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Is there any cryptids that could be real?; Which cryptids could be real?
Topic Started: Feb 8 2018, 08:16 PM (4,377 Views)
Niedfaru
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Add to that the fact the Loch Ness has been searched numerous times over the years for signs of anything mysterious living there, with ever more advanced equipment and techniques, and every single search has come back with either "no" or "eh, maybe, but we can't prove it".

And, the origins of the story are incredibly dubious. Other than some probably unrelated tales in a nearby river, dating for the 6th Century, there's nothing until the late 1800s. And even if there's earlier sightings are related, given that there's been a castle on the shores of the Loch since the 13th Century, it's decidedly odd that no-one saw anything for over 1300 years.

Nessie may be the most famous lake cryptid, but she really is the most improbable.

For me, any cryptid that is to be remotely plausible needs to be something that is backed up by a number of factors, including a viable habitat and food source, a plausible method of origin in the area AND crucially, that modern sighting are consistent with earlier ones. For those few cryptids that could actually be a modern thing, like ABCs, that isn't so much of an issue, but most cryptids are not things you can blame on the exotic pet trade or poor zoo security.

So, yeah, I'm down with Orang Pendek, oversized reptiles and fish (assuming there is a viable food source) and such. But even there I'd be cautious, that for such things to remain undetected, there should be relatively few of them, and that makes them vulnerable. If they do exist, they may well go extinct before we confirm it, especially for something like Orang Pendek, that would be confined to shrinking habitat.

EDIT: Of course, that means I totally support people who keep looking. We aren't going to find anything if we stop looking. I just encourage those people to search with scientific rigour, not Discovery Channel editing.

EDIT 2: further research reveals Urquhart Castle to be even older, a previous fort on the same site going back to the C5th.
Edited by Niedfaru, Feb 10 2018, 11:52 AM.
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Scrublord
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Niedfaru
Feb 10 2018, 11:34 AM
If they do exist, they may well go extinct before we confirm it, especially for something like Orang Pendek, that would be confined to shrinking habitat.

If the Orang Pendek really is an undiscovered species of Sumatran ape, it might be extinct already. I don't know how long ago the last recorded sighting was, but if we take the sightings at face value it was probably never common.

As for the Loch Ness Monster, I will concede that at least a few of the people who claim to have seen the monster have probably seen something. However, even those sightings that do seem to describe animals can be attributed to such things as swimming deer, otters, diving birds, sturgeon, or even possibly the occasional shark or porpoise that inexplicably wanders into the lake.
Edited by Scrublord, Feb 10 2018, 02:48 PM.
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Feb 9 2018, 08:03 PM
Loch Ness is an awful place to go looking for bizarre endemics, be they plesiosaurs, seals or eels. You have to remember, the entirety of Scotland was buried under glaciers until very recently.
That's assuming they even are endemic. Loch Ness does connect to the sea via the river Ness so it could be a case of sea creatures that occasionally swim into freshwater (there's not a whole lot of creatures that can do that but we do have known examples, e.g. bull sharks, so its not unprecedented).
Additionally, "Loch Ness Monster" is a blanket term for various things people have seen in Loch Ness. So the identity could turn out to be more than one thing, perhaps ranging from the mundane (misidentified logs, otters, etc.) to the actually mysterious (one or more types of unknown aquatic animals).

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Not so much any appeal to authority as an acknowledgement that people who've studied animals extensively for long periods are less likely to mistake familiar creatures for supposedly extinct ones. Of course its possible for even scientists and park rangers to make mistaken observations, but it would be good to get a good reason why everyone is consistently imagining the same thing (and if one says something along the lines "they must be just seeing dogs, I know this because such and such have said it can't be thylacines" really is an appeal to authority, not to mention an argument from assumption fallacy).

