No, Bigfoot is not magical. You forget about the Panda. . . .
We knew about the Panda since 1869, yet the first Giant Panda was not captured until 1927.
Rubbish. Who's "We"? The Chinese knew about pandas before Linneaus was glimmer in his great-great-great . . . great grandfather's eye.
You're parroting more crypto-bovine excrement rather than
actually thinking about what you're writing.
Wiki: "the Empress Dowager Bo was buried [in 155 BC] with a panda skull in her vault."
" . . . the use of panda pelts to control menses as described in the Qin Dynasty encyclopedia Erya" [3rd Century BC]
As for the Western discovery, how did that go down? Well, it was
Pere David - the French missionary commissioned by his government to collect all manner of biological specimens for natural history collections in France - to whom that first pelt was supplied by a local hunter in 1869.
Crypto-fail! David was essentially France's Lewis and Clark in China: "Father David summed up his labours in an address delivered before the International Scientific Congress of Catholics at Paris in April, 1888. He had found in China all together 200 species of wild animals, of which 63 were hitherto unknown to zoologists, and 807 species of birds, 65 of which had not been described before."
So again, what appears to the FIRST Westerner in a foreign land with an eye toward natural history
was given a specimen of an unknown species by
one of the locals. Sound familiar? (Cough "gorilla!")
Who cares that "we" didn't catch a live panda until decades later? We already had proof they existed. This is the same tripe that influences the simple-minded when giant squid are discussed. No, we had not photographed one live until a few years ago, but freakin'
Aristotle examined a carcass. Don't even get me started on the panda
fossil record.
