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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 (4,375 Views)
lamna
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GlarnBoudin
Feb 12 2018, 05:23 PM
Never said that they were fully-grown when they went down the river. I meant when they were large enough to fend for themselves - ergo, when they're just fairly large.

Furthermore, reports of giant eels *do* exist from across Britain - the idea is that these things use multiple lakes and lochs to breed, with Loch Ness being just one place.
Plus, Loch Ness' lack of life could make it a very useful nursery - such a bare ecosystem would mean that these hypothetical eels would be largely unchallenged, aside from by European and conger eels.

That said, I'd agree that it'd be more likely to see this creature in a different area - say, in fjords of Iceland.
I don't think one of the birthplaces of modern zoology would miss a large fish.

And the Loch is poor in life just because of its geography. It's very deep and has very steep walls, hence very little area for water plants to grow in. Plants need sunlight, and can't really grow any deeper than 4.5 metres (15 feet) down.

Loch Ness is really, really deep. Its average depth is 132 metres (433 feet) and its deepest point is 226.96 metres (744.6 feet). There are no hydrothermal vents or and very little "marine" snow to sustain a deep water ecology. Loch Ness contains a massive amount of water, but most of it is useless for animal and plant life.

Imagine you had a building as tall as a skyscraper, but it only had one floor in it. Inside would be a huge space, but only a few people could make use of it, because it has limited living space.
Edited by lamna, Feb 12 2018, 06:25 PM.
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Regarding Sheather's statement, I actually remember seeing this seminar done by someone with a background in forensics.
He pointed out that in Native American legends, Sasquatch are always sapient; it could be that things like it simply don't want to be found.

That, or it could be something very simple - people see what they want to believe. Nowadays, when we see something, we don't really care - we just assume that it's something totally mundane. Nobody really believes in cryptids anymore - hence, nobody really sees them.
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lamna
Feb 12 2018, 06:20 PM
GlarnBoudin
Feb 12 2018, 05:23 PM
Never said that they were fully-grown when they went down the river. I meant when they were large enough to fend for themselves - ergo, when they're just fairly large.

Furthermore, reports of giant eels *do* exist from across Britain - the idea is that these things use multiple lakes and lochs to breed, with Loch Ness being just one place.
Plus, Loch Ness' lack of life could make it a very useful nursery - such a bare ecosystem would mean that these hypothetical eels would be largely unchallenged, aside from by European and conger eels.

That said, I'd agree that it'd be more likely to see this creature in a different area - say, in fjords of Iceland.
I don't think one of the birthplaces of modern zoology would miss a large fish.

And the Loch is poor in life just because of its geography. It's very deep and has very steep walls, hence very little area for water plants to grow in. Plants need sunlight, and can't really grow any deeper than 4.5 metres (15 feet) down.

Loch Ness is really, really deep. Its average depth is 132 metres (433 feet) and its deepest point is 226.96 metres (744.6 feet). There are no hydrothermal vents or and very little "marine" snow to sustain a deep water ecology. Loch Ness contains a massive amount of water, but most of it is useless for animal and plant life.

Imagine you had a building as tall as a skyscraper, but it only had one floor in it. Inside would be a huge space, but only a few people could make use of it, because it has limited living space.
Makes me wonder about the spec potential for an alternate Loch Ness with hydrothermal vents in it.

I don't believe any cryptids exist. Even rare deep sea animals like beaked whales, oarfish, giant squid, colossal squid and megamouth sharks wash up on beaches to be found. If there were any large deep sea animals left undiscovered, a carcass would have washed up and been discovered if nothing else.
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Feb 12 2018, 06:55 PM
I don't believe any cryptids exist. Even rare deep sea animals like beaked whales, oarfish, giant squid, colossal squid and megamouth sharks wash up on beaches to be found. If there were any large deep sea animals left undiscovered, a carcass would have washed up and been discovered if nothing else.
...Except they don't. IIRC, oarfish are the only ones of the animals you listed that wash up on beaches, and even then it's really, really rare. IIRC, giant squid have never washed ashore, and shark carcasses tend to sink, ruling them out quickly.
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GlarnBoudin
Feb 12 2018, 07:13 PM
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Feb 12 2018, 06:55 PM
I don't believe any cryptids exist. Even rare deep sea animals like beaked whales, oarfish, giant squid, colossal squid and megamouth sharks wash up on beaches to be found. If there were any large deep sea animals left undiscovered, a carcass would have washed up and been discovered if nothing else.
...Except they don't. IIRC, oarfish are the only ones of the animals you listed that wash up on beaches, and even then it's really, really rare. IIRC, giant squid have never washed ashore, and shark carcasses tend to sink, ruling them out quickly.
Dead sharks wash up on beaches all the time. I know of at least one case of a giant squid that washed up in Kaikoura. And many beaked whales are only known from washed up carcasses.
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Feb 11 2018, 11:10 PM
LittleLazyLass
Feb 11 2018, 10:36 PM
Didn't that episode focus on the greenland shark?
no, that focus was in the final season.
But the episode did seem to conclude Greenland sharks could be behind Nessie reports. I think that could well be true to at least some degree. Though, as I said before, "Loch Ness Monster" is more of a blanket term for whatever strange things people have seen in Loch Ness rather than a reference to a specific species. So while Greenland sharks could explain some accounts, I doubt it is only Greenland sharks and nothing else.

