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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 (4,374 Views)
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Yiqi15
Feb 12 2018, 05:34 PM
GlarnBoudin
Feb 12 2018, 05:23 PM
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.
The problem with that is the Loch ness eels would cause the loch to be much more biodiverse with their presence. You'd have more predators like pikes and sturgeons preying on the eels, and the eels would get to feed on other smaller creatures. Look at wolves for instance; once you introduce them to Yellowstone, the whole park's ecosystem improves drastically.
except that some animals do go into energy-poor areas to give birth...tropical sharks venture to remote shallows far from both other sharks and coral ecosystems, for example. heck, in South Africa, one type of ocean-going fish swims upstream all the way to a couple of remote lakes....and nothing feeds on them, and they don't eat until they go back to the sea.


and given that wolves used to exist in Yellowstone, its not a good example; introducing boars and weasels to New Zealand, maybe.
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A few species of sharks can tolerate freshwater, and their are even a couple that live in freshwater longterm.

Sleeper sharks in general and Greenland sharks in particular cannot do this. They would have swim up a very shallow river (sleeper sharks don't like being near the surface) and then into a lake with very little food which would kill it within hours or days.

The Loch Ness monster is two things

1. People misidentifying natural and man made phenomena, from otter tails to boat wakes, to stone and logs.
2. Hoaxes.

Very rarely seals might make their way into the Loch, but that's the closest you can get to a monster. If the lake was capable of supporting such large animals it probably would already have a population of seals, as their are across the northern hemisphere.
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The idea that many cryptids are based on extinct megafauna is iffy to me. The Wakynian (thunderbird) is clearly a supernatural entity embodying storms, that is simply depicted as an eagle.

It's like saying Zeus or Thor were real people.
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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.

I tend to think how strange it would be a sapient species being of almost solitary habits since the common thing is to be of quite social habits, not without contact with other similar beings but that have not tried to interact with curiosity is very odd.

As well, I have always considered perhaps that bears have played an important role in the sighting, being animals capable of adopting a bipedal posture, and in very few and rare cases being able to walk in that position, a person watching this at a distance and who has not seen this behavior turns out to be a very propitious mixture for a bad identification, of course, I do not think that would be the absolute answer, but maybe a common cause.


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ZoologicalBotanist
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If (and this is a big if here) sasquach does exist, its probably better that it remains a cryptid, and not a confirmed sapient/sentient species. Humans have done terrible things to other humans, so i can guess some people would have no problem doing some of those same things to other humanoid species capable of thought and emotion.
Edited by ZoologicalBotanist, Feb 13 2018, 11:46 AM.


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Carlos
Feb 13 2018, 08:57 AM
The idea that many cryptids are based on extinct megafauna is iffy to me. The Wakynian (thunderbird) is clearly a supernatural entity embodying storms, that is simply depicted as an eagle.

It's like saying Zeus or Thor were real people.
That's actually a problem I have with a lot of cryptozoological accounts. They never really seem to understand the culture that they're borrowing from. In a lot of cases, these creatures weren't thought of as literal animals but as gods or god-like beings that happened to have animal attributes. They were seen as religious, not physical, entities, and to try to explain them in the context of real-world biology is usually pointless.
The Thunderbird isn't a literal giant bird, it's the personification of storms and natural disasters. The Mokele-Mbembe isn't a living dinosaur or a prehistoric rhino, it's a cultural representation of dangerous jungle rivers. Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the various other ape-men aren't real species of hominid, they're products of the universal "wild-man" archetype representing the gap between man and nature (which even shows up in European culture, by the way-- think of the Greek god Pan).
So the history of cryptozoology is, to put it bluntly, also a history of cultural appropriation. When people give a mythical being the status of "cryptid", they rarely give much thought to what it originally represented.
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I don't think they are intentionally racist (well, maybe some of them are). They simply aren't taking a close enough look
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I never said that, did I? All I said is that cryptozoologists don't understand the true meaning of the mythological and religious figures they cite as "evidence" of undiscovered animals.
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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.

