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| Is there any cryptids that could be real?; Which cryptids could be real? | |
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| Topic Started: Feb 8 2018, 08:16 PM (4,370 Views) | |
| hotpotato! | Feb 16 2018, 06:23 PM Post #121 |
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Big Scary Aliens
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Are there any cryptid potatoes? Can cryptids be plants? What if there were plants that no one knew existed? I want to become the first cryptobotanist! |
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| Tartarus | Feb 16 2018, 06:46 PM Post #122 |
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Prime Specimen
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I don't really get your point here. So if a specific descriptive term has not yet been coined, anything mentioned before that doesn't count as fitting said term even if it fulfills all the criteria? Sorry, but that makes no sense. Using that same logic one could claim, for example, that all dinosaur fossils found before 1842 were not really dinosaur fossils because the term "dinosaur" had not yet been coined. That would make no sense, and similarly it makes no sense to say that certain animals that would have fit every criteria to count as a cryptid prior to their official discovery somehow don't count as cryptids solely because the term had not yet been coined at the time. Actually that only reinforces the platypus' former cryptid status. One common feature of cryptids is being "ethnoknown", i.e. being a creature known about by people living in or near the region it lives in even though its existence is not officially scientifically recognised (indeed, some cryptozoologists have insisted that an undiscovered animal has to be ethnoknown to count as a "true" cryptid). The platypus was well known by the Aboriginal people, but if Europeans were told about these weird and wonderful creatures, odds are many would just dismiss it as just primitive, superstitious folklore, much like how many today dismiss creatures people from various cultures insist live in their region but have not yet been officially discovered. Overall, the platypus was an excellent example of a cryptid before it was officially discovered. |
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| Rodlox | Feb 16 2018, 06:50 PM Post #123 |
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Superhuman
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octopus trees and vampire plants...various sorts of predatory and nonpredatory plants surely qualify. |
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| Tartarus | Feb 16 2018, 06:52 PM Post #124 |
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Prime Specimen
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Yes there are some cryptid plants. Cryptobotany has not gotten nearly as much popularity as cryptozoology but it is a thing. Incidentally, on botanical cryptids, one argument working against them is that since plants are generally rooted to a single spot they can't really get away from anyone finding them, so discovering a plant cryptid should, theoretically, be easier than finding an animal cryptid. A point in their favour though, is that as long as it is not too "sensational" or "incredible" a plant it could get easily overlooked. Many people have a habit of seeing plants more as scenery than as noteworthy living things just as interesting as animals, so its quite possible someone could see undiscovered plants in the wild without even realising it. |
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| lamna | Feb 16 2018, 06:55 PM Post #125 |
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I think a lot of people are pushing regular animal discoveries into being former cryptids, and it doesn't fit. I want to share you a story about one of them to show how unlikely most cryptids are. For example, the Okapi. Stories about some kind of "congo zebra" bounced around during the late 19th century, and became reasonably well known from Henry Morton Stanley's writing about his travel in the Congo. It was at this stage, during the 1890's that you might be able to argue that this animal was a cryptid. Not long after, Harry Johnston, governor of Uganda was freeing some Efé "pygmies" from being sent to the west to be exhibited, and they told him about this animal, and provided him with a few scraps of physical evidence, a skull and some skin which he sent back to London in 1901. Harry Johnston then went on to gather trace evidence (footprints) discovering this animal was not a horse, but an even-toed ungulate. Eventually he was able to get a skin and a skeleton of this elusive animal. Then, in 1909 an American expedition set out to collect more specimens, and planned to bring some back to America alive for the Bronx Zoo. They managed to collect several specimens, and a live calf. The calf died quite rapidly, but was documented. You can still see the mounted skins from this expedition in the AMNH. ![]() I don't know the precise zoo to first revive a live Okapi, but London Zoo had theirs by 1930, and the Bronx Zoo's first okapi was obtained in 1937. By the 1960's they were being successfully bred, and they are now reasonably common zoo animals. ![]() The Okapi and other animals like it are often held up to show how their could still be large animals left to be discovered. But I think the story shows differently. It took a little over a decade for this animal to go from story to fact, another decade for it to become something science understood, and a few more for them to be on display for the world to see. The Okapi came from the closest thing to "darkest Africa" that ever existed. Deep in the interior of Africa, in rainforests barely explored by science at the time. But once it became clear their might be something to it, science descended on the region and learned all it could about the animal. If there was anything to any cryptids (especially terrestrial ones) then they would already be stuffed in museums and on display in zoos. Edited by lamna, Feb 16 2018, 06:58 PM.