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Personally I feel like when talking about cryptids people tend to have two very different mindset (of course there is variation as with all opinions, but generally people I meet fall into two camps); people who think of the more grounded side of the cryptid definition when they hear the word including things such as displaced animals, animals which are od but perfectly logical, or not-as-extinct-as-we-thought animals (Britains big cats, Komodo dragons, and Thylacines respectively) and the camp of people who think of mystical monsters when they hear the word cryptid (mothman, chubacabra, Jeresy Devil).
I am rather skeptical of things like mothman, chupacabras and Jersey Devils, though I think there was likely a basis of fact to the accounts. Probably there were some sightings of far less fantastical creatures (e.g. large owls in mothman's case, mangy dogs in the chupacabra's and so on) and exaggerations and embellishments produced far-fetched tall tales about fantastical monsters.
I generally remain on the "more grounded side", as you put it. I think there probably still are many species of animals not yet officially discovered but I think those yet to be discovered animals will still nonetheless turn out to be ordinary animals even if sometimes quite surprising ones.
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Regarding Sheather's statement, I actually remember seeing this seminar done by someone with a background in forensics.
He pointed out that in Native American legends, Sasquatch are always sapient; it could be that things like it simply don't want to be found.
This was always the way I saw it. They're (supposed for the sake of argument they're real) almost certainly the smartest organisms on earth, alongside us, and if they wanted to avoid us I recon they'd be better at it than just about anything. Additionally, once again supposing they exist, once one does royally fuck up and provide us undeniable proof, suddenly there's no shortage of encounters and videos/pictures (ones that suddenly are worth taking a lot more seriously) putting it on some magical pedestal away from everything else.
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Even considering if they are sapient, its not like humans haven't combed every part of the earth at one point. They'd either have to be living in underground or be purely nomads for... some reason.

If they were sapient then I doubt they'd not be seen even more! The possibility of a bigfoot that would try to show themselves to the world is an inevitability imo if they were sapient.
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I see no reason why it's impossible they could be nomadic and unwilling to make contact.
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We should be very wary of saying "we know everything already". We clearly don't.

That statistic you hear about how we know more about the moon than the ocean: I always thought it was BS, but listening to an oceanographer explain why it's not was fascinating. Basically, we have explored the surface 50m of the oceans with scuba gear and (some of) the sea floors with subs. The surface range is now extending thanks to new scuba gear that lets you go down to 100m. But that still leaves a huge gap in the middle. That there could be large interesting and unknown species in the seas that are currently unknown is far from impossible. Yeah, fishing nets and sonar and all that make it harder and harder, but still not impossible. In 2016, a 24ft specimen of a new species of beaked whale washed up in Alaska, for example.


And even outside the oceans, there's still space, just not much of it. Given that over 13000 new species are discovered each year, it's still possible to find something. Yes, I know, half of those species are insects, and many of them are just splitting existing species into smaller groups. But, still, it only takes one of those...

BUT I agree that, as Sheather says, it's much easier to find evidence now than ever before, and most cryptids don't have a lot to them. But that just means the burden of proof higher now, not that everything has already been found.




More on Orang Pendek - I'd forgotten this bit until I looked it up again. It probably already is extinct, in fact it was probably extinct long before Europeans ever heard of it: it was probably Homo Floresiensis. Sumatra is close to Flores, and Flores has it's own mythology called Ebu Gogo, which is described very similarly to Orang Pendek. This just gives more grounding to the cryptid, though, and some (not many) are still suggesting H. Floresiensis is still alive. It's not likely.

But, with that in mind, how many cryptids could be a similar cultural echo of an animal we know to be extinct?
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Well, that depends on whether you mean cryptids or just myths in general. The Maori of New Zealand had the Pouakai, which is almost universally agreed to have been the Haast's eagle, and likewise the original Thunderbird of Native American mythology (as opposed to the cryptozoological version) may have been based on folk memories of teratorns.
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Hmm, well yeah, there are lots of theories about cultural memories in mythology, but I'm wondering specifically about cryptids. Then again, where do you draw the line between cryptozoology and mythology. The former can be fantastical, while the latter can often be very reasonable, so...
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LittleLazyLass
Feb 12 2018, 10:23 PM
I see no reason why it's impossible they could be nomadic and unwilling to make contact.
I would say it's highly, highly unlikely that an entire sapient species lives hidden from us and the entire society has somehow had enough contact with our world that there are regular sightings and "supposed" footage, but not so much that we know anything about this entire sapient society.

Especially unlikely that not one member of the species/faction has attempted to make actual decent contact within recent (last century or so) history.

EDIT: AND that they apparently live in the US, since that's where most sighting I know of are found, while still not being found AND that they're also, like, bigger than humans (which, at minimum, requires a LOT of food and a LOT of space to have that food grow).
Edited by Bob-The-Seagull-King, Feb 13 2018, 12:27 AM.
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The whowhie of aboriginal mythology is said to be a giant man-eating goanna of 20 feet long, but has 6 legs instead of 4 and a frog-like head. Not exactly megalania, but 50,000 years of folklore might distort it.
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This makes me wonder what people think of the Patterson–Gimlin film?
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