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Do recently extinct animals that people still report seeing from time to time really deserve to be called cryptids?
Depends on how you define "cryptid". If you feel it should mean something that does not seem to match known species, then something like a surviving thylacine would not count as a cryptid. If you also allow "cryptid" to include known species presumed extinct, then it would count.
Also, this does pose the question of what to make of "cryptids" that seem to be just unknown variants of known species (e.g. unusually coloured tigers).
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@Scrublord: there are still good recorded sightings in the 1980s, and even one of those cryptozoology shows (Beast Hunters) have dredged some 21st century sightings

The rainforests of Kerinci Seblat are still quite well-preserved afaik
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To add to the discussion of whether or not recently extinct animal sightings count as cryptids, I will say it doesn't make much sense to say it. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the whole thing- Ivory Billed Woodpeckers have never been described as cryptids, so why Thylacines?

Not to mention the fact animals presumed to be extinct regularly turn up every once and a while, but I'm not sure any "cryptids" have ever been discovered properly, at least not recently (I guess you could argue that things like limbless birds of paradise could be considered a historic cryptid now proven to exist, in a different form).
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I don't see any reason not to include animals we think are extinct - the search for them fits nicely into the rest of cryptozoology on multiple levels, and many purely folklore derived cryptids get erroneously tied to real life prehistoric creatures anyway. This excerpt from Wikipedia also supports their inclusion as logical and within the spectrum:

Quote:
 
Cryptozoologists may consider any figure from folklore to be a "cryptid" (from the Greek κρύπτω, krypto, meaning "hide") after the term cryptozoology and meaning a 'hidden animal'. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun cryptid as "an animal whose existence or survival to the present day is disputed or unsubstantiated; any animal of interest to a cryptozoologist".[1] Some dictionaries and encyclopedias define the term "cryptid" as an animal whose existence is questionable.[2][3]

Also from Wikipedia, a man named George Eberhart attempted to clarify what is and is not a cryptid. Some parts of this are rather odd, but it's relevant nontheless:

Quote:
 
Cryptozoologist George M. Eberhart classifies ten types of mystery animals under the cryptozoological umbrella:[5][6]

  • Distribution anomalies (known animals reported outside their normal range, e.g. the anomalous big cats of the U.K.);
  • Undescribed, unusual, or outsized variations of known species (e.g. the giant anacondas reported from Amazonia or the spotted lions of East Africa);
  • Survivals of recently extinct species (e.g. the ivory-billed woodpecker presumed extinct c. 1960, the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), declared extinct in 1936, or the Steller's sea cow presumed extinct c. 1768, all of which are occasionally claimed to have survived to the present);
  • Survivals of species known only from the fossil record into modern times (e.g. the mokele-mbembe of central Africa, sometimes described as a living dinosaur);
  • Lingerlings, or survivals of species known from the fossil record much later into historical times than currently thought (e.g. the woolly mammoth, presumed extinct c. 12,000 BCE but occasionally purported to have survived into later eras);
  • Animals not known from the fossil record but related to known species (e.g. the Andean wolf or the striped manta-ray reported by William Beebe in the 1930s);
  • Animals not known from the fossil record nor related to any known species (e.g. North America's Bigfoot or most sea serpents);
  • Mythical animals with a zoological basis (e.g. the griffin, partly inspired by dinosaur fossils of Central Asia);
  • Seemingly paranormal or supernatural entities with some animal-like characteristics (e.g. Mothman, black dogs, vampires or some fairies from folklore);
  • Known hoaxes or probable misidentifications (e.g. the jackalope, an antlered rabbit, a popular hoax in taxidermy).

    Additionally, Eberhart argues for six exclusions from classification as a cryptid:

  • Insignificance. "Cryptids must be big, weird, dangerous or significant to humans in some way."
  • Lack of controversy. "Someone needs to observe a mystery animal and someone else needs to discredit the sighting. Cryptozoologists function as interventionists between witnesses and skeptical scientists."
  • Erratics. "The out-of-place alligator […] that turns up in an odd spot, undoubtedly through human agency, is not a zoological mystery […] [I]f someone discovers a new species of alligator that lives only in sewers, that is a different matter."
  • Bizarre humans (e.g. zombies)
  • Angels or demons […] "the paranormal or supernatural is admitted only if it has an animal shape (a werewolf sighting, which might involve a real dog or wolf, or a mystery canid)."
  • Aliens "[unless such extraterrestrials] arrived a long time ago and thus classify as residents."

