Science Needs More Terriermen

This is a mammal, recently re-discovered in Cuba, called the Almiqui or Cuban Solenodon (Solenodon cubanus). Since its discovery in 1861, only 37 of these creature have ever been caught.

The folks that ponder such things have, at various times, thought this animal had slipped into extinction, but in fact it is merely a rare, regionally endemic, nocturnal, burrow-living animal that no one has really spent too much time looking for in a very expert manner. It seems that pondering animals and putting them into taxonomic "clads" is very different from actually going out into the field to find them with shovels, nets, traps, guns and dogs in hand. Hmmm. Who knew?

On the upside, not everyone in the world of biology is sitting at a typewriter. Dutch biologist Marc van Roosmalen recently went up the Rio Aripuanã river basin in Brazil and discovered a new species of peccary, a type of wild pig. It weighs 90 pounds and is the largest peccary in the world, but it has gone unnoticed by suit-and-tie scientists up to now. The push is on now to protect the area where it lives before it is logged out to make toilet paper and coffee tables.

Other relatively recent animal discoveries include only the second golden-mantled tree kangaroo ever found (this one in Indonesia, the last one in Papua New Guinea), an odd species of bushy-tailed rat "discovered" in the wild meat markets of Laos, the Arfak Pygmy Bandicoot, the Mountain Brushy-tailed Possum, the Red-bellied Gracile Opossum, the Pygmy Three-toed Sloth, Goodman's Mouse Lemur (very cute!), and the oddly-named "GoldenPalace.com" Monkey whose naming rights were sold for $650,000 which will go to support consevation efforts in Bolivia's Madidi National Park.

I wonder how many lost or never-discovered animals might be found in the tropical parts of the world if an energetic person with a good working terrier and a shovel were detailed to hunting in the field? Who is really looking for stuff that dens underground?

If the Smithsonian or National Geographic wants to find out what's out there, the dogs and I are available for travel to exotic locations. Pay my mortgage, slip me a travel stipend, and arrange for a decent retirement and health plan, and I will willingly suffer dysentery and rebel forces in the developing world in the name of science. Operators are standing by!

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Nonsense With Trail Cams

I got a number of blog hits the other day from folks looking at an earlier picture I put up of a bear with mange (picture at right).

I thought nothing more of it until this morning when I got the Newshound feed from J.R. Absher's excellent blog, where he reports that some bo-ho is claiming his trail cam picked up a picture of Big Foot in Pennsylvania.

J.R. is skeptical, and so am I. Bears with mange (along with coyotes with mange, dogs with mange, fox with mange and goats with mange) are not uncommon, and things without hair DO look rather odd and other-worldly.

Of course, headlines and hype are helped quite a lot by the fact that most "crytozoologists" (who are almost never actual zoologists) have rarely spent too much time in forest or field. Like small children who have just read a book about Kenya, when they hear hoof beats they assume it must be a herd of zebra rather than one small pony.

It helps for good headlines, of course, if you send your blurry photos (and they are always blurry) to the "Big Foot Research Organization" for identification, rather than to the Division of Natural Resources or State Game Commission.

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Beast of Dartmoor is Caught

Thank God this savage thing was tracked down and finally caught near Hound Tor.

A true Hell Hound and Demon with "large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh."

And it was seen just yards from school children who could have been attacked!

Oh did I forget to say what it turned out to be? Silly me. Here's that story.

Of course there are other Beasts of Dartmoor out there. Here's another one that was caught earlier. Please God, let's not let them start breeding!

We are going to catch them all! The Beast of Bodmin is next, and after that we are going after the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest.

I always like the descriptions like this one that tell us of the enormous footprints of giant mystery cats with enormous claws. Please tell us more! How big were the claws on that foot print again?

And of course we have them over here too. Chilling!

Other "beast of " stories on this blog:

• Beast of Basra is blamed on the British


• The Beast of Exmoor and other nonsense


• Chupacabra hunting with terriers


• P.T. Barnum and the beastiaries of the imagination.
  

"Footprint?"

"Footprints."

"A man or a woman's?"

Dr. Moritmer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound."

. . . -- The Hounds of the Baskervilles, A.C. Doyle

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The "Beast of Basra" Is Blamed on the British

From The Times of London:


British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

Major David Gell, a British Army spokesman, said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger or ratel - melivora capensis - which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

The animals are indigenous to Africa and large parts of the Middle East and are about the same size as European badgers but much more aggressive, with long claws and strong jaws. They have been described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most fearless animal.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but the story of the British badgers has spread like wildfire through Basra and the surrounding villages.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and sought to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not new to the region but had been seen well before Saddam's ouster in 2003.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific," Mr Abdul-Mahdi told AFP.

