Tales of the Cryptids: Mysterious Creatures That May or May Not Exist (Darby Creek Publishing)

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Bigfoot. Nessie. Yeti. Sea monsters. All terms mostly avoided by biologists, and all deemed synonymous with pseudoscience, pop culture and wishful thinking more than biology. Throughout history anecdotes and stories have described large animals, often considered monstrous or frightening, that don’t conform to species recognised by science. Palaeontologist Darren Naish explains why the unscientific field of ‘cryptozoology’ can still tell us a lot about how humans see nature I’ve seen many of these places personally. If you tell me there’s a hodag statue in Wisconsin, I want to see it with my own eyes, same as if you told me there was an actual hodag in Wisconsin. In South Dakota, I took selfies with the world’s largest chainsaw bigfoot sculpture. In Vermont, I hiked an icy mountaintop to find Wampahoofus Trail. In Ohio, I climbed an ancient mound shaped like an underwater panther. I have been to many cryptid museums and gift shops, and I have a shelf full of souvenirs to prove it. I sometimes joke that when I say I’m hunting cryptids, what I mean is that I’m driving to a town to drink a craft beer named after one. But I did also venture into their territories. After dark, I entered the old cement bunkers in the West Virginia forest that are the lair of the Mothman. I boated from New York to Vermont across Lake Champlain looking for sinuous humps in the water. I walked through an Arizona canyon that skinwalkers are known to haunt—but only after I drove to town to see if they had any craft beers named after them. Also known as “The Big Gray Man,” this creature is said to inhabit the summit of Ben Macdui, the second-highest mountain in Scotland. Supposedly you can hear its disembodied footsteps in the gravel on the mountain, and when the fog thins, you’ll see a hairy humanoid three times taller than a man. 7. and 8. Yowies and Habagon

Cryptozoology at the Zoological Society of London. Cryptozoology: time to come in from the cold? Or, Cryptozoology: avoid at all costs?Explore the fascinating world of cryptozoology with this fun guide, filled with eyewitness accounts of 50 cryptids found throughout the world, some of which have been proven real. The idea that cryptids are somehow surviving individuals from a prehistoric species is a well-known feature of cryptozoology, but cryptozoological writings are often rife with an additional layer of speculation. When imagined in detail as ‘real’ animals, cryptids often end up as radically novel members of their respective groups. Nessie isn’t the only aquatic cryptid out there. One is Tahoe Tessie, which supposedly lives in California and Nevada’s Lake Tahoe. Another is Ogopogo, which lives in Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. This creature appears in Syilxand Secwepemc tales as the N’ha-a-itk, an evil entity that required natives to make a sacrifice to cross the lake. White people reportedly started seeing the creature in the 1870s.

I love folklore, so naturally, I also love cryptids, since they're basically the scary story versions of modern folklore. Which is precisely what I enjoyed about The United States of Cryptids.”—BoingBoingShould, then, cryptozoology be denounced as pseudoscience? Some argue that it should and that its practitioners are only pretending to ‘do science’. Those in favour of this view argue that cryptozoology should be considered akin to belief in the paranormal and that it functions as the thin end of the wedge when it comes to an anti-scientific view of the world. This ‘cultural’ view of cryptozoology is not in keeping with the ‘flesh and blood’ or ‘pelts and paws’ view preferred by advocates of the field, and for that reason it’s seen as a highly sceptical position, if not a cynical one. Ultimately it might mean that we should abandon the term cryptozoology altogether, since there may be little to no ‘zoology’ at the bottom of it. In addition, discussions about cryptozoology in the popular sphere now overlap with those on UFOs, demons and paranormal phenomena. All are suspected by aficionados to be related branches of the same big picture. What we’re seeing here is a disregard for (or ignorance of) the zoological roots of cryptozoology, and a downhill slide to belief in a demon-haunted world. Archaeologist and anthropologist Jeb Card terms these overlapping beliefs the Paranormal Unified Field Theory, or PUFT. It’s on the rise and swallowing cryptozoology alive.