Figure 1.3 The okapi, an animal native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was long rumored on the basis of testimony from local informants before it was formally identified for science in 1901. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton)
Some “new” species were first known from fossils and then discovered alive. The classic example is the Chacoan peccary, a relative of the peccaries or javelinas, which are widespread across the southwestern United States, Central America, and South America. First described from a tooth fossil by the famous Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino in 1904, it was known to natives of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay for decades before scientists “discovered” it and named it.51 Van Roosmalen recently claimed to have found a fourth species, the “giant peccary” of the Brazilian Amazon basin, although it has not yet been accepted as distinct by most other zoologists.
The most famous example of a creature known first from fossils is the coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish related to lungfishes and amphibians (figure 1.4). Before 1938, it was known primarily from rare fossil specimens older than 65 million years and was thought to be extinct. (There are now fossils as young as 15 to 5 million years old, so the gap is no longer as great as it once was.)52 Then in 1938, a living coelacanth was found in a deep-water trawl off the coast of South Africa and was immediately recognized as a relict of the early evolution of fishes. Its great significance led to a widespread hunt for more specimens and a sizable cash reward, and eventually more coelacanths were discovered off the Comoros Islands north of Madagascar and, more recently, off the coast of Indonesia and again off South Africa. The oceans continue to reveal many new and spectacular fishes—such as the megamouth shark discovered in 1976—squids, and other creatures, so the pace of discovery is no less impressive than that for land animals. The remotest and deepest parts of the seas still may hold secrets as yet undreamed of.
Figure 1.4 The West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), a “living fossil,” was known originally from fossils older than 65 million years old until a live fish was caught off South Africa in 1938. It has now been found in several places around the Indian Ocean, including off the coasts of Indonesia and the Comoros Islands. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
REALITY CHECKS
Biology and Ecology
If so many animals are still being found every year, why is the study of Bigfoot and Nessie considered “fringe science”? There are important distinctions to make between animals newly known to science and cryptids, even when the folkloric elements are set aside. Nearly all the “new” species just mentioned are relatively small in body size and are closely related to other living animals—so it was easy to mistake them for familiar species until more detailed studies could be undertaken—and none are outside the normal range of zoological diversity. The last large land animals to be found and named by biologists were the Chacoan peccary, lowland and mountain gorilla, okapi, Komodo dragon, and kouprey, and all were described about 50 to 150 years ago. In addition, nearly all these discoveries were made in remote areas of Africa, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, not in well-populated places like Scotland and the Pacific Northwest (where Nessie and Bigfoot allegedly reside).
Biologists have dealt rigorously with the question of how many species remain to be found, using a variety of sophisticated methods to model “discovery curves” (figure 1.5). Applying these techniques in 2008 to a question of interest to cryptozoologists, Michael Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh Shanahan estimated that as many as fifteen species of seals and sea lions (pinnipeds) conceivably remain undiscovered, although they warned that this figure was “probably a significant over-estimate of the true number likely to exist.” Turning to a slightly different estimation technique, they suggested that few or no species of pinniped are yet to be found.53 Naish expanded, “We definitely favoured the idea that there are hardly any new pinnipeds to find—that is, there are about zero new ones out there, with one or two being conceivable based on the data. This could be taken to mean that cryptozoological ideas of new pinnipeds are unlikely, since there probably aren’t many (or any) new pinnipeds to find. Or, it could be taken as being consistent with cryptozoological ideas about crypto-pinnipeds”—provided that only a very small number of cryptozoological pinnipeds are proposed.54 When we add to this reality check the constraining factors that seals are noisy and return often to land in order to molt and breed (where they would presumably be seen and identified), we may conclude that reports of “sea monster” cryptids are highly unlikely to be of genuine sightings of as-yet-undiscovered species of seals (despite the popularity of the “pinniped hypothesis” in the cryptozoological literature) but more likely are cases of mistaken identity. Andrew Solow and Woollcott Smith took an even broader approach and showed that the discovery rate of large marine animals has dropped dramatically in the past few decades. From this method, they estimated that, at best, fewer than ten species of large marine animals remain to be found.55
Figure 1.5 A curve showing the number of new species of pinniped discovered over the past 300 years, with observed data shown by the × and a logistic curve fit in the solid line. The curve indicates that discoveries of unknown species of marine animals such as pinnipeds have reached a point of diminishing returns, so there are few or no species remaining to be found. (Modified from Michael A. Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh P. Shanahan, “How Many Extant Pinniped Species Remain to Be Described?” Historical Biology 20 [2008]: 225–235)
Thus the discoveries of the okapi and the kouprey do not really help the cause of cryptozoologists because these animals are within the realm of conventional zoology. These were zoological discoveries of the type that we would expect once qualified field zoologists began to work in remote and sparsely populated areas like tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. Similarly, the discoveries of the coelacanth and the megamouth shark may be remarkable, but these fish dwell in very deep, seldom fished waters in only a few places on Earth. It is easier for animals to remain hidden for a longer period in poorly accessible locations—and yet, notably, animals such as the okapi and coelacanth eventually were located and described.
