In Search of Cryptids

Imagine for a moment that you are a scientist in late 18th century England. You and your collegues are at the height of the scientific community. New discoveries are made everyday, and you are privy to each new discovery and idea. In other words, you are the rock stars of the age of reason.

So when a buddy of yours sends a letter from Australia (a land full of criminals and frauds and all sorts of unsavory characters) describing a mammal that lays eggs, is venomous, has a duck bill and beaver tail, you scoff. What red-blooded scientist wouldn't? So your buddy sends you a package this time, with what he claims is an actual corpse of the animal he described in the early letter. Clearly the remains are a clever hoax, bits and pieces of other animals sewn together, because there is no such animal.

And you, like many scientists before and after, fall victim to a logical fallacy. I am an authority in the scientific community. I have never heard of this creature or anything like it. Therefore, the evidence before me must be fabricated by human agency.

But the platypus is real. Strange, and little mindboggling, but very real. Throughout history, creatures once thought myth or hoax or extinct have been found very much alive. The okapi was called the "African unicorn" until one was found (by white people) anyway, when it became known as a real animal. The ceolacanth (an ancient fish) was known to have belonged to the fossil record, but believed extinct. Until one was caught off the coast of Madagascar. Giant squids were just the drunken ravings of your uncle the sailor. Until seven years ago when a group of Japanese scientists caught one on film. Both the mountain gorilla and the komodo dragon and the devil bird (now known to be a kind of very scary owl) were all thought to be myth by Western Science, and thus cryptids, until they were discovered to be real. It seems most Australian animals were once thought to be cryptids, as well.

Skepticism is an integral part of the scientific process (at least that's how it seems to me, a non-scientist...). A scientist works based on an established set of rules to either discover new rules or disprove those rules or...well, as I said, I'm not a scientist. Most scientists build on the work of others. This is a relatively slow process, much like evolution. Some scientists, however, discard many of the established rules to make astonishing new discoveries. Until they are proven correct, they are often ridiculed and dismissed by the wider scientific community, and not without reason. For every Heinrich Schliemann (the man who proved that the city of Troy was a real place, not just the fruit of Homer's very fertile imagination), there are dozens of Erich von Danikens and Thor Heyerdahls. (Although I think these guys are nuttier than fruitcake, who knows?).

Sometimes it pays to not disregard something as myth simply because there is nothing in your sphere of knowledge to prove it is real. And sometimes it pays to look beyond the literal interpretation of a myth to other possibilities. What once were dragons are now thought to be an ancient explanation for dinosaur bones. The single massive cavity in an elephants skull could be the origin of the cyclops myth and the narwhal the origin of the unicorn.

Of course, there are hoaxes. The Lochness monster that turned out to be nothing more than a toy submarine. Piltdown man. Crop circles (?). Perhaps some people just want to play jokes, and perhaps others are so invested in the existence of these creatures and phenomena that they want others to believe as much as they despite the lack of evidence. Either way, these tricksters are hindering the gathering of genuine knowledge and only giving the mainstream scientific community further reason to disregard genuine evidence.

It was only seven years ago that the giant squid was proven real. The mountain gorilla has only been "real" for 109 years. Chupacabras, a relatively recent recruit to the ranks of cryptids, is more and more thought to be real...really mangy canids. Perhaps in the next decade creatures we once thought to be the figments of unstable minds will be accepted as part of the natural world. Maybe chupacabras will be domesticated and Sasquatch will have his own reality show.

Australia has the platypus on its twenty-cent piece. Canada has a trio of cryptid coins. Maybe Canada is just ahead of its time.