Who ever said anything about a society? Like I said, my stance is that they'd be wholly nomadic and seemingly largely solitary sapients with a way of thinking very clearly fundamentally unlike our own. We have a sample size of one, ourselves, and we're projecting that onto a hypothetical creature?

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This makes me wonder what people think of the Patterson–Gimlin film?

Been wondering when that'd come up. I've yet to come to a conclusion; in general, I feel I lean towards feeling it seems legit, but I don't want to hastily accept it as some sort of smoking gun. Nonetheless, it fascinates me - I'm either looking at one of if not the most amazing events ever captured on footage, or possibly the greatest hoax of all time.

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Feb 12 2018, 11:21 PM
But, with that in mind, how many cryptids could be a similar cultural echo of an animal we know to be extinct?

It is my hypothesis that the South American mapinguari exists as a cultural memory of a late-surviving ground sloth, which may have persisted up until a thousand to a few hundred years ago or even more recently. The tamer version of this cryptid (the exaggerated one is a giant torso with jaws) is literally is described like a ground sloth and natives have affirmed that illustrations of ground sloths match the creature's appearance. It is among the most probable cryptids in my opinion, but the animal is probably extinct today.

I agree that the Orang-Pandek is likely to have also been a real creature and quite possibly Homo floriensis, or else some variation of the formerly more diverse orangutan tribe which previously did have large terrestrial representatives.

The Patterson/Gimlin footage doesn't look like a real animal to me, it looks like a man in a costume. While we can't discount that a bigfoot could walk in the exact same way, it really does look like a human gait, and I don't find it convincing.
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Scrublord
Feb 13 2018, 11:52 AM
The Thunderbird isn't a literal giant bird, it's the personification of storms and natural disasters. The Mokele-Mbembe isn't a living dinosaur or a prehistoric rhino, it's a cultural representation of dangerous jungle rivers. Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the various other ape-men aren't real species of hominid, they're products of the universal "wild-man" archetype representing the gap between man and nature (which even shows up in European culture, by the way-- think of the Greek god Pan).
This of course conveniently ignores the fact that many people in this day and age, both natives and foreigners alike, report seeing the creatures.

And the whole "well uh, they're racist cause of um, cultural appropriation or whatever" is pretty ironic when one considers the skeptics are the ones who sneer at what people from other cultures say, dismissing it all as just a bunch of ignorant "superstitions".
Of course, people who actually care about proper arguments rather than immature mud slinging avoid "people who think different to me are racist" arguments and instead argue for or against ideas based on the evidence for or against them instead.
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Patterson–Gimlin footage is weird. A lot of people find it very convincing looking, and I think I would agree with that. To me, it looks like a real non-human animal and I'd say it's a pretty good special effect. Lots of other people say it looks like an obvious fake.

Obviously it is a fake. Concoct whatever stories you like about bigfoot being as smart as humans, and being nomadic and secretive. But that doesn't match with the behaviour seen in this film. The Bigfoot in that film seems pretty easy to see, calmly walking away from the person filming. If Bigfoot was that easy to see, it wouldn't have made it undetected past the era of the video camera, let alone the era of CCTV, camera traps and mobile phones.

If bigfoot being implausible isn't enough, and you want something more to discredit it the film, check out those titties.

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The creature in the footage has large, firm breasts. That's not what we would expect from an ape. Their breasts are pretty saggy and flat. Without bras and other support, that's what human breasts often end up looking like too.

But it was part of the story from Albert Ostman, one of the most sensational bigfoot sightings, and one that occurred prior to the footage being shot.
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Feb 12 2018, 08:20 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.
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.
To be fair, who exactly would believe this undeniable proof? There's also the possibility that they already had those fuckups in the past - that is, famous Bigfoot sightings.

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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).

