On Cryptozoology

Crypto - Prefix taken from the Ancient Greek word meaning secret or hidden.

Zoology - The study of animals.

Cryptozoology - The study of animals not yet proven to exist... wait, how the hell do you study something you can't prove exists?

I love dinosaurs and have done since I was very young.  Like many kids, giant monsters that are safely dead and buried hold a great deal of interest for us.  Unfortunately, some of us don't pay very good attention in science class* and miss certain key details.  We also watch movies like The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park which color our perception of what is real and what is not.  This leads the more adventurous of us to go looking for dinosaurs that are still alive and, amazingly, if you look hard enough, you can find examples of people believing dinosaurs are still on Earth**, hiding in lakes and forests the world over.

Cryptozoology is unique among science fields in that, should they ever discover something provable (which they haven't) it would immediately be out of their field of study.  It's also not recognized as an official field of study by any reputable scientific organization and is commonly referred to as a pseudoscience.  Cryptozoologists spend their time in search of mythic animals, things like Nessie, Bigfoot, the Chupacabra and other such creatures.  Most of their "proof" can be seen below and doesn't really add up to much.

Wabbits, wabbits, wabbits...

On your left, you will see the Jackalope, a frequently faked internet meme.  Real rabbits occasionally suffer from Shope Papilloma Virus (SPV) which causes bony tumors to grow on certain parts of their heads, which may have started the myth.  Looks pretty realistic though, huh?  Amazing what you can do with some fake antlers and a tame/stuffed rabbit.  Please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, thank you... Do not feed the mythical, nonexistent beasts.

You seen any Hendersons around?

On your right, the famous Bigfoot, which in this case is a man in a costume in a grainy picture.  Grainy pictures or, on rare occasions, grainy video are a common theme among "cryptids," as cryptozoologists call their quarry.  Maybe Bigfoot is just out of focus in reality.  However, there is overwhelming evidence that he is largely a hoax.  No bodies of dead Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) have ever been discovered and most of the "proof" has either been faked videos or faked (Big)foot prints.

Here is the famous "Surgeon's Photo" of the Loch Ness Monster, which was also revealed as a hoax.  It is nothing more than a toy submarine with a vaguely dinosaur shaped head on its con tower, sculpted out of clay.  While it did wonders for Loch Nessian tourism, it's also led to a lot of bad thinking about the lakes of the United Kingdom.  If there is a plesiosaur in the waters of Loch Ness, and I wish there was more than anyone, it'd be either millions of years old or it'd have to be one of a group of them.  If there's a group, there's nowhere near enough food in Loch Ness to keep them alive.  Also, no remains of one have ever floated to the surface, washed ashore or been discovered by the sonar sweeps that have gone through the loch over the past century.  Still, the belief in Nessie exists...

Nessie made a messie

See the picture on the right?  The one that looks like a floating turd or log?  This is being hailed as the best picture so far of an animal living in England's Lake Windermere*** which has eluded the echo locators installed in the lake for many years.  The photo, taken by an IT professional on a team building exercise (so a credible source?), follows the basic rules of cryptozoology "proof": It's grainy, it's from a huge distance away and it really doesn't show off much detail.  Here's the full article for the curious...

Full Telegraph article

Best yet?  This is the BEST you can do on a completely new animal no one has any other proof of?  I also love the guy's first reaction to seeing a huge, undiscovered creature in the lake: He ran away.  I quote...

• "It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away" - Tom Pickles, 24

Straight away from the new species of animal... Good thinking Tom.  At least you had your camera phone to take a shitty picture.  I also notice your picture didn't have any ripples from you furiously paddling the kayak you were supposedly in at the time.  My problem with this is how much credibility stories like this are lent by the press.  This is front page news on Yahoo at time of writing and is not written in a skeptical way.  The scientific facts are put at the bottom of the article and aren't used to call a skeptical point of view to a "discovery" like this.  Would it be amazing to find a giant monster living the lakes of England?  Of course, but a crummy photo in today's era of photoshopped images doesn't come remotely close to scientific proof of anything.  For instance...

I've been everywhere, man.  Also, moo.

Pretty cool, huh?  Of course it is, it's a fake picture, but it looks pretty convincing.  The day that they find an actual, verifiable "monster" living in the lakes of the world, I'll be the first to dance with joy.  Until then, I'm sick of finding stories like this in digital print.  All it serves to do is give people bad ideas about this ever changing world in which we're living and qualifies as sensationalist media in the worst sense.

Thanks for reading, feel free to leave feedback below.

* As a note, I did get a C in chemistry, but this is more about biology, which I got an A in.
** Or hijacking research about soft tissue in fossils and trying to prove that The Flintstones was a documentary film... but that's more of a religious issue.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html
*** And really, could we have asked for a more British sounding name for a lake?  That sounds like a lake that does everything in a smoking jacket while having tea and crumpets.