But their numbers are increasing, possibly, scientists say, because Iraqi authorities are trying to reflood marshlands north of Basra that were drained under Saddam Hussein.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace's fears.

“I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on my head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer,” said Suad Hassan, a 30-year-old housewife. “It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly."

Mobile phone video of the badgers circulating in Basra shows a stocky skunk-like animal with long front claws. The honey badger, or ratel, is known as a brave predator capable of killing a cobra. It weighs up to 14kg (30lb),

Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey. “I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it,” he said.

“I believe this animal appeared following a raid to the region by the British forces,” said Ali Mohsen, a farmer in his 40s from Karmat Ali, near the air base used by the multinational force. “As we are close to the airport, they probably released this animal into the area.”

Amid such tales, there is little experts like Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of the veterinary college, can do to reassure his neighbours. “Its nature is to eat small animals like hens and rats. It has powerful senses of hearing and smell. It gets aggressive if senses danger, but it doesn’t attack man unless threatened,” he said.

Major Gell said that Basrawis should have little to fear from the beast, although he warned them not to get too close, “If you cornered it and poked it with a stick, then the smart money would be on the badger,” he said.

But he added: “We have not released giant badgers in Basra, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river."

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P.T. Barnum and the Beastiaries of the Imagination

Over at the Querencia blog a while back, Matt M. reported that he had been reading a book called Big Foot Exposed, which was written by his wife's first cousin, who happens to be a specialist in primate anatomy and biomechanics. Big Foot data is looked at straight-faced and is -- not too surprisingly -- found wanting.

Meanwhile, over at the Tetrapod Zoology blog, the always-interesting Darren Naish went to a Big Cat conference in the U.K. and seems to have gotten sucked in to believing that there are large mystery cats running around Britain. Well maybe they're not large cats ... maybe they're little ones about the size of a house cat or a Scottish Wild Cat. Hmmmm . . . . could they possible be just house cats and Scottish Wild Cats?

On my end, I have to say I rather enjoy the cryto-zoology crowd because it's an odd alamgam of P. T. Barnum myth makers, city slickers that that have never touched a cow, country rubes easily fooled at the carnival, and regular folks with a deep-seated desire to find (please!) some level of mystery, fantasy and novelty in a world that is pretty well explored and explained.

At some level we all desperately want there to be a Santa Clause, a flying Yogi, a living T-Rex, and an anaconda large enough to swallow a house trailer.

If we canot find it, we will invent it, and who is to say that it does not exist? You cannot prove that the non-existent does not exist -- an interesting fall back position for every kind of fun thing from Sasquatch and Cold Fusion theorists to the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

It's a bit fun to stoke the fires of misbelief, as anyone who has even taken a troop of cub scouts "Snipe Hunting" at night can tell you. After you have them beat the brush for half an hour looking for a "snipe" (described as an animal that looks like a thin rabbit with a white stripe downs its back) you aim your flashlight up a tree and bounce it around a bit while telling the kids you just saw .... a Ho-Dag!

I plead guilty of pulling a few tricks like this. Regular readers might remember the "Chupacabra" that I reported the dogs killing a while back. The post came complete with pictures, and they were not faked. All I did was take a natural oddity, add a tall tale which I told straight, and presto -- a real Chupacabra.

In fact, my "Chubacabra" was nothing more than a groundhog victimized by four or five very large tumors that had distorted its body to the point that it looked like an alien beast. The purple color was due to the fact that the poor creature was dragging itself over nearby pokeberry plants as it tried to find food in the final days of its misery.

Similar "mystery creatures" are reported all the time, and in almost every case they are nothing more than a mangey fox or coyote, or a bear that has lost its hair or -- in some rare cases -- an escaped exotic pet like a mouflon goat or a wallabee.

The "Beast of Stronsay" turned out to be nothing more than a half-rotted basking shark.

Pulling people's leg is big business. I could point to Big Tobacco here (or the Bush Administration and Haliburton), but let me stick to the natural world and not digress too much.

Phineas T. Barnum made his fortune by parading people into a museum to see a "Feejee Mermaid," which was nothing more than a faked bit of taxidermy combining a monkey and a fish. That gag worked so well, he began parading a pair of retarded dwarf brothers from Connecticut around as the "Wild Men of Borneo," and he found a 5-year old midget he paraded around as an adult named "General Tom Thumb."

Today, thanks to PhotoShop, the gags have never been easier. In the great tradition of western postcards that show Rainbow Trout so large that just one of them fills a wagon pulled by a team of 20 mules, we now have pictures of massive sharks looming over surfers or jumping out of the water to snatch National Guardsmen off of ladders dangling from helicopters. Even video tape can be faked.