Did... did you just forget that Canada exists? Or that most of the areas where Bigfoot sightings occur are in deep, thick boreal forests, for that matter? IIRC, that sort of environment is extremely poor for preserving bodies, mostly due to the soil acidity. Also, I doubt that it would have a diet exactly like humans - my money's on it being able to take on tougher vegetation than any human, along with being able to stomach more 'aged' carrion, negating the need for fire.

Plus, it could be that if Bigfoot's real, populations used to live all over the US, but development of land by humans caused their populations to fragment, with inbreeding and lack of food killing them off.

Adding onto Tartarus' point, didn't you do exactly what you were complaining about literally one thread page ago, Scrublord?

As for sea monsters, I'm with Niedfaru. Contrary to what Rebirth seems to think, giant squid simply do not wash up on shore, and nobody's ever seen a dead megamouth shark at all, especially since shark carcasses sink. Oarfish are a bit of an oddity because they're known to head up to the surface on occasion, and beaked whales need to surface for air; however, keep in mind that even whales can be so horribly decayed that nobody can really recognize them. (See: Globsters, Trunko)
There's also shit like a 9-foot tagged great white being apparently swallowed whole, sonar signals that don't match anything around, giant wounds on whales like enormous cookiecutter sharks, and suction cup scars on ships from something way too big to be any ordinary squid.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if these giant sea creatures are nothing more than buried bones by now, killed off by overfishing and/or by a shifting climate.
Edited by GlarnBoudin, Feb 13 2018, 06:41 PM.
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Feb 13 2018, 06:39 PM
LittleLazyLass
Feb 12 2018, 08:20 PM
Quote:
 
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.
To be fair, who exactly would believe this undeniable proof? There's also the possibility that they already had those fuckups in the past - that is, famous Bigfoot sightings.

Quote:
 
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).

Did... did you just forget that Canada exists? Or that most of the areas where Bigfoot sightings occur are in deep, thick boreal forests, for that matter? IIRC, that sort of environment is extremely poor for preserving bodies, mostly due to the soil acidity. Also, I doubt that it would have a diet exactly like humans - my money's on it being able to take on tougher vegetation than any human, along with being able to stomach more 'aged' carrion, negating the need for fire.

Plus, it could be that if Bigfoot's real, populations used to live all over the US, but development of land by humans caused their populations to fragment, with inbreeding and lack of food killing them off.

Adding onto Tartarus' point, didn't you do exactly what you were complaining about literally one thread page ago, Scrublord?

As for sea monsters, I'm with Niedfaru. Contrary to what Rebirth seems to think, giant squid simply do not wash up on shore, and nobody's ever seen a dead megamouth shark at all, especially since shark carcasses sink. Oarfish are a bit of an oddity because they're known to head up to the surface on occasion, and beaked whales need to surface for air; however, keep in mind that even whales can be so horribly decayed that nobody can really recognize them. (See: Globsters, Trunko)
There's also shit like a 9-foot tagged great white being apparently swallowed whole, sonar signals that don't match anything around, giant wounds on whales like enormous cookiecutter sharks, and suction cup scars on ships from something way too big to be any ordinary squid.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if these giant sea creatures are nothing more than buried bones by now, killed off by overfishing and/or by a shifting climate.
A megamouth shark washed up on a Philippines beach in 2015.
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Did... did you just forget that Canada exists? Or that most of the areas where Bigfoot sightings occur are in deep, thick boreal forests, for that matter? IIRC, that sort of environment is extremely poor for preserving bodies, mostly due to the soil acidity. Also, I doubt that it would have a diet exactly like humans - my money's on it being able to take on tougher vegetation than any human, along with being able to stomach more 'aged' carrion, negating the need for fire.

They are not supposed to be a kind of temperate dweller, and living around the west and east coast of america? I'm seeing that there are some sightings in Canada but the most focal encounter ones are in the US regions.

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and nobody's ever seen a dead megamouth shark at all, especially since shark carcasses sink

There was like dozens of specimens found dead and alive by fishermen and one washed up in the Philippines.



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