without a followup, though this is unprovable without a massive surveying effort, is going down. 
This doesn't mean sasquatch can't still be hiding. There are unsolved sightings. There are some intriguing footprint trails. But I think on balance there is either one big hidden mammal in North America, or there are none.  I am hoping for one.

NASA Probes Renamed to Honor Van Allen

James Van Allen is someone I never met but will always appreciate. When the father of atmospheric physics and discoverer of the radiation belts was contacted in 1999 about our book The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites, he couldn't have been more helpful to authors he had never heard of: doing a phone interview, then sitting down with my coauthor for a daylong discussion (we still have the tape somewhere), writing a Forward, and sending us a laudatory letter after the book was published.

So it's always nice when someone else remembers Dr. Van Allen.  NASA has renamed its latest probes to the Earth's magnetosphere, originally the Radiation Best Storm Probes (which was a pretty cool name already) to the Van Allen Probes.  The twin satellites went up on August 30, 2012, and have just been commissioned (declared operational).  There is an awful lot we don't know about the space immediately surrounding around our planet, and the Van Allen Probes should answer some very important questions. Good job, NASA. 

Nala, is that you? The maned lioness

Odd things happen in our best-known animal species. Take lions. We have white ones, black-maned ones, and the occasional maneless male.  But I've never seen this one before.  A lioness with a mane? Apparently, they are not unknown, and here are some photos.  The same touch of male hormones that result in a mane also result in infertility, which makes it interesting that the mutation keeps recurring. 

Do we need a cockroach with a nightlight?

Apparently, Nature is unsure whether a bioluminescent cockroach was really necessary.  This newly described species, with a back surface configured to host glowing bacteria in a pattern reminiscent of a poisonous species, the click beetle, may already have been made extinct by a volcanic eruption.
On the one hand, the biomimicry going on here is really impressive. And everything that has evolved has some more or less useful niche in the Great Circle of Life.
On the other (unscientific) hand, I grew up in Florida, and one less species of cockroach really doesn't  make me weep. 
That mimicry is impressive, though. I suppose I hope the species survived.  But if one of these comes anywhere near me, I will still reach for the Raid. 

Heinlein invention validated on Shark Tank

I was watching a taped episode of Shark Tank last night, and two guys came in with an invention: a gyroscopically stabilized unicycle.  You could rise it up to 15 mph and you could not make it fall over.  This is exactly - exactly - what Robert Heinlein, 60 years ago, called a tumblebug in his story "The Roads Must Roll." It's a shame it took so long to invent: it looks like a lot of fun, simpler and cheaper than a Segway and needing only a space the size of the user's body. there have been prototypes for self-balancing unicycles before, but these guys look like they have gone beyond the interesting toy to the practical transport.

Can an eagle kill a cow?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/11/10/raptors-kill-hominids-kill-cattle-kill-giant-moa/.
One of the debated points in ornithology is whether raptors can carry off large prey, even small human children.  As Darren Naish points out in this brief note, they can certainly kill large animals. I didn't know the berkut (golden eagle) of Russia had been trained to kill wolves, or that there are records of its American cousin killing cattle (although obviously not flying off with them.)
The most famous and bizarre story of this type is the 1970 report that two large eagles of unknown type, apparently escaped or released exotics from another continent, attacked 70-lb Marlon Lowe of Illinois, and one actually got him off the ground.  As crazy as it seems, this event seems to have been real - the clawed boy and his torn clothing were evidence - though I do wonder if the part about actually lifting the child and starting to carry him off before dropping him was a product of the two panicked human witnesses (Lowe and his mother) perceiving things to be even scarier than they were.  This would mean Lowe was running as one or both eagles grabbed him and slashed at him, and but his feet may have only momentarily been off the ground. (I will note that Lowe's mother has denied she could have been mistaken on this point, but the physics don't seem to allow for any other answer.)  While most accounts of eagles lifting smaller children have been dismissed as folktales, a couple were well-attested and might have happened.