By contrast, hundreds of zoologists and tens of thousands of hikers, campers, and loggers wander the woods of the Pacific Northwest, yet not one has managed to find any hard evidence to support the existence of Bigfoot. Nearly all the “evidence” consists of anecdotes and eyewitness accounts, dubious film footage, and a spectrum of suspicious footprint casts, plus hair of undetermined origin. The forests of the Pacific Northwest are neither remote nor underexplored; indeed, they have been decimated by clear-cut logging (and more recently, by the mountain pine beetle epidemic).56 Every animal that lives in these forests leaves plenty of hard evidence of their existence: nests and dens, carcasses, skeletons and partial skeletons, teeth, and isolated individual bones. Yet not once has the elusive Bigfoot left so much as a single toe bone, and explanations from advocates that Bigfoots somehow decay faster than other animals or are buried by their kin are ad hoc and simply do not cut it.
This raises an even more important issue: animals the size of Bigfoot, Nessie, and Yeti cannot simply be singletons or the last surviving lonely members of their species. If they have persisted through thousands of years and been sighted hundreds of times, as their advocates claim, they must have significant populations. If they are living as viable populations, there should be hundreds of reliable sightings, many good examples of film footage, and plenty of hard evidence in the form of carcasses and bones—not only of isolated individuals, but of groups, including females and their young. Ironically, the best proof that these cryptids do not exist comes not from the abundance of questionable evidence that cryptozoologists try to promote, but from the dearth of more quality evidence, especially conclusive, concrete proof in the form of carcasses and bones.
Even more interesting is that as more and more people have been looking for these creatures in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, the snows of the Himalayas, the j
ungles of the Congo, and the waters of Loch Ness, the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot, Yeti, Mokele Mbembe, and Nessie has diminished, not increased. In the modern world, where cell-phone cameras are ubiquitous and space satellites that can read newspapers on Earth are constantly watching us, the absence of reliable images does not bode well for the existence of cryptids.
The next important consideration is that populations of cryptids as large in body size as Bigfoot, Yeti, and Nessie would have to occupy relatively extensive areas to obtain enough food and other resources to sustain themselves. Although the relationship between body size and home range is complicated, in general home range expands as body size increases, as is confirmed by the large and complex literature on the relationship of home range and body size (figure 1.6).57 As Johan du Toit has shown,58 for large-bodied African mammals, the home range (Ahr) scales by body mass (M) in the formula
Ahr = 0.024 M1.38
Lowland gorillas have home ranges of roughly 40 square miles, and they are much less active and mobile than, say, giraffes (which require individual ranges of about 110 square miles). Animals the size of the presumedly wide-ranging bipedal Bigfoot and Yeti would have to occupy home ranges of at least 100 square miles. But because so much of this habitat has been degraded or broken up by human habitation, they would be forced onto remnant patches, enhancing the likelihood of their discovery or, conversely, decreasing the likelihood of their existing.
Figure 1.6 A plot of body mass versus home-range area for omnivorous land animals, showing that animals of very large body size (such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and Mokele Mbembe) require huge home ranges in order to sustain a viable population. A similar plot applies to herbivores and carnivores as well. (Data replotted from Douglas A. Kelt and Dirk H. Van Vuren, “The Ecology and Macroecology of Mammalian Home Range Area,” American Naturalist 157 [2001]: 637–645)
This is the problem that large animals face in places like the tropical rain forest. In a famous monograph, ecologists Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson showed that the number of species in a given region is well predicted by the total area that they occupy.59 Using this famous relationship, rainforest ecologists have found that breaking the forest into numerous small patches separated by logged or farmed areas leads to the disappearance of large animals, since jaguars, tapirs, rhinos, and tigers need huge home ranges in order to survive. This problem would be magnified in the case of Bigfoot, whose temperate-forest habitat has been chopped into hundreds of small preserves and parks, separated by roads and towns and farms. Even within the larger national forests, most of the pristine regions are extremely reduced or have been destroyed because of clear-cut logging.
Limited range is an even bigger problem for Nessie and the wide assortment of air-breathing “lake monsters” that have been promoted as cryptids. Loch Ness and other lakes said to be the home to monsters are relatively small bodies of water that are generally not rich enough in fish and other food resources to sustain a population of the enormous creatures purported to live in them.
Geology
If the problems enumerated by ecology were not enough to reduce the plausibility of the existence of large cryptids, there are even bigger hindrances apparent to a geologist. Let’s start with a very simple constraint: the Ice Age of the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million–11,700 years ago). As recently as 20,000 years ago, the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere was covered by a sheet of ice more than 1 mile thick, similar to the ice sheets that now cover Greenland and Antarctica (figure 1.7). Thus Loch Ness (and much of the British Isles, except for the southern margin during interglacial warmings) was under a glacier for most of the past 3 million years. Either the Nessie population was frozen in the ice and then miraculously was resuscitated after thawing (a biological impossibility), or the creatures lived elsewhere and swam into Loch Ness. Yet Loch Ness is a freshwater lake 52 feet above sea level. If Nessie were indeed an ocean-going plesiosaur, why have plesiosaurs not colonized other freshwater rivers and lakes—and where are the other saltwater plesiosaurs today? Glaciation is an even more serious problem for inland cryptids like Champ, which supposedly lives in a lake that is far inland, a long way from the nearest outlet to the Atlantic Ocean—and Lake Champlain, the home of Champ, was buried under even more ice than was Loch Ness just 20,000 years ago. Indeed, most of the lakes that allegedly support cryptids are in northern regions and were buried under ice during the last glaciation.
