Seeing Cryptids: The Problems

The whole man-horse thing raises interesting questions. I mean, on the one hand it's not actually impossible; on the other, it's so wildly unlikely that I'd have to see a body.

(ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that I believe centaurs exist. What I mean is that they may be possible to create, which is a fun topic to speculate about--particularly given that Horner opened the door to such experimentation.)

The number of limbs mammals have is genetically controlled. If you were to tweak those genes, you could end up with a six-limbed critter. This would probably kill the critter, however, so you could only really do this in a lab setting at this point (and even there it'll be incredibly tricky). The other option is to have had two lineages of terrestrial vertebrates--one four-limbed lineage, like us, and one six-limbed, like centaurs and dragons sensu stricto and gargoyles and all the rest. That wouldn't lead to man-horses, though; lizards and mammals are much more similar than four-limbed and six-limbed tetrapods would be, and you don't see reptilian humanoids anywhere in the fossil record.

Still, it'd be fun to play with the HOX genes and see if you could develop a six-limbed horse. If nothing else, it'd be an interesting study on the degree to which HOX genes control development, and the plasticity of mammals (something that could have implications for evolutionary theory). So I could see someone deciding "Why not?"

The face is also weird. Horses have the mouths they do for a reason--to chew grass. Apes have the mouths they do for a reason--the wider variety of food, and the less-abrasive food, we eat. You can't have a horse with a human face, because the teeth wouldn't function properly. You CAN have a human that eats hard-to-chew food; we've found fossils of some. They look rather odd, but didn't have an "evil leer" any more than a gorilla does. Also, I find it very odd that someone would scream in fright over a near-human face anymore. After all, all sci-fi aliens are exactly that: near-human. If I saw something with a near-human face I'd be curious, maybe afraid (depending on what the rest of the critter looked like!), but I certainly wouldn't scream in terror.

As far as trustworthyness goes, it's an invalid criteria. I've studied morphology more than most, and I still see weird things. Then I look again and realize that no, my brain was just playing tricks on me. Bad eyesight combined with a quick glance combined with preoccupation combined with a sadistic brain result in seeing all sorts of things. I still see the face of a girl I once knew all over the place.
 
Last edited:
Dinwar,

Could centaur sightings be linked to some genetic experiment, gone horribly wrong (in theory, of course)? Fun to speculate. The more mundane explanation (cultural influences, imagination, etc.) is, well, not very exciting.

As to problems with perception, if we keep an eye out, so to speak, we might find daily incorrect perceptions all around us, high and low. One of my favorite examples: once, around lunch time, while at my work desk, a fellow worker walked by and said that my hamburger really looked appetizing. Since I had no hamburger, nor was eating anything, I looked at him strangely. He caught my look, and was puzzled. He looked at my "hamburger" again and became embarrassed. He was looking at my up turned work hat with my work gloves laying inside the crown.
 
Jodie said:
Well Jerrywayne, there was a pterosaur sighting in Charlotte, NC yesterday. That's just 70 miles north of me. My other favorite cryptid.....

http://lightsinthetexassky.blogspot.com/2013/01/pterosaur-sighting-in-north-carolina.html
Click to expand...

I live on the gulf coast and see lots of sea birds. But on day,I was out fishin for redfish when this rather large looking thing comes flying by (300 yards away maybe) and my fishin buddy and I are like "wow, that looks like a small pterodactyl eh?" It had the sharply pointed snout pointing down, long black looking wings..etc

Well, we watch it for awhile and it gets close and turns ,we notice that it's actually a very large seagull with a sizable fish in it's beak! The way the fish angled down, plus the lighting had made it a dead ringer for a dinosaur of some type!


On reflection, it may not have been a "sea gull" but one of the various large seabirds that frequent the area, I'm sure all sorts of different things get labelled as seagulls by us redneck rubes! :D
 
I have seen herons of all types around here that could pass for pterosaurs and we do get gulls this far inland. We have turkey vultures that rival the legendary Thunderbirds. I had never seen vultures this big until I moved to South Carolina.

Right after I moved here, I happened to be driving along Hwy 77 one day and got stuck in traffic behind a wreck. Evidently there was a dead dog on the side of the road that the buzzards were feasting on but when I pulled up along side of it they stood up and looked at me through the passenger window. They were over freaking three feet tall!!