  • A few things here stand out; the rule of insignificance would seem to contradict several of the examples used in the set of things that are cryptids (a giant woodpecker or striped manta ray does not significant a creature make); the inclusion of only animal-like paranormal creatures is rather arbitrary, though it does fit with excluding human cryptids; and lastly, the exclusion of aliens feels very random, though I don't at all agree with not counting them.

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but I'm not sure any "cryptids" have ever been discovered properly, at least not recently



Several animals we accept today like okapis, komodo dragons, platypuses, and gorilllas all fit the definition of cryptids before their existence was proven.
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Personally, I think that there might be credence for stuff like Champ and Nessie, along with lake monsters whose native 'turf' connects to the ocean.

I had this idea that maybe whatever these things are (Likely an eel or similar fish), they lay eggs or give birth or whatever at the mouth of the river that leads into the lake, then depart into the ocean. When the offspring hatch (Those who weren't eaten as eggs, anyway), they head upriver and into the lake, growing fairly slowly in an environment largely free of big predators like large sharks, dolphins, and orcas. When they're a fairly large size, they move downriver and into the ocean, where they finish their growth.
It'd explain why Lake Champlain at the very least doesn't have any more sightings of sea monsters - the major rivers that link the lake to the ocean have been dammed in several areas, barring the creatures from getting into the lake just as they do with eels. Hell, increased ocean pollution and overfishing probably do a number on them, too.

Alternatively, Champ could have been an animal that lived in Lake Champlain before the Ice Age when it was the Champlain Sea, becoming trapped as the landscape changed and walled them in and slowly dying off as their food supplies vanished. The more recent Champ sightings would be of the last few individuals or perhaps even the last one.
(As a note, most of the accounts of Champ portray a fairly small creature compared to a lot of portrayals - 12 to 9 feet seems to be the average estimate for most sightings.)
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Probably nothing to it given the incredibly low number of reports, but I remember back when I was in my big Sasquatch phase, the only other two hominid cryptids I gave any credence to were the aforementioned Orang Pendek and a small African one known as Agogwe. Here's an article on it. The reason I found it more convincing was rather than being some ten foot tall dangerous behemoth, it was only said to be a cryptic four foot tall forest creature. Given it's location in African Rainforests and this small size, I found it reasonable enough it could be a surviving australopith.

Nowadays, of course, I realize the existence of only three reports is rather telling, and being from a rainforest doesn't make it likely enough for us to miss to take it that seriously, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
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I also remember this idea that someone was talking about - namely, that in the Native American legends, Sasquatch were always described as a tribe of people, not animals.

Yes, it may be hard or even impossible for a species of large animal to hide for so long in that area...

But what about a group of people?
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I've always seen it that if Sasquatch is real, it must be on a similar level of intelligence to us, so I don't think that'd make a huge difference. A lot of reports and... "evidence" falls apart when you try to claim they're some sort of weird Homo sapiens, leaving little left to consider anyway.
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Loch Ness is connected to the sea by the River Ness, which meets the sea at Inverness, the biggest city in the Highlands. It's not massive, but it isn't a small place and it's been around for a long time.

I think they would have noticed a "Nessie run"

It seems like many, maybe even most cryptids depend on not really understanding the area they are supposed to live.
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I've become enamoured with the idea of living thylacines in New Guinea, which logically makes sense.

Problem is, the only anthropological cue comes from the "dobsegna", a creature I can't find information off outside cryptozoological sources. It at least resembles a thylacine, unlike many cryptids that are shoehorned into extinct animals, but it could very well be fabrication and at any rate mythological beings based on domestic dogs with nocturnal traits aren't uncommon.
Edited by Carlos, Feb 11 2018, 04:33 PM.
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I'm pretty sure New Guinea singing dogs would have outcompeted them.
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Thylacines occupied a different ecological niche than dogs, and their extinction appears to be unrelated.
Edited by Carlos, Feb 11 2018, 05:11 PM.
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