Tyson helps Superman find Krypton

OK, I gotta get this comic book.
Superman turns to Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson to help pinpoint exactly which star (a real star readers can look for) which the "distant planet Krypton" orbited. 
Very, very cool idea.  Might even het a few kids curious about astrophysics.

Least-known whale appears in the flesh

It was a tragedy for the whales, but a gift for science: a mother and son (calf) of the world's least-known cetacean species, (Mesoplodon traversii) or the spade-toothed beaked whale, died in 2010 after stranding on a New Zealand beach.  They were presumed to be a common species until a new DNA study pegged them as a species previously known from 3 skulls.  It's a good reminder that the oceans are still vast, and they can shield even a large animal from all but chance detection. 
It's not at all certain, though, that this is the least-known whale.  Cetologists I talked to in the writing of my 2006 Shadows of Existence  thought there was at least one type, nicknamed Mesoplodon species B, that had never been caught or its remains found, and there may be a couple more after that.  (That is, of course, if you accept the identification of the long-enigmatic Mesoplodon species A with the pygmy/Peruvian beaked whale.  I admit I have not read the latest research, but that wasn't very convincing to me.)

More birds - ALL the birds

A family tree covering all the 9,993 known species has been unveiled in the journal Nature after three years of work.
This is not going to solve arguments over just how many species there are, how many of those described are valid, or even how to classify them - bird classification is a cauldron of conflicting theories, modern DNA tools notwithstanding. But this massive effort has given us our best idea ever of how birds evolve and form new species. Some lineages produce species faster than others, but ornithologists were surprised by the steadiness of bird speciation, averaging 0.74 species every mission years. Most classes tail off in the rate of new species formation: Aves does not, perhaps because of birds' abilities to colonize new ranges more effectively than ground-bound species. 
So, birdwatchers, get to work!

A peek at the world of birds

Most of us don't think much about the birds we see every day.  But even common species produce majestic moments, if the right photographer is at hand.  Whether it's a pair of hummingbirds in courtship display, a penguin peering through the mists, or the wonderfully named Marvellous Spatuletail in flight with its tailfeathers streaming like kites, birds offer sights that sparkle like diamonds embedded in the fabric of Nature's gown.  (Hmmm..you might think that simile is a reach, but I'll think on a better one while you peruse these spectacular photos.) 

Why no flightless bats?

Darren Naish's never-boring Tetrapod Zoology blog asks why, if brids have evolved flightlessness at several different points in space and time, why have bats, a lineage believed to be 50 million years old, never evolved a flightless form?  The answer may be that bats, which are preyed upon by nocturnal raptors, have never found an environment where they were free to go flightless,  I think his reasoning here is that poorly-flying intermediate forms would be at a huge disadvantage, unsafe on the ground or in the air. Maybe, Naish speculates, birds have to vanish before bats can take the emu's niche.

Jane Goodall on Bigfoot

The world's best-known primate researcher has her own take on sasquatch.  While puzzled by the lack of a body (or even a definite piece of one), she says, "I'm not going to flat-out deny their existence."  She is "fascinated" by the topic and hopes the species is out there. 

COMMENT: It's interesting that, for someone with so many years' experience studying apes in their habitats, she apparently doesn't feel the "poor ape habitat" argument for dismissing sasquatch is compelling.  

"Hobbit" actor searches for new creatures

Dominic Monaghan met plenty of weird creatures playing a hobbit in the Lord of the Rings movies.  In real life, he has launched a new British TV series, Dom's Wild Things, about the strangest and scariest creatures.  He has already participated in some searches of remote areas for new species. He hasn't found one yet, but he says,  "I just wanna keep exploring and I'd like to find a species that has not been known to science before and then maybe call it after my family name."

I think I see a skink

New lizard from Australia

A new lizard species isn't a huge deal, particularly when it's only 6cm long. But the Coastal Plains Skink reminds us of two things: the seemingly endless parade of new species on a planet many mistakenly think is thoroughly known; and the threats to wildlife of all kinds (the new lizard is already endangered.) 

