Sasquatch redux

P Z Myers is not convinced.

Sea tales

The giant sea-serpent glides into view time and again, with a particular frequency in the Victorian period, although the beached and rotting "Animal of Stronsa" in the Orkneys was, according to the scientists, a basking shark. Detailed accounts are often from respectable folk such as the Reverend Donald Maclean, minister of Eigg, "quite a man to be believed" according to the Glenelg minister – who saw one himself in the Sound of Sleat.

Hitch-hiking decades ago in the Hebrides, I was picked up by a fishing-boat skipper who at one point confided his own sighting of a long serpent with a bristling, hideous face yards from his stern off the Angus coast. "We've most of us seen them," he said, quietly, "but we don't like to talk about it for fear of being laughed at."

-- from Adam Thorpe's review of The Fabled Coast by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood

Giant killer squid of the Triassic?

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a 'kraken,' with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid

-- from here.

P Z Myers is sceptical :

This 'Triassic kraken' has not been found; no fossils, no remains at all, no evidence of its existence. It is postulated to have been large enough to hunt and kill ichthyosaurs, which is remarkable—comparison to modern giant squid is invalid, since they are prey, not predator.

P.S. 11 Oct: Microecos has some fun, but Nature does not dismiss the idea out of hand.

The short man

Richard Freeman outlines some evidence for Orang Pendek, an elusive Sumatran great ape that, if it exists, is probably more closely related to the Orangutan than to hominins.

Of coelacanths and sea-monsters

On the subject of sea serpents - while many of the specific cases in the literature are inconsistent or unconvincing there is a substantial body of evidence suggesting that at least one species of large marine animal quite different in form to the baleen whales still exists and remains to be formally recognised. The evidence from the north-west Atlantic (as described in the book The Great New England Sea Serpent) is I think particularly strong - with well over 200 reports from the 19th and 20th centuries (not all of equal quality of course) and a particular peak of sightings in the period from 1815 into the 1830s, with many sightings involving tens of people and some witnessed by over 100 people. I particularly find interesting the fact that the 19th century observations showed seasonal behaviour, with sightings suggesting that the fish shoals were followed and fed on at certain times of year, and that the drop off in reports correlated with the collapse of the fish stocks due to over fishing.

-- from a comment by Mark Lees on a post by Darren Naish.

Tretretretre

Ecological niche modeling adds even more evidence to the already overwhelming case that 'bigfoot' is actually a brown bear. But within historical memory stranger animals have existed and been extirpated as their habitats were destroyed:

The tretretretre is a large animal, like a calf of two years, with a round head and the face of a man. The forefeet are like those of an ape, as are the hindfeet. It has curly hair, a short tail, and ears like a man's...It is a very solitary animal; the people of the country hold it in great fear and flee from it, as it does from them.

-- this is a Megaladapis as described by Étienne de Flacourt in his Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar of 1661 (and quoted in A Pleistocene Bestiary).

Image from the Atlas Virtual da Pré-História.

Found! Dick Cheney's heart

Weird blobs of the Anthropocene: Deep Sea News reports on an unknown lifeform in a North Carolina Sewer.