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| Dragonthunders | Feb 16 2018, 07:52 PM Post #126 |
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The ethereal archosaur in blue
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Yeah, I did a mistake of what I was talking, I did not explain myself well. I was referring to a different context to be reason to not referr them as cryptid, based on the epoch and knowledge of the time in addition to the way in which the animal was discovered, unlike several cryptids, platypus were found, they were not simply spotted, samples were taken (several skins) that were considered as hoaxe only because it was a strange organism, considering that such an animal was not possible to exist for its paradoxical look, it is not as if they had been sighted and had simply made anecdotes of sightings and sketches. There was not a period of just seeing it a couple of times, there were not several other encounters without evidence, or the two skins were proved to be hoaxes, it was a misunderstanding by a group of people in the early days of global zoology investigation.
I don't think it would be a good analogy, cryptozoology does not assume a concrete group, and it is more a generic category for animals that we do not know if we are real or not, and this the main idea of my previous point was use the cryptid term into animals that in previous times had not been properly identified by the scientific community and were considered mysterious or hoax and after were deceptive as real later it seems inappropriate without the right context. |
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| GlarnBoudin | Feb 16 2018, 08:09 PM Post #127 |
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Disgusting Skin Fetishist
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...You overlook the fact that it still took roughly twenty years of someone actively searching for and researching it to get a substantial body of knowledge. Granted, compared to the millions of years we normally operate on, it's not much, but it's still a long fucking time. You also overlook that we a) find big species all the time, from the olinguito in South America to the saolo in Vietnam earlier, and b) there's still quite a few big, unexplored areas on this planet, including on land. Vale do Javari in Brazil, Tsingy National Park, northern Patagonia, the North Mountains in Colombia, the cave systems around Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, and Cape Melville in Australia, the latter of which is only 900 or so miles from Brisbane. |
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| Rodlox | Feb 17 2018, 01:18 AM Post #128 |
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Superhuman
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you know what I noticed about a lot of the locations in Finding Bigfoot? pretty much every one of them is in a place where hunting is prohibited. * Indian reservations * rural neighborhoods * national parks * military land there are exceptions, of course...but whether by accident or by design, the Bigfoots are no longer in places where its easy to kill them (that and they can cross roads a lot faster than normal cars are allowed to go on mountain roads and other such pathways) so, I don't know if the Congo was at the time still under Leopold and his security& repression, but whether it was or not, that's just different degrees of difficulty getting an okapi skin out of a country...you want to try your luck lugging a human-shaped body on military jurisdiction? |
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.---------------------------------------------. Parts of the Cluster Worlds: "Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP) | |
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| Rebirth | Feb 17 2018, 01:37 AM Post #129 |
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Adolescent
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The olinguito isn't a "big species", it's the smallest of all procyonids in fact. And most if not all the places you mention as "unexplored" are relatively small. Large endothermic species need large ranges to find adequate resources to survive. |
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| Rodlox | Feb 17 2018, 03:52 AM Post #130 |
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Superhuman
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so how did things like the saola manage? |
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.---------------------------------------------. Parts of the Cluster Worlds: "Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP) | |
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| Archeoraptor | Feb 17 2018, 04:22 AM Post #131 |
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"A living paradox"
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there is probably some interesting stuff let to discover but it won't fit the description of any known cryptic it will be a new animal, just that in the way we have discovered new species, so basically cryptics don't exist there may be just some animals out there we don't know about cool nonetheless but nothing "we already know because is a cryptic" Edited by Archeoraptor, Feb 17 2018, 04:24 AM.