And yet, we want to believe. I regularly get interesting bits of stuff sent my way from folks who are sure it is true. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, an office mate sent me a picture of a giant alligator that was caught in New Orleans' streets. There was just one problem -- the picture was not an alligator, but a crocodile. I tracked down the origin of the picture in a few minutes ... ditto with the enormous snake "in Australia" that I quickly recognized as an African Rock Python.

Some of my favorite tall tales are the myriad "Beast of" stories that come out of the U.K. People who believe in such things are entirely immune to rational thought. Here's a hint: there are about 200 mounted fox hound packs working every inch of a very crowded U.K., and yet they have never turned up a big cat.

Yet people want to believe there is real danger in the English countryside -- never mind that the last wolf in the U.K. was shot dead more than 250 years ago, and the last bear more than 1500. If there is a dead sheep with a torn throat it must be a giant cat, never mind all the sheep-worrying lurchers that regularly get loose and go feral for a few days, weeks or months. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle understood the mind set well when he wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

People want to believe and will suspend all logic to do so, and if it also helps sell a few newspapers and T-shirts, so much the better.

The folks around Loch Ness have a small business selling postcards, tours and trinkets. The same is true around Lake Champlain where the locals have invented their own version of "the monster" which they call "Champ." Add to the mix the Yetti of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest.

And while we're at it, let's not forget the thousands of "Jackaplope" heads gracing the walls of western bars and tourist stores in Wyoming, Colorado and Montana.

And, of course, if there is ever a Museum of Humbuggery, the alien autopsy gag has to get its own case, as does the running gag known as "crop circles," which turned out to be nothing more than a collection of pranksters with a bit of rope and a couple of two-by-fours.

The real story, however, is that most of the earth has been well-swarmed by biologists, hunters, anglers, explorers, bug collectors, small children, foreign aid workers, and old men. Sadly, on land and in the air, there is no longer too much new under the sun.

Not all mystery is gone, of course. About once every decade we find something as "amazing" as a new small deer or striped rabbit in the forests of Southeast Asia.

Several times a year a scientist or two declares he has found a new species of mouse, frog, large insect, or small bird.

The deep oceans contain a lot of things yet unseen and unnamed. Perhaps the Creature from the Black Lagoon really does exist .... somewhere ... out there.

And even if not, we can still sell a book, a movie, and a few T-shirts about it, eh? What's the harm in believing?


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Chupacabra Hunting With Terriers

This is a picture of a fake Chupacabra. The dogs caught a REAL one!


The photo, above, is a not-very-good model of a Chupacabra. We sometimes hear of El Chupacabra, but it's very rare to know anyone who has actually seen one in the field, much less been lucky enough to bag one. But that is what the dogs and I did on Sunday, and I have the pictures to prove it.

But I am getting ahead of myself. What, you may ask, is a Chupacabra?

El Chupacabra is an animal that is known to inhabit rural areas of Mexico and parts of Central America. Its name, translated literally from the Portuguese and the Spanish, means "goat-sucker" for its habit of attacking and killing lifestock and draining them of all their blood.

It is not clear when the Mexican Chupacabra first came north to the United States, but by the mid 1990s, it was here. Mexican farmhands in such diverse places as Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, would periodically come across dead livestock in the fields with torn windpipes and every ounce of blood drained from their carcases. "El Chupacabra," the migrant workers would whisper. "It has come El Norte with us."

It is easy to write such things off, and, in truth I have always done so myself. Where are the pictures of El Chupacabra? Where does it live during the day? Why does it only come out at night? Where is the proof? There were never any answers. Until now.

On Sunday, I was walking the edges of a cut-over corn field with the dogs in tow, when Mountain slid into a hole and opened up to a full bay. A few minutes later, this thing came barreling out of the ground.

Mountain followed it out of the hole and gave chase, and soon caught it by the rear leg. Pearl, still young and full of herself, piled into the scrap too. Both dogs had it above ground and on its back. I ran over and put my boot on the creature so it could not bite the dogs. But ... what the hell was it?

And then, I knew. It was El Chupacabra -- the infamous Mexican goat-sucking blood beast of legend.

By God I had one, and it was not going to get away. And it didn't.

Now there are some who may doubt my story, but I have appended pictures of the Chupacabra below, for anyone to see the horror of this thing.

Clearly, this is not an animal found on earth. This animal is the work of the Devil. This is El Chupacabra.

The Mystery Beast of North Carolina

What is it?

One theory is that it's a red fox with some type of short-coat mutation or diet deficiency, or even mange (though it really does not look mangey).

Another theory is that it is a Gray Fox with all of the above or perhaps even a coyote with all of the above.

It looks a bit like a jackal to me, but I suspect it is some freakish red fox. In any case, this is a "mystery beast" actually photographed in North Carolina

More information can be found at at http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/06/05.html#foxy