Don't laugh. The quixotic quest for beasts of lore is not far from what drives zoologists to find new and incredibly rare creatures today.
couple of Georgia men claimed to possess a Bigfoot body on ice, a surprising number of news outlets covered the story. CNN and CBS, National Geographic and Scientific American interviewed Bigfoot "experts," such as members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization -- experts more likely found on "Monsterquest," a TV show that covers werewolves and vampires. Plenty of readers expressed their outrage on comment boards. "Were you recently purchased by the National Enquirer?" wrote one reader to Scientific American. Another wrote, "This is far beneath what I expect to read about in SciAm."
doubtful the reporters believed the story, even before Sasquatch researchers pointed out that the body lacked muscle tone and that its hair samples burned like plastic. (It turned out to be a sloppy hoax involving a gorilla suit.) Sasquatch, of all legendary creatures, has become a cliché of the absurd, and with good reason.
ever-shrinking wilds of the United States sounds as far-fetched as a farmer being abducted by aliens in the cornfields of Kansas.
But science journalists entertain the Bigfoot story (even with a wink) because discovering a new and shockingly strange animal in the farthest reaches of the wilderness remains possible. Today, amid the drumbeat of bad news of species being driven to extinction, scientists are discovering more new species -- both curious and commonplace -- than in any time in history. As recently as November, excited anthropologists found a pygmy tarsier in Indonesia, a spooky gremlinlike primate, the size of a mouse, not seen since 1921.
That means some of the most respected scientists in the world cannot help having an open mind when it comes to the zoological unknown. And a few fringe scientists, known as cryptozoologists, are actively in pursuit of beasts of lore on the outside chance that they may not be figments of our imagination.
foot-long reptile that the Apatani, a tribal group in India, claim to have seen, or the Orang pendek, an upright gibbonlike creature said to stroll like a human in the forests of Sumatra.
anything is possible. And it's from that place where some of the most astounding advances in the sciences are derived.
More recently, new animals are turning up at a rapid pace. "In the last 25 years, the number of species known to share the world with us has grown by 25 percent," says Bruce Patterson, a curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. "This is a remarkable level of discovery, and a remarkable statement of our current ignorance about the other forms of life we share the planet with."
Most of these animals are much smaller than a Loch Ness Monster; most are plankton, insects, small fish and amphibians. But a few new mammals are discovered every year. While rats and bats are the most common finds, some big surprises have turned up.
(cow family!), was discovered in Vietnam. "It's a beautiful little thing," says Patterson of the Saola. "Maybe 1,100 of them known to exist in the world."
size, bushy-tailed rodent with a football-shaped head, was discovered in 1998. "It was found to belong to a family of animal that was thought to have gone extinct 11 million years ago. It is the only living representative of an otherwise extinct family."
Animals like the rock rat -- once thought to have been extinct -- are known to biologists as Lazarus species, and are quarry for both cryptozoologists and run-of-the-mill zoologists. Most people are familiar with the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a large and colorful bird thought to have been lost forever that may or may not have been found in 2004 alive and flapping in the swamps of Arkansas. (This now-legendary species comes complete with its own controversial video footage, rather like the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage of a trudging Bigfoot.) In 1938, the coelacanth, a large fish that tends to dwell in deep-water caves, was found to be alive and flourishing. Ichthyologists had assumed it died out around 65 million years ago.
A find like the ivory-billed woodpecker or the coelacanth propels its discoverer to the top of his or her field, so the search for the oddest of creatures can be a long shot worth pursuing. Ian Harrison, a freshwater fish expert at Conservation International, has been hunting his own mini Loch Ness Monster, a hideous-looking fish called Rhizosomicthys totae, fondly known as the fat catfish.
like rolls of fat. A dried-out specimen from another museum confirmed that the drawing was accurate. "I was just captivated by these things," says Harrison.
When he found out that there were some reports of possible sightings as recently as 1984, he traveled with a team to Lake Tota, in Colombia, to hunt it down. The expedition was cut short when the team suspected that a left-wing rebel group was sniffing around their site. "We didn't want to get kidnapped," says Harrison. The team came away with nothing, but Harrison wants to go back. "The evidence suggests that it's not there," says Harrison. "But the lake is deep."