Everyone loves smart dinosaurs

A minor industry in paleontology is speculating what dinosaurs would look like if the asteroid had missed us and the dinosaurs had continued to rule and evolve. Dale Russell and Ron Seguin started this 30 years ago by postulating a strikingly humanoid dino descendant. As Darren Naish points out, though, even the smartest dinos were around ostrich-level intelligence, and it's not certain they would have gone much further. Even if they did keep getting smarter, we know dinosaurs were evolving in the direction that produced modern birds, and there's no reason to presume a "dinosauroid" of human intelligence would look like a human, instead of like a big ground-dwelling bird, feathers, long tail, and all.  This is endlessly fascinating speculation and has spun off many a science fiction story.  We'll probably never leave the subject entirely. 

Heard about the talking whale?

The beluga known as NOC (why, I'm not sure) managed to make sounds surprsingly like human speech.  I say "managed" because it's not like a whale has a vocal structure remotely resembling a human's: NOC had to work hard at this.  Just amazing. 

First film ever of Shepherd's beaked whale

Here it is, the first video ever of one of the most elusive large mammals on the planet. Tasmacetus shepherdi was thought to be solitary, but a team studying blue whales off Australia happened across a pod of 10-12.  A great stroke of luck for science.  So we have this very big, visually distinctive animal that moves in pods - and a pod had never even been reported before.  It's a good reminder just how vast the oceans are. What else might still be eluding us?

Italian scientists guilty for imperfect science

This is terrifying.

Some people have been known to use the term "playing God" for ambitious scientists.  These people in Italy were convicted of not being God - not being perfect about the imperfect science of earthquakes.  Think of the consequences if we can hold any scientist to criminal penalties for not being omniscient. Science as a whole would clam up, issuing only the most vanilla statements instead of informing public discourse. 

Book Review: Dolphin Confidential

Dolphin Confidential
Maddalena Bearzi
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (April 15, 2012)

Bearzi's touching memoir of her scientific work is mostly about dolphins, but there's a great deal more here. First is her personal journey. The author doesn't start with a data dump on dolphins: rather, we see through her eyes as she progresses through her degrees and practical work to learn about animals (graduating from lizards up through sea turtles to cetaceans). She cautions about over-humanizing other animals, but admits the temptation is sometimes irresistible. An incident where a group of dolphins stopped feeding and took off at high speed to (apparently) lead researchers to an isolated and drowning human makes her wonder. As her studies and conservation efforts take her from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, we not only learn about creatures and ecosystems but dire environmental threats. Everyone (hopefully) knows we are damaging the marine ecosystem with garbage and pollutants, but Bearzi brings it home in a personal way no reader will forget. If you want detailed breakdowns of species, ranges, etc., there are better books for that, but this author's personal journey into the world of the dolphin is unforgettable.

Tesla/Edison - both human

Ever since the death of the brilliant, eccecntric, and very important inventor Nikolai Tesla, his idealizers have raised him to the status of a demigod who invented everything important in modern life, and many futuristic things, but was constantly thwarted or robbed by Edison, Westinghouse, and, on occasiona, evil government agents.  In response to a recent Tesla-worshiping (indeed, really hyperbolic) comic, this article makes some corrections about the Edison-Tesla mythology.  As the writer says, "Tesla wasn’t an ignored god-hero. Thomas Edison wasn’t the devil. They were both brilliant, strong-willed men who helped build our modern world. They both did great things and awful things." Not all of Tesla's ideas were brilliant (tracking submaries with radar was...ummm...downright silly) and some of his claimed inventions were ideas that never could have worked. With 70 years of additional development and knowledge of physics, no one has come close to sending huge  amounts of electrical power through the air - because you can't.  (OK, you can do it in huge lightning-like sparks, wich Tesla experimented with, but you can't direct it, and it's deadly, not useful.)  Tesla made huge improvements in AC current devices, but did not invent them, just as Edision didn't invent the light bulb, he made it practical. History is always more complicated than we remember it.
Another take is here.
The comic is here.