Figure 1.7 During the Ice Age of the Pleistocene, sheets of ice covered not only the polar regions, but most of northern Eurasia and North America, including all the lakes (such as Loch Ness and Lake Champlain) that allegedly are home to monsters. Thus if such creatures existed at that time, they either were frozen under a mile of ice or somehow swam into these landlocked lakes from the distant North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. (From Donald R. Prothero and Robert H. Dott Jr., Evolution of the Earth, 8th ed. [Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill, 2010])
Paleontology
Even more problematic is the evidence—or lack of evidence—from the fossil record. No one claims that the fossil record is perfect, but paleontologists have an excellent understanding of which organisms tend to fossilize well and which ones do not.60 Small animals with delicate bones (like birds) may be underrepresented in the fossil record, but large animals with robust bones (like large nonavian dinosaurs) have a much better chance of being preserved. An excellent fossil record exists for such large animals as mammoths, mastodonts, rhinos, and dinosaurs. For this reason, paleontologists can be fairly confident that if fossils of certain animals are not found in the appropriately aged beds along with the abundant bones of many other animals of the same body size, the former creatures were almost certainly absent from the region. Even small bone fragments of large-boned animals are extremely durable, so paleontologists can determine that the animals were present, no matter how small the fossilized fragment.
These considerations have important implications for nearly all the large-bodied cryptids, such as Bigfoot, Nessie, and Mokele Mbembe. If they have lived in their respective homelands for as long as cryptozoologists assert, they would have left fossil records. The skeletons of Bigfoot and Nessie would be exposed in the Ice Age deposits of the Pacific Northwest and Scotland, as are those of other large animals once native to North America and Great Britain, like mammoths and mastodonts. Instead, there is no evidence of their existence anywhere in the fossil record.
From the excellent worldwide fossil record, paleontologists can determine exactly which regions had which dinosaurs and marine reptiles in the Mesozoic era, or Age of Dinosaurs (250–65 million years ago). More important, the complete absence of any dinosaur fossils (other than those of birds, which are surviving dinosaurs) in beds younger than 65 million years is strong evidence that no nonavian dinosaurs or large marine reptiles survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period (144–65 million years ago). This argument applies to the plesiosaur-like Nessie and the sauropod-like Mokele Mbembe.
Plesiosaur fossils are common in marine beds deposited during the later part of the Mesozoic era (Jurassic [206–144 million years ago] and Cretaceous periods), and even plesiosaur vertebrae and teeth are distinctive and identifiable. Extensive marine deposits laid down after 65 million years ago are full of fossil sharks and other fish, whales, seals and sea lions, and other marine animals from all over the world. The collections of these fossils, especially in rich beds like Calvert Cliffs in Maryland and Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed in California, are enormous. Indeed, there are so many fossils of so many different marine animals that it is extremely unlikely that a creature as large as a plesiosaur swam in Chesapeake Bay, the Temblor Sea (present-day San Joaquin Valley), and Loch Ness and yet has never shown up in any fossil beds anywhere in the world that date to the Cenozoic era (65 million years ago–present). This record is good enough that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The excellent fossil record for mammals and other animals that have lived in Africa over the past 65
million years not only is proof that no dinosaurs—such as Mokele Mbembe—survived on that continent, but also shows what animals (including some very large ones, such as early mastodonts and the horned, rhino-like arsinoitheres) have lived in Africa since the beginning of the Cenozoic.61 Once again, the fossil record is good enough that the absence of evidence of dinosaurs in Africa is enough evidence of their absence.
Now that we have an understanding of how scientists work and how they might investigate claims about the reality of major cryptids, we can begin our exploration of these wondrous creatures.
AS A SKEPTIC WHO INVESTIGATES cryptozoological mysteries, I am sometimes asked by exasperated proponents, “Why do you even bother? If you don’t think cryptids are real, why waste your time picking on cryptozoology?”
I explain that cryptozoology is my first love. It was my youthful obsession with monster mysteries that led me to the skeptical literature in the first place, and I’ve never lost my fondness for the topic. I don’t think of myself as picking on cryptids, but as making an all-too-rare effort to solve cryptozoological mysteries.
You may be surprised by one of the reasons I find myself drawn to such mysteries: I once personally found a Bigfoot track. My parents were silvicultural contractors in British Columbia. Thus I spent most of the summers of my childhood in tree-planting camps in the remote wilderness (a wilderness I later returned to for a ten-year career as a professional shepherd). In those days, tree-planting camps were tipi-filled refuges for the last first-generation hippies. In the daytime, the crew was trucked out to plant trees in the hills while the cooks worked in the cook trailer—and we feral hippie children (I remember young friends named Raven and Blue Sky) had the run of the camp. It was a nice way to grow up, catching frogs and fishing and playing in the mud.
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