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What cryptids might be real?

What I think is really cool are the things that would have been considered cryptids if anyone had thought of them, like the 5-foot frugivorous monitor lizard!

Like many 'new discoveries", this animal was well known to the locals, but hadn't been cataloged by science.

Of the true cryptids, I have to think that a whopping huge goanna (spelling?) in the Outback would be the most likely. The Aborigines claim there are big ones out there, or were in their grandfathers' time anyway. And I look at all those camels as a lot of meat with no apparent predators, and I wonder...

Sure would be fun to find, wouldn't it?
 
Correa Neto said:
Call me a close-minded radical denialist, but I would say zero.
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Agreed. Actually finding a new species takes careful study of the known species, to the point where you can draw them more or less accurately from memory. Then you spend a lot of time figuring out where to look--examining habitats (or, in my case, outcrops), looking for where in the habitat to look, etc., based on knowledge of related species. Then you go to the site and take samples (photos, specimens, rocks). Then you go back to the lab and pour over the stuff until you can draw THAT stuff from memory. Then you compare what you've found with what you have, in excruciating detail. There's a reason I focus on drawing: I was trained that that's the way to really look at something. Sure, you can take a photo, but drawing it forces you to think about what you're seeing in much more fine detail, which is necessary for taxonomy. The line drawings in monographs are useful for interpretation, yes (I defy anyone to look at the photos of a Cambrian Explosion critter and reproduce the line drawings in the monographs), but they're also a tool for extremely accurate description.

The process is long, it's tedious, it requires a lot of effort, it requires you to read thousands of pages of the most arcane text anyone has ever even conceived of (seriously, scientists think this stuff is too tedious to put into regular journals), most of it occurs in stuffy offices where the most dangerous thing is the coffee maker (seriously, scientists get some REALLY weird ideas about coffee)--it's nothing like what a Bigfoot advocate would have you believe. You won't be trampsing through the woods with your buddies; you'll be spending evenings looking at photos and tracking down references. Frankly, almost everyone will find this sort of thing mind-numbingly boring. It takes a unique person to do taxonomy.

The rewards are far greater, though. The thing about focusing on reality is, the skills are transferable in almost every case. The skills you learn in examining species allow you to notice--and, more importantly, remember--nuances of morphology that most miss. Name a single cryptozoologist that has revised a single clade due to their research. In contrast, I can't name anyone who's named more than a handful of species that hasn't. Most revise taxa outside of the clade they work with--for example, a professor of mine that focused on decapod paleontology also developed a morphospace model for decapod evolution, revising our understanding of the mechanisms by which these animals evolved. Gould studied mollusks, and changed how we view evolution itself. You also get to have fun moments like I had yesterday, when you see something that to others is perfectly ordinary, and suddenly numerous connections click into place and you can see the history of the groups spread out before you.

That paragraph isn't off topic, really. Those clicks are fitting organisms into their evolutionary framework, allowing one to predict what organisms are possible. Cryptozoologists don't work that way--they assume something exists, then try to find evidence. A real taxonomist already HAS the evidence.

Think of it this way: Cryptozoologists are Barney Stinson. What you're asking is "Which of his pickup lines might be true?"

Miss_Kitt said:
Of the true cryptids, I have to think that a whopping huge goanna (spelling?) in the Outback would be the most likely. The Aborigines claim there are big ones out there, or were in their grandfathers' time anyway. And I look at all those camels as a lot of meat with no apparent predators, and I wonder...
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I'd put that in a different category, for two reasons. First, the Outback isn't actually all that well explored--the locals aren't exactly thrilled about us outsiders poking around (for very good reasons--look what happened last time!). So there's actually room for there to be undiscovered critters out there. Second, large goannas aren't exactly unlikely. It's completely implausible that a plesiosaur lived in a lake for...well, however long Loch Ness has been cut off, or for an African ape to be walking around the New World (outside of us, obviously). A large goanna, in an area that has lots of goannas? Sure. Add in the various environmental factors that can lead to increased lizard size (the Island Effect for one, though it applies more broadly than the name suggests), and yeah, sure, it's perfectly plausible. If I recall correctly it's happened before--giant lizards (not dinosaurs, but actual lizards, in so far as the term has any meaning anyway) have been found in the fossil record.
 
smartcooky said:
Hmmm. Does a creature, known to have existed but which becomes extinct, qualify as a cryptid if people then claim to still see it?

And what if it is then actually rediscovered and its existence confirmed?

This happened with a fish called a Coelocanth. They were once known only from the fossil record; believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous, until a fisherman caught one off the east coast of South Africa in 1938.
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Not in my opinion. It's just a range extension, something that we deal with all the time. And if you think the Coelocanth range extension is impressive, you should see some of them for mollusks!
 
The various large cat cryptids are probably the most likely, but still very unlikely to be found to actually exist.

The stories about feral panthers and other big cats in the Australian outback are fairly easy to find, but the evidence is always curiously lacking. That and the fact that we have a real feral domestic cat population that could easily be mistaken at a distance for a larger cat species probably contributes to the longevity of the stories.

All the rest are pretty much just bunk.
 
Miss_Kitt said:
.........Of the true cryptids, I have to think that a whopping huge goanna (spelling?) in the Outback would be the most likely. The Aborigines claim there are big ones out there, or were in their grandfathers' time anyway. ........
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There is already a huge goanna (monitor lizard), well known in the outback. The perentie. It is big, up to 8 feet long, and big enough to take down adult kangaroos (and it has a poisonous bite, too). There are rumours of examples up to 11 or 12 feet long, but no evidence, indeed, there is plenty of evidence that 8' is the exception.

Is this not what you were talking about, or are you thinking of some altogether bigger creature, like the 5.5m long megalania, which used to live there and was extant when the aboriginals arrived?

Mike
 
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We periodically hear about someone trying to resurrect the thylacine. Lets just say the practicality of such an endevour is quite different from the dream. I don't hold any hope for such a resurrection.

Would be damn cool though.
 
nvidiot said:
We periodically hear about someone trying to resurrect the thylacine. Lets just say the practicality of such an endevour is quite different from the dream. I don't hold any hope for such a resurrection.

Would be damn cool though.
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True, but a complete gene sequence is a vital first step, and that appears to be well on the way to being taken.
 
Miss_Kitt said:
What I think is really cool are the things that would have been considered cryptids if anyone had thought of them, like the 5-foot frugivorous monitor lizard!

Like many 'new discoveries", this animal was well known to the locals, but hadn't been cataloged by science.

Of the true cryptids, I have to think that a whopping huge goanna (spelling?) in the Outback would be the most likely. The Aborigines claim there are big ones out there, or were in their grandfathers' time anyway. And I look at all those camels as a lot of meat with no apparent predators, and I wonder...

Sure would be fun to find, wouldn't it?
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That's likely cultural memories of Megalania. Though the current day Perentie is pretty big, not big enough to take on a camel though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perentie
 
I consider Ivorybills and Thylacines to be cryptids because people report seeing them but repeated attempts to confirm their persistence have fallen short.

Animals like okapis, gorillas, and saolas were not cryptids because there was no problem of repeated, failed attempts to find them. They just happen to live in remote places that weren't well explored until recently.

Coelocanth - not a cryptid because no one was looking for it.

As for giant squid, here's something I posted on them some time ago:

“Giant squid have spawned mariner's tales for centuries, but some people mistakenly think they were finally discovered by science a few years ago - not so. Steenstrup appears to have published the first description of giant squid in 1857, and there have been literally hundreds of specimens examined since then. What's more, Aristotle wrote of giant squid in the 4th Century B.C., and Pliny the Elder provides a description of a specimen examined in the 1st Century. Wikipedia provides the references for those last items as follows:
• ^ Aristotle. N.d. Historia animalium.
• ^ Pliny. N.d. Naturalis historia.
When Aristotle and Pliny are the references for something, then "science" has known about that something for a long time. The thing that was a recent discovery related to giant squid is that a live one was photographed in the wild for the first time in 2004. Very cool - yes. Cryptid - no.”
 
Camel Spiders? (Or are they just misidentifed known species?)
ABCs in the UK possibly, but not jaguars or panthers...
 
ellindsey said:
Not cryptid at all, although their size and abilities are often wildly exaggerated.
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True......but still a damn good reason to take good care about how you sleep out under the stars in a desert! :eye-poppi

Mike
 
Heuvelmans wrote two books that I read a while back. "In the Wake of the Sea Serpents" and "On the Track of Unknown Animals." Both of these stoked my young person interest (subsequent to my reading of Gardner Soule's "The Maybe Monsters," "The Mystery Monsters," and "Trail of the Abomniable Snowman").

I cannot say for certain if any alleged cryptid will be actually discovered by science and catalogued, but I can hope. (I am an optimist--that there are further large creatures (and small) still waiting to be identified and catalogued by scientists.)

There are some of these claims for sea creatures that I find intriguing. Long-necked (excess of six feet in the neck) pinnipeds; claimed archaeocete-type critters; re-discovery of potential Steller's Sea Cow survivals; and so on.
 
Since I posted, I was thinking about one other potential survival from a while back, the giant shark Megalodon.

Back in September 2012 on a local TV station, they were broadcasting a syndicated show on unsolved mysteries (produced in Canada, for young people--2007 was the date of the original show in the copyright section at the end), and it talked about giant sharks, and the sighting by Zane Grey and his son in the early 1930s (two separate sightings). They actually interviewed Zane Grey’s son for the program. It was off the coast of California, about 100 miles or so south west of Los Angeles.

There is also a discussion forum called "monsterfishkeepers.com" that has a thread about Megalodon sightings in the 20th century, including about finding Megalodon teeth dredged from the bottom of the Pacific that were dated to 11,000 and 24,000 YBP. I am not yet able to post a URL link, but enterprising readers should be able to locate the thread I am speaking about via Web searching.
 
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