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| Flisch | Feb 17 2018, 07:56 AM Post #132 |
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Superhuman
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This thread is a prime example of the human mind forming opinions first and justifying them later. Like, people believe in cryptids and then try to find any scrap of potential and circumstantial piece of pesudo-evidence to make a point that cryptids could, theoretically, exist, while playing down the points that speak against cryptids. |
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| Dragonthunders | Feb 17 2018, 10:02 AM Post #133 |
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The ethereal archosaur in blue
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You know, I hoped you did not include a video that was linked to a group which already with what we know is quite unreliable and would do everything possible to focus the evidence that bigfoot is real because of this, this is not take the discussion seriously. Also, as far I find, the person related to this work, David Paulides (Which is a cryptozoologist) as the correlations he has found with Missing 411 cases have been subject to criticism by the CSI (Committe for skeptical inquiry) because the disappearances really aren't out of place, it seems simply events easily explained by random normal causes, and that he has justified as mysterious and inexplicable, I mean, come on, the guy wrote 6 books about it without adress why they happened to these disappearances and everything is surronding bigfoot because yes. Glarn, at this point you have only taken evidence that tries to justify the existence of bigfoot, and it does not seem that you are seeing the evidence that disapproves it.
They are quite small bovines to tell the truth, is given the title of the first large mammal discovered in 50 years, but does not mean that it is a big bull sized animal. |
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Projects "Active" projects The Future is Far Welcome to the next chapters of the evolution of life on earth, travel the across the earth on a journey that goes beyond the limits, a billion years of future history in the making. The SE giants project Wonder what is the big of the big on speculative evolution? no problem, here is the answer Coming one day Age of Mankind Humanity fate and its possible finals. The Long Cosmic Journey The history outside our world. The alternative paths The multiverse, the final frontier... Holocene park: Welcome to the biggest adventure of the last 215 million years, where the age of mammals comes to life again! Cambrian mars: An interesting experiment on an unprecedented scale, the life of a particular and important period in the history of our planet, the cambric life, has been transported to a terraformed and habitable mars in an alternative past. Two different paths, two different worlds, but same life and same weirdness. My deviantart | |
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| lamna | Feb 17 2018, 10:08 AM Post #134 |
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Firstly, the saola is not a big animal. It is the size of a goat, not tiny, but this isn't a cape buffalo we're talking about there. Second, it's a very shy and retiring animal, it's not noisy it is mostly beneaht notice. Third, it's very rare. There are probably less than a thousand alive today. Fourth, reports of it may have been confused with the serow. Fifth, war. The forests of South East Asia are still filled with the mines and unexploded ordinance from the Indochina Wars of the 20th century. There are still around 80 million unexploded American bombs just sitting in Laos, waiting for someone to set them off. You can see why zoologists are hesitant about traipsing through their jungles, when fifty Laotians are killed or wounded by these bombs and mines every year. While South East Asia is a very open place that sees a lot of tourism today, that only really started in the 1990's. Before that it was a warzone from the end of WW2 until the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Cambodia in 1993. Local governments were too poor or too busy to do much science, and foreign scientists were not really welcome. For local people it was just a normal animal. Something to be hunted to stop starving to death. How does the story of the Okapi not make bigfoot look absurd? 1. It took ten years to get some specimens of Okapi, twenty to get good ones and photographs of live animals. It's been over fifty years since the Patterson–Gimlin film was shot, and their have been bigfoot reports for a while before that. 2. The Okapi was discovered around the turn of the century. They had no planes, no cars, helicopters, no thermal imaging, no residual DNA testing, only the most basic of camera traps, etc. But they found their Okapi. How hasn't we seen bigfoot in the era of drones? 3. The Okapi was believed to be fairly interesting, a new species of horse. And it turned out to be quiet interesting, it was the second living species of giraffe, and it s quiet a pretty animal too. That was enough to bring this animal to light. Bigfoot would be a sensation. The largest ape in the world, a seeming-missing link? That's incredible news. Every zoo and museum would want one. During the 19th and 20th century their was something of a mania among scientific fields for "missing links". Every nation wanted their "apemen". It was in this atmosphere that the Piltdown man hoax got accepted for a time, despite being a fairly obvious hoax of close inspection. A bipedal ape in America would be of massive interest. 4. The Okapi lives in a rather remote part of Africa, and was discovered when just getting to their home was an adventure, back when the infrastructure of the region was almost non-exhistant. It is not hard to go to Oregon. Not hard at all. Edited by lamna, Feb 17 2018, 10:21 AM.
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| Carlos | Feb 17 2018, 12:24 PM Post #135 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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They were also never believed to be physical beings. Its like saying angels are an undiscovered species. |
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