No one else seemed to be paying them any attention, so I asked about them when I got to my destination. According to the native SC'ers, they do get that big. I guess that is why the witness made sure to emphasize in the report that he wasn't looking at a vulture. They will circle over head if you happen to be napping outside, I've been swooped by them checking me out to see if I'm dead before. Suffice it to say there is plenty of wildlife here that could be mistaken for a pterosaur.
 
Jodie said:
Well Jerrywayne, there was a pterosaur sighting in Charlotte, NC yesterday. That's just 70 miles north of me. My other favorite cryptid.....

http://lightsinthetexassky.blogspot.com/2013/01/pterosaur-sighting-in-north-carolina.html
Click to expand...

Love the pterosaur. Is it my imagination (no pun), but have "sighting" dinosaurs and ancient reptiles, on land and air, in U.S., arisen after the Jurassic Park film series and walking with prehistoric monsters tv series?
I was raised on King Kong and The Lost World, and I never heard of dino sightings back then. Were we more mature then? Stupid? What?

Certain times of the year where I live, we have egrets migrating and passing through. Spray paint one of those birds, put a reptilian tail on it, and it would make a passable pterosaur.
 
Jodie said:
Suffice it to say there is plenty of wildlife here that could be mistaken for a pterosaur.
Click to expand...

What is it about our culture that would induce a person to consider a pterosaur the first option, rather than the dead last or no option at all?
 
Someone who is not familiar with the native wildlife like I was when I saw those giant vultures. They saw the movie but they probably don't spend very much time outdoors to know what is normal.
 
jerrywayne said:
What is it about our culture that would induce a person to consider a pterosaur the first option, rather than the dead last or no option at all?
Click to expand...

I don't think people ,by nature, jump to "that IS a pterosaur" but we DID go "doesn't that look like a little pterosaur?". We have the normal profile of birds burned in our memories, and we also have the profile of the scary dinosaurs there too. It's not odd to see something strange that has a similar profile and have the brain jump to that critter. Not at all. It all goes wrong when you get to pterosaur on your mental list of possible critters and stop checking any more files!;)
 
Or something just goes wrong with data processing at the brain. We were wired by evolutionary forces to quickly discern patterns - ast recognition of the face of an ambushing predator, for example, would give you an edge when it comes down to passing your genes to the next generation if you were some primate living in the jungle.

Sometimes, somehow, it goes wrong. Somewhere here at JREF forum you can find my sighting report of a two-headed guinea fowl. Which turned out to be a hare. It took long enough for me to think "OK... Now, how the f-word am I going to tell this to JREF posters?" but it was also long enough for the illusion fade away. If it hadn't...

So, people may "see" centaurs, pterodactyls, lake monsters, etc. etc. etc.
 
Hold on a second. There are three species of vultures in North America: California Condor, Turkey Vulture, and Black Vulture.

Condors are huge and big enough to make folks do a double-take, but out side of coastal CA and some reintroduction locations in the Grand Canyon, you're not going to see them. They are just under 4' long (beak tip to tail tip when laid on their backs), but their standing height is probably about 30" or so.

Turkey Vulture is the common North American vulture you can see pretty much anywhere in the contiguous U.S. and southern Canada. Their total length is about 27"; I'd put their standing height (based on some photos of mine) at 18".

Black Vulture is the other common vulture in the Southeastern U.S., these are even a bit smaller than Turkey Vultures, but mostly because they have a shorter tail: total length 25".

The vultures in South Carolina are no larger than anywhere else. If anything, Bergmann's rule might predict that they'd be a bit smaller. The difference might be, however, that there are more of them in the southern U.S. and therefore more opportunities to see one up close and on the ground as opposed to high overhead.

I have a long-running argument with a birding buddy that the South is birdier than the North. He says I'm wrong because there are a lot more species of birds that breed in the North than in the South (e.g., all those boreal forest warblers). I say the abundance of multiple big, conspicuous species in the South means that folks actually see and notice birds more readily. In a place like coastal South Carolina, folks are seeing lots of Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, Wood Storks, Brown Pelicans, Anhingas, Ospreys, Bald Eagles, plus geese, cormorants, ibises, and, as mentioned, lots of close-up vultures. In Upstate New York where I cut my teeth on birding, we'd occasionally see a Great Blue Heron or a Turkey Vulture, but that was it for the big, showy birds.