And the ocean is deeper. Two years ago, some Japanese researchers were the first to capture video footage of the famous giant squid -- millions of dollars had already been spent on a generations-long pursuit of the 40-foot-long animal, which was known to exist but had never been captured or properly observed. It seems safe to assume that marine biologists have entertained the idea, at least in passing, that there could exist a deep sea animal whose body has yet to reach any shore.
"The larger something is, the more likely it is to be seen at some point in time," says Harrison. "But it's possible. There is a lot of water out there, that's for sure. The megamouth shark was first discovered in 1976." Today megamouths, which weigh in at 1,600 pounds, are known to swim in at least three different oceans. "That's a substantial-sized animal that's been cruising around, not being found, for a good few hundred years of marine research."
forests of Mount Foja, Indonesia.
end of the era of finds like the Mountain Gorilla," says Beehler.
"But I think there are definitely some surprises in store. Absolutely."
Guinea. "There are not many big areas," he says. "Most of them are little, like the Foja Mountains, which covers about 300,000 hectares [700,000 acres]."
funded an expedition to track the thing down, with no success.
Martyr had nightmares for weeks.
Without a photo, he knew, it was unlikely that anyone would take the sighting seriously, so the two never publicized their experience.
Some may roll their eyes at the amateur explorers' ability to bring home the goods, but to Holden it is not entirely surprising that there is a dearth of tangible proof that the Orang pendek hides in the forests of Sumatra.
troop of 19 chimpanzees," says Holden. "They were used to people.
Indeed, last August, the Wildlife Conservation Society reported that a population of about 75,000 Western Lowland gorillas had been overlooked in a swampy area of equatorial Africa. "I'm not a Bigfoot fan," says Patterson. "But the discovery of this population of gorillas in a relatively intact ecosystem is an indication that some large animals that may still be abundant can escape our attention, particularly in poorly studied tropical locations."
for literally months and months before she got her first glimpse. And she was working with gregarious, social, loud, boisterous primates."
sounding testimonials from Native Americans, which have her convinced.) In his lab, Meldrum has a collection of more than 200 so-called Sasquatch footprints, and believes that, surely, some of them are legit. They may be evidence, he says, of the existence of a peculiar great ape, or, more incredibly, a member of the Homo genus, the closest relatives to humans. As far as we know, no other animal of the Home genus currently exists besides Homo sapiens.
the aura of legitimacy on his cryptozoological side project.
reaches of their habitat in order to persist."
widespread. We don't have a lot of species in North America that have lived for a long time in one single tiny place. That's why we look to the tropics, places that have never been covered in ice."
hominid, of course, scientists are naturally skeptical. I have a residue of that skepticism."
Patterson is also an open-minded skeptic. Of so-called cryptozoologists, he says, "They seem to be universal. I'm not a cryptozoologist, but I run into them all the time. There was a missionary, a Catholic priest, who works with indigenous communities in Amazonian Peru. He would occasionally stop by the museum to compare the bats and rodents he collected with the museum's collection. He would tell me about these black jaguars twice the size of modern jaguars. I've also been told of a gigantic ape living in South America. You know, I keep saying to these people: All you have to do is bring back a skull, a scrap of skin, or even some poop and we can do something with that. But I can't do anything with your story. And despite real interest and dedication, these people can't produce the physical evidence that is needed to support their claims. I can tell you that I don't lose any sleep worrying about this stuff at night."
possibilities are checked off the list.
"I think there is a place for the cryptozoologist," says Patterson. "The organizer of a meeting for the American Society of Mammalogists called me up and said that they had an abstract for a paper to be presented about a survey for Bigfoot. I called the author of this paper [not Meldrum] and determined that they had actual data and methodologies, and they were not going to present it as if they had definitive evidence. They were going to approach it in a purely scientific fashion. So I said, yeah, go ahead, present the paper." He laughs. "It was one of the best attended talks at the meeting."
It may be impossible to know whether photographer Jeremy Holden saw a mere gibbon who, to an excited witness, projected the illusion of effortless walking, or saw something far more interesting that wants to keep to itself. Those few who are serious about finding improbable lost species insist that they deserve a place at the table with the Goodalls of science. But they also know that most scientists aren't buying it.
"Until we have the Orang pendek, the animal itself," says Holden, "it's just another cryptozoology story."