All of which means that I think the visual perception of size is distorted for a lot of folks when they see some big-ish birds close-up, and it causes folks to interpret those birds as much larger than they really are.
 
This thing was right on the other side of my passenger window and I could see it's shoulders and collar bone. I might have thought it was bigger than it actually was but it was a big ass prehistoric looking thing regardless, I was in awe. The one that swooped me while I was in the lounge chair on my deck was about 12 feet above me. It's wing span was wider than I was tall and I'm 5'4".

Speaking of pterosaurs, I was just in my living room 30 minutes ago sitting in Big Orange and looking out my floor to ceiling windows. As I talked I saw a huge heron fly by that looked exactly the way pterasaurs look in the movies, from the profile view it's legs looked a reptilian tail.

Ok, I just went out and measured the height of the edge of my passenger window to the ground. It's 40 inches. Maybe we have some cryptid condors here or the vultures just eat very well and grow big. No one else on the road seemed to pay them any attention and I've seen the big vultures/condors since then, all the time living on the river. One was perched up in an elbow of an oak tree behind my condo watching my cat one day. It was massive. I just thought these were the turkey vultures everyone was talking about and didn't pay them any further attention. If I can get a pic of one, I'll PM it to you Shrike.
 
Last edited:
Jodie said:
Maybe we have some cryptid condors here or the vultures just eat very well and grow big.
Click to expand...

No, you just had a close-up view that made you think it was bigger than it actually was. There are no vultures standing 40" tall in South Carolina, and no condors that tall either.

Photo of CA Condor with two women of apparent average size. The condor appears no taller than about half the women's height. I'd say 65" women = condor standing no more than about 32".
 
Could it be that some people are using the shadow of the flying bird to estimate it's size, we had a small farm next to us years ago and once in a while turkey vultures from the state forest would fly over, I was mowing the grass once and one of them flew over me, I watched the shadow on the ground and it was about the same size as a two seat beechcraft, I have to say it was a bit nerve racking seeing something that big fly right over ya.
 
I tell you what Shrike, as close as these were I don't think I was mistaken but could have been. The shoulder was even with the road so that wouldn't explain it. As soon as I see one with something next to it for scale I'll snap you a pic.
 
I once was standing on a shore in Saskatchewan in fall as a Sandhill Crane took flight overhead. It probably helped that the scene looked like something straight out of a paleozoic textbook, barren and rocky, but if I hadn't known better, I'd have said "pterosaur." The thing was huge, slow, and the experience otherworldly. I have no real idea of how large it was, but it certainly was the biggest flying animal I'd ever seen at that point by so much that I could have exaggerated easily, lacking references.

Not to say I did think it was a pterosaur, nor would I give credit to any such sighting, but I can certainly connect with the feeling. I mean, that was in 1977, and it still gives me chills.
 
I think the pterosaur would be an easy thing to misidentify but it's still fun to read about them.

Now I'm going to be noticing vultures everywhere I go just to see if my eyes fooled me. :)
 
People forget "The Old Fisherman Rule": The first time you see a wild animal it always looks bigger than it is. Old fisherman always have a story about the one that got away, and it's always the biggest fish they've ever seen. When you talk to the other guys on the boat they usually laugh and say it was big - but not that big.

The those times I've first seen wild animals they've always seemed larger than they are. Bobcats, Golden Eagles, Western Diamondback rattlesnakes, and critters like them seemed huge. I think it's a perception thing, maybe the brain needs to add them into the catalog, so it sucks in all kinds of details without rational perspective.

True story: I'm hiking high on a ridge here in Central California. I come across huge, three-toe'd footprints from a bird. First thought is an Ostrich has escaped, and is roaming the park. A little ways down the trail I hear movement in the trees to my left. I see this prehistoric, red-brown face staring back at me from ten feet away. My first honest thought? Dinosaur! He seemed to be at least 6-feet tall (remember the rule).
Then I relaxed and took a better look. It was a turkey. He was standing on a rise which made him look tall. I didn't know there were wild turkeys where I live. So I learned something that day that began to change my mind about cryptids. Well meaning people can fool themselves with incomplete information.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom