Speaker 1: You're listening to an air Wave media podcast.
Speaker 2: Is cryptozoology is science? Surely, searching for the solution the
Speaker 2: mysteries is part of science. But is scrypto zoology or
Speaker 2: is it something else?
Speaker 3: Is it just a game?
Speaker 2: The intersection of science and cryptozoology will be discussed in
Speaker 2: the next two episodes of Monster Tongue. In this episode,
Speaker 2: Part one, featuring doctor Darren Nash, it's actually.
Speaker 4: Quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 5: A giant hairy creature party part of mat in Larkness,
Speaker 5: about twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Speaker 5: Highlands of Scotland. If the creature known as the Lucknest Monster.
Speaker 3: Monster.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 2: Blake Smith and together with my co hosts doctor Karen
Speaker 2: Stolesnow and Ben Radford, we talk about monsters, science and
Speaker 2: the vast landscape of mystery where such stories grow. Today,
Speaker 2: we're happy to have a well known figure in the
Speaker 2: world of science and cryptozoology, doctor Darren Naish. This is
Speaker 2: the two part look at the intersection of cryptozoology and science,
Speaker 2: and in our next episode we'll be talking with some
Speaker 2: other voices on this topic. Benjamin Radford wasn't able to
Speaker 2: be a part of this interview, but he plans me
Speaker 2: back next episode. This is a media interview with surprising information,
Speaker 2: and so we'll get started right after these messages.
Speaker 3: This is an EVP I recorded last night.
Speaker 5: How you doing?
Speaker 2: I'm a ghost?
Speaker 5: What's up?
Speaker 3: You?
Speaker 5: Guys?
Speaker 2: Can't possibly ignore that type of Hey, who are you?
Speaker 3: What are you doing?
Speaker 4: EVPs are the result of paradolia and cross modulation.
Speaker 2: Combined with the listeners hopes and expectations. What does this
Speaker 2: have to do with science? I think you just got
Speaker 2: skeptically pooned. Well, gotta see.
Speaker 3: You now, skeptically pound dot com in the next.
Speaker 2: Space.
Speaker 3: The Galctic universe is comprised of literally dozens of stars
Speaker 3: and hundreds of galaxies. Man has waited millions of late
Speaker 3: years for the infinite raison the Cosmos to reach us,
Speaker 3: yet it can all disappear in a parsek the distances.
Speaker 3: You have no idea what you're talking about? Do you?
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 3: Galactic universe? Dozens of stars, parsec and light years as
Speaker 3: measurements of time.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know what?
Speaker 3: You need to go to the star party? What the
Speaker 3: Atlanta Skeptics star party? What's that? You really are clueless
Speaker 3: here read this? Okay, let's see. Please join the Atlanta
Speaker 3: Skeptics on Thusday, September second, twenty ten for stargazing food, drinks,
Speaker 3: and amazing conversations billed at the Emery Math and Science
Speaker 3: Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Astronomers Pamela Gay and Fraser Kane
Speaker 3: will be hosting this amazing night. Ooh, I love those guys.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, keep going. Pamela and Fraser will be leading
Speaker 3: guests and exploration of this guy is using the observatory
Speaker 3: at Emery. A musician, podcaster and science lover George Roun
Speaker 3: will also be providing entertainment. Who's that? Never mind? Keep reading.
Speaker 3: This event is an honorable Jeff Medcalf, the blue collar scientist.
Speaker 3: Jeff succumbed to liver cancer in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: and the whole proceeds will go to the Leukemia and
Speaker 3: Lymphoma Society in Jeff's name. Nice No, yes, yes, indeed,
Speaker 3: keep reading. For those attending Dragon column, this is the
Speaker 3: night before the craziness begins. Go to Atlanta Skeptics dot
Speaker 3: com slash star party for full information. Remember two meteorites
Speaker 3: don't make a meteor role. Don't add anything. Just read Sorry.
Speaker 3: The Atlanta Skeptics Star Party with Pamela Day, Fraser King,
Speaker 3: and George rob Thursday September second, at seveno thirty pm.
Speaker 3: You gonna go oh yeah, just make sure you listen.
Speaker 3: Mostly Cool Cool Atlanta Skeptics dot com slash Star Party.
Speaker 2: Monster Darren Nash is a paleo zoologist, a freelance author,
Speaker 2: and a science writer at the Tetrapod Zoology column on
Speaker 2: Science Blocks. He's affiliated with the University of Portsmouth. He
Speaker 2: obtained a degree in geology and then gained a PhD
Speaker 2: in vertebrate paleontology at the same institution. He mostly works
Speaker 2: on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and quote also messes around
Speaker 2: with swimming giraffes, fossil marine reptiles, British big cats and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. Darren, welcome the Monster Talk. What's your
Speaker 2: personal take on cryptozoology and how did you get associated
Speaker 2: with that area of studying.
Speaker 4: There's something I've always been interested in, and I've always
Speaker 4: seen it as part of my kind of broader interest
Speaker 4: in zoology as a whole. I'm still kind of unclear
Speaker 4: on exactly how I feel about it, whether even using
Speaker 4: the term cryptosology is a good thing because of the
Speaker 4: associations that has with pseudoscience and such. But at the moment,
Speaker 4: I would say my feeling is that a lot of
Speaker 4: qualified biologists and zoologists who to do normal everyday biology
Speaker 4: or zoology actually do do cryptozoology because by definition, cryptosology
Speaker 4: is meant to be the study of species known from
Speaker 4: anecdotical evidence. And if you look at the roster of
Speaker 4: creatures alleged creatures that crypto's orders are interested in, they're
Speaker 4: not all lake monsters and man like apes and so on.
Speaker 4: That they do include fairly dull, small creatures that don't
Speaker 4: you know, the normal scientists wouldn't have a problem with.
Speaker 4: So I actually think I think there's a substantial overlap
Speaker 4: between normal zoology and cryptos ordy. But yeah, the fact
Speaker 4: that the term is so often associated only with monster
Speaker 4: hunting and lake monsters and fast question and so on,
Speaker 4: I think I think that is a problem. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I kind of I find it annoying. There's many subjects
Speaker 4: where I sort of sit on the fence and I
Speaker 4: can't beside, you know, what I think is the best
Speaker 4: perspective and a non particular issue. I still haven't made
Speaker 4: them my mind. I don't mind you know, saying that
Speaker 4: I do cryptozoological re surgery, then saying sometimes that I
Speaker 4: am a cryptos ugist, but that you know, with the
Speaker 4: caveat that you can be a proper scientist if I
Speaker 4: may use that term and do cryptos already, and you
Speaker 4: can be a cryptos audist and actually do proper peer
Speaker 4: reviewed science. That's the term cripers ordist and cryptom and
Speaker 4: cryptus algy, Yeah, they are. They are kind of problematic terms.
Speaker 1: And Darren, do you think that there is a distinction
Speaker 1: between cryptozoology and it's no biologyth no biology?
Speaker 4: Well, that's just I think. I think that's quite a
Speaker 4: useful term. But it's kind of kind of replacing crypto's orgy,
Speaker 4: and it doesn't really seem to mean anything particularly different
Speaker 4: so far as I understand. It just means investigating the
Speaker 4: creatures that are purported to exist, so so again anecdotal creatures,
Speaker 4: so you know, feel free to tell the otherwise I'm
Speaker 4: maybe missing something here, but I can't see that it's
Speaker 4: really any different from conventional cryptos orgy.
Speaker 6: Do you think that's the case, Well, that's.
Speaker 2: A good question. I've noticed several people with PhD's referring
Speaker 2: to ethnobiology, and it seems to parallel the way I've
Speaker 2: always thought of cryptozoology, and I wondered if maybe it
Speaker 2: was a more reputable term, maretical term.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is, you know, you can you can see
Speaker 4: in some quarses there's a move to kind of make
Speaker 4: a kind of more scientific terminology, like another example of
Speaker 4: the term cryptid. Everyone closes around nowadays, and it's almost
Speaker 4: it's almost kind of become okay to okay, we might
Speaker 4: not the people that are interested in cryptos orgy. They're
Speaker 4: not necessarily saying that I believe in, you know, naming
Speaker 4: your favorite mystery animal, because you don't want to put
Speaker 4: your neck on the on the block and say I
Speaker 4: am advocating the existance of the locks, monsters, ascut or whatever.
Speaker 4: But it seems to be okay to talk of cryptid.
Speaker 4: And the concept of the cryptid is kind of like
Speaker 4: a crystallized you know, you've kind of basically got the
Speaker 4: basic features of a species that you're saying actually exists.
Speaker 4: And should we really be playing the hard and far
Speaker 4: should we be talking in that kind of black and
Speaker 4: white language when we don't really know that we're pursuing
Speaker 4: real quitas in the first space anyway. Yeah, I think
Speaker 4: the term s no known and s no biology they
Speaker 4: might be part of the same kind of problem.
Speaker 6: People trying to make.
Speaker 4: Sometimes make this out to be more solid than it
Speaker 4: really is.
Speaker 2: Is there, so go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1: I was just going to ask for the question, is
Speaker 1: there a more scientifically acceptable term than cryptid that's around?
Speaker 4: No, there isn't that.
Speaker 6: There's currently a debate going on right now.
Speaker 4: There's a few responses floating around in the literatature. None
Speaker 4: of this is published yet, but there are people who
Speaker 4: are just arguing that we shouldn't use.
Speaker 6: The term cryptid at all because it because it just
Speaker 6: implies that, you know how, there's this long history.
Speaker 4: In Crypto's orgy of people coming up with different classification
Speaker 4: schemes for all of the sea monster sightings in the world,
Speaker 4: all of the law monster size things, all of the
Speaker 4: mystery primate sightings, and then grouping them into distinct little categories,
Speaker 4: and you say, you've got, you know, species A and
Speaker 4: species B or whatever.
Speaker 6: Once you start kind of doing that, you're and you call.
Speaker 4: These you know, if people normally call these little categories cryptids,
Speaker 4: you're kind of crystallizing the idea that you've got like
Speaker 4: a real tangibile entity there, and in most cases there's
Speaker 4: probably you know, we're probably we haven't gone that far
Speaker 4: down the road until, you know, we're probably not ready
Speaker 4: to do that. So yeah, myself and Charles Practice and
Speaker 4: who's the fisheries ecologe is very interesting in crypts already,
Speaker 4: and Michael Woodley, who's a molecular ecologist who also has
Speaker 4: an academic interest in cryptos ordy. We're having a debate
Speaker 4: about these subjects at the moment and they will appear
Speaker 4: in the literature. And yeah, we're going to be holding
Speaker 4: a conference in a couple of years that's hoping to
Speaker 4: address this subject as well. So yeah, my thoughts on
Speaker 4: it crystallized.
Speaker 1: But once a new species has been found that's been
Speaker 1: referred to as potentially a cryptid, would you still call
Speaker 1: it a cryptid that has been proven to exist or
Speaker 1: would you not use that term anymore?
Speaker 6: Yeah, Now, the idea is.
Speaker 4: That the cryptid is the name you use for it
Speaker 4: when it's only known anecdotally, and then once supposing it
Speaker 4: becomes verified to the procuring of a specimen or whatever,
Speaker 4: then no longer is it encrypted. But a lot of
Speaker 4: animals that I'm sure you've heard this before. This is
Speaker 4: in all the books, and you know this is quite
Speaker 4: well known. So anyone interested in cryptos already a lot
Speaker 4: a lot of animals that are officially recognize today. People
Speaker 4: always talk about your IDIA copy in the Canudo Dragon,
Speaker 4: So they were cryptids historically. So I'm interested in the
Speaker 4: idea that, yeah, some things today were cryptids in the past,
Speaker 4: and if you're writing about the knowledge of those animals
Speaker 4: prior to that official discovery, should you actually be referring
Speaker 4: to the now as cryptids? So Wards, for example, was
Speaker 4: the should you regard the akapi as a cryptid prior
Speaker 4: to its nineteen oh one discovery?
Speaker 6: And I kind of think you should.
Speaker 4: I think, you know, if it's if you're investigating an
Speaker 4: organism that's no name from anecdotal data, well, crypto's aordy
Speaker 4: is the investigation of anecdotal data, and cryptids are the
Speaker 4: names for those entities. So yeah, I think the terms,
Speaker 4: I think the term cryptos audy encryptids probably should be
Speaker 4: more widely used. But like I say, as I said
Speaker 4: at the start, that there is this unfortunate implication that
Speaker 4: that this, this, this link that Cryptus already has with
Speaker 4: stuff that's not exactly mainstream science.
Speaker 2: Our show comes from a very skeptical position, you know.
Speaker 2: But and it sounds like you yourself are using a
Speaker 2: lot of caution in your terminology. So do you consider
Speaker 2: yourself to be a skeptic cryptids in general?
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, well, I hope so I try and.
Speaker 4: Be skeptical about kind of everything. I would say that
Speaker 4: I certainly fall into the trap of favoring certain ideas
Speaker 4: because I, you know, personally find them appealing.
Speaker 6: But then we all I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in terms of my approach to mystery animals cryptos already,
Speaker 4: my approach has always been that, you know, go where
Speaker 4: the evidence takes you, and we certainly as scientists, should
Speaker 4: be looking at the evidence empirically and you know, not
Speaker 4: being guided by our prejudices or preconceptions or whatever. So
Speaker 4: let's say I'm interested in investigating sea monster, cabrosaurus or
Speaker 4: sasquatch or whatever. I'm you know, there's there's data to
Speaker 4: look at. That data can include a witness, accounts and
Speaker 4: trys or you know, so in our readings whatever, you
Speaker 4: don't have to have any preconceived conclusion. You can you
Speaker 4: can analyze that data and see where it takes you.
Speaker 4: And I would certainly say that for some mystery animals,
Speaker 4: my feeling at the moment is that there's the implication
Speaker 4: from some of the data that real things are there.
Speaker 4: But for many other cases, the evidence is one thing.
Speaker 4: But you know, if you're interested in investigation of the evidence,
Speaker 4: if you're interested in this, you know, approaching this from
Speaker 4: a scientific point of view, that's fine. And even if
Speaker 4: even if all of the eyewitness data is nonsense and
Speaker 4: you know that there really isn't an animal at the
Speaker 4: bottom of the reports, and there certainly our mystery animals
Speaker 4: around the world where that is the case, I still think,
Speaker 4: you know, scientists should be really interested in those cases
Speaker 4: because we can learn so much about things like witness perception,
Speaker 4: witness bias, things like why do people want to believe
Speaker 4: these animals? Are they seeing something else and making a
Speaker 4: perfectly rational misinterpretation. Those are really good questions and there
Speaker 4: are huge interest to well, not only people interested in
Speaker 4: cryptos audy, but psychologists and sociologists and stuff. So so
Speaker 4: cryptus audio I think has a lot to tell us,
Speaker 4: not only about diversity in the natural world, and so
Speaker 4: on but also about our own approaches to the natural world,
Speaker 4: how we study it, and yeah, a lot of stuff.
Speaker 6: I think.
Speaker 2: One of the questions I think about it quite a
Speaker 2: bit is cryptozoology in the hands of trained scientists versus
Speaker 2: cryptozoology in the hands of the amateur Is their value?
Speaker 2: Is their value in the amateur cryptozoologists not just the
Speaker 2: armchair but the people who you know, they have a
Speaker 2: day job of whatever, and then they but when they
Speaker 2: get a chance they go down the Amazon, are they Yeah,
Speaker 2: they got a thieland Er to bed.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, And to be honest, that is the majority
Speaker 4: of people who call themselves cryptos autists.
Speaker 6: That that is, you know, their approach. And I've always
Speaker 6: said that.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously I can want to found Hiragan. You know,
Speaker 4: I've become technically qualified and you know, have a lot
Speaker 4: of proper perspective and in terms of in terms of
Speaker 4: being able to employ critical thinking and this kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: And you know, if I'm interested in evaluating reports, I
Speaker 4: won't write a popular book on it. I just think
Speaker 4: about putting it into the periviewed literature. I think that
Speaker 4: even if we encourage scientists and more scientists to look
Speaker 4: at cryptos orgy kind of scientifically, that does not in
Speaker 4: any way tominish the role that the amateurs can can play.
Speaker 4: And I mean, for a start, all of the evidence
Speaker 4: that the data that's now been analyzed by by scientists,
Speaker 4: qualified scientists, has almost all of it been collected by
Speaker 4: people who would regard themselves as kind of well, they
Speaker 4: might think of themselves as scientists. Have had this discussion
Speaker 4: with Lauren Coleman actually that they're not you know, they're
Speaker 4: not pretending to be above their station. They know that
Speaker 4: the they're kind of like amateur scientists, if you like,
Speaker 4: they don't have a university position or whatever. I do
Speaker 4: think that sometimes we do have to kind of rain
Speaker 4: them in or encourage kind of more critical appraisal of
Speaker 4: the way they come to conclusions and also to be
Speaker 4: more cautious in terms of what they're prepared to conclude,
Speaker 4: because I mean, I always say that one of the
Speaker 4: biggest problems with cryptos orgy is not necessarily with the
Speaker 4: kind of raw data, the eyewitness data that we that
Speaker 4: we have, but it's the conclusions that people build on
Speaker 4: the data. There's there's there's a thousand you know, hypotheses
Speaker 4: and idea about that in the kryptodological literature about all
Speaker 4: manner of creatures surviving from prehistory or coming from different dimensions.
Speaker 6: Or you know the name it.
Speaker 4: Every conceivable idea has been out there, and I think
Speaker 4: I think that is the problem. It's like what you're
Speaker 4: if you if if you're an interested amateur, you're out there,
Speaker 4: you know, finding historical records of Bigfoot, or collecting eyewitness
Speaker 4: reports from people first hand, or even going out there
Speaker 4: in the field and you know, investigating.
Speaker 6: The cases that that's brilliant, that's really worthy work.
Speaker 4: You know, we need we need more of that. But
Speaker 4: it's the conclusions that the people sometimes reach that I
Speaker 4: think don't really do us any favors. Yeah, the crypts
Speaker 4: algy definitely does stuff from that, it also suffers from
Speaker 4: the kind of people that it attracts, by which I
Speaker 4: mean there's this kind of I'm really I'm really bothered
Speaker 4: by the by the creationists who seem to have quite
Speaker 4: a large spoken cryptos orgy these days, and I don't
Speaker 4: really understand what can be done about it. Some people
Speaker 4: say that, you know, we shouldn't be prepared to do
Speaker 4: anything about it, but that you know, as a as
Speaker 4: a scientist, with biological, toological and you know, palaeontological interests
Speaker 4: and really makes me very unacted.
Speaker 2: Well, you're people who have this interest don't like to
Speaker 2: see their their hobby or or their passion repurposed for
Speaker 2: decidedly unscientific reasons, right, So yeah, that's it's it's troubling
Speaker 2: to me too. It's a frequent theme here, and it's
Speaker 2: something that a lot of people, even you know, we're
Speaker 2: involved in the skeptics community, but a lot of people
Speaker 2: in skepticism don't understand how deeply creationists, Young Earth creationists
Speaker 2: especially are entrenched into cryptozoology, especially anything to do with
Speaker 2: extant dinosaurs or you know, marine reptiles, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Darren, have you had any personal encounters with
Speaker 1: these people with these creations?
Speaker 4: Really, I'm sorry to say. I was having a discussion
Speaker 4: just just sorry, discussion is the wrong term. I was
Speaker 4: having an exchange just a couple of days ago with
Speaker 4: I think it's called James Witkom, a guy who who's
Speaker 4: written a book on the rope put this alleged parasol
Speaker 4: like from New Guinea and like similar minded people, he's
Speaker 4: you know, fairly convinced that the eyewitness evidence indicates firstly
Speaker 4: that you've got this animal and it looks, you know,
Speaker 4: in this case, it's got a twenty foot wing span,
Speaker 4: it's bioluminescent's got a long tail, breaths fire or something.
Speaker 4: So the first of all, they think there's that real animal. Secondly,
Speaker 4: they think that it can be identified as very specifically
Speaker 4: in this case, as a surviving terrosare. And thirdly it's
Speaker 4: kind of all linked with their particular view of history.
Speaker 4: I don't want to say evolutionary history, because obviously they
Speaker 4: reject the reality.
Speaker 6: Devolution and all.
Speaker 4: Like, you know, it's like where do you start because
Speaker 4: the okay, something like the suggestion terroritors might be alive
Speaker 4: from the palaeontological record is a non start, but it
Speaker 4: can be very confident that that's really not the case
Speaker 4: or there's certainly there's no evidence that might support it.
Speaker 4: But in cryptos algy, the more important thing is is
Speaker 4: the eyewitness evidence that should be your kind of you know,
Speaker 4: your core data. And in all these cases where people
Speaker 4: have built these huge hazards of cards, the eyewinness data
Speaker 4: is really poor. Certainly, you know, okay, maybe there's a
Speaker 4: suggestion that there might be some unusual creature at the
Speaker 4: bottom of this. That's probably the case with many cryptological entities.
Speaker 4: But you're really going too far in saying that it's
Speaker 4: the particular creature that they that they want it to be.
Speaker 4: These these stories from them from New Guinea about living
Speaker 4: terodactyls and stuff are pretty poor. They come from extremely
Speaker 4: unreliable sources. They're often extremely vague, you know, people seeing
Speaker 4: lights at night and saying that it's a bioluminescent terodactyl.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't need to you know, I'm preaching
Speaker 6: to the choir here, but.
Speaker 2: Maybe you know I haven't actually talked to many people
Speaker 2: on that side of the argument. I'd like to ask
Speaker 2: them how effective those tools are for conversion, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. I mean, I've seen plenty of cryptos
Speaker 2: while it's interested in Bigfoot, but I've never been offered
Speaker 2: a Bigfoot gospel tract.
Speaker 6: You know, just oh well, they're probably do as obviously.
Speaker 4: I live in the UK, so I'm not affected by
Speaker 4: creationism and creationists as much as as you probably are.
Speaker 4: I find it interesting that being interested in animals and
Speaker 4: working on prehistoric animals in particular, I think that that
Speaker 4: well Pain told us in particular, I really seem to
Speaker 4: be kind of on the front line in terms of creationists.
Speaker 4: I've been a conferences and exhibitions and stuff where you
Speaker 4: actually have creationists to come up and engage you in
Speaker 4: discussion because they see the skeleton of the dinosa or
Speaker 4: the terrorists or whatever, and that's kind of like their hook,
Speaker 4: but sort of the kind of first thing to like
Speaker 4: attack you with, because you know, it's a the obvious thing.
Speaker 4: There's no there's no pretending that. Let's say you see
Speaker 4: the skeleton of a dinosaur in many cases be half
Speaker 4: that might be reconstructed, you know, and I'm sure you
Speaker 4: understand how the reconstruction is done entirely kind of in
Speaker 4: a sensible logical way, you know, you look at related
Speaker 4: animals or whatever. But that's their kind of like first
Speaker 4: point of attack. Come in, say, oh, you've you've fabricated.
Speaker 6: Evidence or whatever.
Speaker 4: But then within like five minutes of the conversation they're
Speaker 4: talking to you about things like they somehow I've experienced
Speaker 4: several times they start talking about things like, you know,
Speaker 4: the age of the earth and the function of the
Speaker 4: brain and humans and basically things to do with you know,
Speaker 4: the plate the specific place of man in the universe,
Speaker 4: and and it just occurs to me, like, why are
Speaker 4: you talking to a palaeontologist about these questions?
Speaker 3: This?
Speaker 4: This? Okay, we can answer those questions, we can have
Speaker 4: a discussion if you're like that, But you should be
Speaker 4: talking to you know, geneticists or psychologists or people who
Speaker 4: work on brain anatomy, brain function, that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: And they don't do that. I've noticed they don't do that.
Speaker 4: They attack what they see as any easy target, palientology.
Speaker 6: So so I don't know, Well, I've spoken to I remember.
Speaker 4: Talking to an animal behaviorists colleague of might you know
Speaker 4: what what his approach was with with creations. He lives
Speaker 4: in Canada and he just never had any experience with
Speaker 4: them whatsoever, Whereas I, as a palent oldist, feel that,
Speaker 4: like you know, actually get a lot of interaction with them.
Speaker 4: So yeah, maybe it's a good point. Sorry, that's a
Speaker 4: really good point.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of that before that. You guys are
Speaker 1: always the ones who are bombarded with these claims and questions.
Speaker 6: Well, that's right, and I'm.
Speaker 4: Sure you're aware of these museums that have been built
Speaker 4: specifically creationist museums.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, museums and.
Speaker 4: Scare quotes, and they are entirely you know, dinosaur dioramas
Speaker 4: like Jesus riding on a bronze saurus, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 6: They aren't about.
Speaker 4: They don't have a wing devoted to the human body
Speaker 4: or the anatomy of the brain or genetics or whatever.
Speaker 4: It's all like the Garden of Eden and prehistoric animals
Speaker 4: and Trannosaurus wrecks a watermelon, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 6: So yeah, yeah, maybe you have a.
Speaker 4: More negative yewn it than many baldiests. But but then,
Speaker 4: like I say, cryptos already does seem to have this
Speaker 4: strong link with growth creationism, and it's difficult to know
Speaker 4: what to do about it. It does tarnish the subject
Speaker 4: as a whole.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about some of the cryptids out there that
Speaker 2: people claim to see. Which ones do you think are
Speaker 2: the most plausible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I'll say to start with that, I think
Speaker 4: it's pretty likely, and I assume in my experience most
Speaker 4: people kind of agree with me, whether they're interested in
Speaker 4: cryptos order or not. I would say that there are
Speaker 4: large animals in the oceans that remain to be discovered.
Speaker 4: I think we can be pretty confident about that. Because
Speaker 4: we still find new sharks, rays, whales. Relatively recently, you've
Speaker 4: got you know, new species that have been named within
Speaker 4: the past couple of years. Every study that's ever been
Speaker 4: done of looking at discovery ropes over time, they all find,
Speaker 4: you know, people generate these graphs plotting discovery over time,
Speaker 4: they all find that there are more discoveries yet to come.
Speaker 4: Numbers range from anywhere between I think five and fifty.
Speaker 4: So there's everyone agrees, there's some, and then there's there's
Speaker 4: a really good body of eyewitness reports, some of which
Speaker 4: are extremely trustworthy as in they come from you know,
Speaker 4: qualified biologist to people have got a lot of experience
Speaker 4: of looking at marina and judging differences that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So I think there's new things to come in and see,
Speaker 4: but what they are well that I can't answer.
Speaker 6: This kind of you know, linking back.
Speaker 4: To what I said magic earlier about cryptids and the
Speaker 4: idea that you've got like distinct little category secreture people
Speaker 4: have ever since Bennard Houberman's books of the fifty and sixties,
Speaker 4: people have tended to kind of think that there's like,
Speaker 4: you know, certain distinct species of a distinct species of
Speaker 4: long bodied fisher distinct species of crocodile like mareen reptile.
Speaker 4: We can't we can't really go that far at the moment.
Speaker 4: So as to what these animals are, I really don't know,
Speaker 4: but I think but I think there are some. So
Speaker 4: that's kind of a loose, easy answer to begin with.
Speaker 4: As for others, well, at the moment, one I would
Speaker 4: say that I'm what's the right word, and I don't
Speaker 4: want to say impressed that.
Speaker 6: I want to say.
Speaker 4: Confident a creature that I do find particularly interesting, and
Speaker 4: I do think it's very likely. I think it's fairly
Speaker 4: likely that we might establish this reality fairly seen. Is
Speaker 4: rang Pendeck this Redford hominid from the Borneo and perhaps
Speaker 4: Sinatra in other places?
Speaker 2: Wow? Yeah, I would not have guessed you would have
Speaker 2: thought that. So is it really you find the evidence compelling?
Speaker 4: Well, I have some inside data se.
Speaker 2: Oh hello, okay, detail, Well, what how.
Speaker 6: Much can I say?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I think again the oe witness
Speaker 4: evidence is pretty credible, comes from pretty good sources, and
Speaker 4: seems fairly consistent. So on, And there's there's some hair data,
Speaker 4: and there is actually a paper in the works describing
Speaker 4: and analyzing the hair which I'm sure this is going
Speaker 4: to sound very familiar if you know the sasquat stritsurance such.
Speaker 6: But yeah, without you know, I do.
Speaker 4: Not want to sound too confident. At the moment, I'm
Speaker 4: thinking that there's reasonable ground that this is actually a
Speaker 4: real animal. It is a real undiscovered homonid. But time
Speaker 4: will tell, and we have to get some things in
Speaker 4: the peer of viewed literature first.
Speaker 2: Well, that is exciting, I have to say, because as
Speaker 2: a skeptic, I am also a huge enthusiast for crito zoology,
Speaker 2: or otherwise I wouldn't be doing the show.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a really important point.
Speaker 4: I've heard you make it before, but people, well kind of.
Speaker 2: You can give it lib service without actually meaning it, right, Okay, No,
Speaker 2: finding a living homine or even just a different kind
Speaker 2: of ape is super That's awesome. So do you think
Speaker 2: the hair they have they I don't know how much
Speaker 2: you know about the quantities they've uncovered. We whatever our
Speaker 2: very first episode, we talked to Todd Dissotel, who does
Speaker 2: extensive DNA analysis, and he said, at the current times
Speaker 2: they can do something like fifty percent of the time
Speaker 2: they can get DNA from the hair without the root.
Speaker 2: So do you know if the hair samples they're looking
Speaker 2: at have they have they taken.
Speaker 6: It to that level or there are plans to do
Speaker 6: that next.
Speaker 4: At the moment the analysis has been done is on
Speaker 4: just gross morphology, but even that certainly very I kind
Speaker 4: of want to imply that it's compelling, but that's probably
Speaker 4: a little bit too strong. But yeah, the next thing
Speaker 4: to do is to see if if DNA can be extracted.
Speaker 4: But I've heard conflicting reports on how easy it is
Speaker 4: to get DNA out of.
Speaker 6: Hominid hairs.
Speaker 4: There's there's some data indicating that it's really hard to
Speaker 4: get it out of gorilla hairs, for example. So but
Speaker 4: but yeah, no, certainly that's that's that's planned. There aren't
Speaker 4: there aren't many hairs. There's a handful of them, and
Speaker 4: they have been compared to well, certainly all of the
Speaker 4: native mammals, like you know, the known species like cats
Speaker 4: and civets and bore and human sure, sure, yeah, and yeah,
Speaker 4: I shouldn't say anymore because this is this is a
Speaker 4: work in progress.
Speaker 2: And you'll excite our listeners for sure, right.
Speaker 4: Cool, Well, yeah, you watch the space that it would
Speaker 4: be fairly easy to pretty much make a career out
Speaker 4: of publishing the technical research on cryp zoological data, if
Speaker 4: only there were the time and the funding and stuff,
Speaker 4: and you know, and if you were dedicated to that alone.
Speaker 4: I think, I mean, I've got like two or three
Speaker 4: things on the go with with several in the background,
Speaker 4: and yeah, there's there's there's a lot of work to do.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the orang pendic thing, it's it's it's going
Speaker 4: along in the background. And yeah, that's that's a crypti
Speaker 4: that I consider at least moderately reasonable.
Speaker 1: I think, Oh, I was going to ask to prove
Speaker 1: something like that, Orn Pindick, what sort of further evidence
Speaker 1: would you need to prove it?
Speaker 6: I mean, you wouldn't.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't be able to prove it unless you obviously
Speaker 4: had had a dead one and DNA profile and and
Speaker 4: so on, because because even with describing any species from
Speaker 4: bits and pieces, even if even if you had data
Speaker 4: as good as let's say, a complete limb or a skull,
Speaker 4: you still wouldn't convince the majority of people in the community.
Speaker 4: And that's fairly reasonable, you know, I don't expect to
Speaker 4: expect it to be any other way.
Speaker 6: All you can do at the moment.
Speaker 4: With a small amount of data like hairs and so
Speaker 4: on that you know, small basi data, you can you
Speaker 4: can put the idea out there and say, look, this
Speaker 4: disappears to be here from a hominid. It's not from
Speaker 4: an orangutan, but it's similar to rang down. It's not
Speaker 4: from a human. It seems to be from an unknown,
Speaker 4: an unknown hominid. And you could say, yeah, you could
Speaker 4: say the same for species that you that you describe
Speaker 4: on the basis of you, like a skull or whatever.
Speaker 6: So it's kind of.
Speaker 4: One step closer.
Speaker 6: But no, you wouldn't.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't all of a sudden convert every skeptical zoologist,
Speaker 4: and I wouldn't expect it to be that way, you know.
Speaker 2: But but finding a good hair profile and then if
Speaker 2: they were able to extract DNA and it showed comparable
Speaker 2: to what they would expect for an unknown primate, that's
Speaker 2: awfully compelling, I have to say. But I'm still probably good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I want to see the body, you know, are the
Speaker 2: live specimen. We don't have to kill it.
Speaker 4: But that's a trippy subject to kill on to kill,
Speaker 4: isn't it? But not just for your token cryptids. But
Speaker 4: but for for new species in general. I mean, I
Speaker 4: personally don't like the idea of killing animals. I don't
Speaker 4: think people should just go out and kill things for
Speaker 4: you know, not for just collecting, but well, yeah, you
Speaker 4: absolutely need to and for something like like Bigfoot. How
Speaker 4: would you ever convince anyone unless you did kill it
Speaker 4: and the death of one individual. We're talking hypotheticals obviously,
Speaker 4: but let's say, let's say big is real.
Speaker 6: Let's say you kill one.
Speaker 4: You've got to kill it in order to demonstrate to
Speaker 4: everyone that it's that it's real. No amount of anecdotal evidence,
Speaker 4: no amount of you know, video footage or.
Speaker 6: Little bits of data, hairs or whatever it.
Speaker 4: Is gonna is going to convince people enough to really
Speaker 4: make a difference. And the implications of some of these
Speaker 4: alleged creatures and sasquatches top of the list, the implications
Speaker 4: are huge if if they did exist. I mean not
Speaker 4: only in terms of how people think about themselves and
Speaker 4: where we fit, where our species fits in the natural world,
Speaker 4: but also in terms of conservation, environmental protection, economics. I'm
Speaker 4: sure you've heard these stories from uh John Binn and
Speaker 4: Able talks about them in his book that supposedly loggers
Speaker 4: and not supposed.
Speaker 6: Not to report.
Speaker 4: Sasutch sasquatch I things because because let's say it's real,
Speaker 4: then it could have a huge impact on where people
Speaker 4: can log. So yeah, some some some animals of cooks
Speaker 4: a lot of an interest could have just the most
Speaker 4: astounding impact, should they should they prove to be real.
Speaker 2: The thing about Bigfoot is, I think the killer don't kill.
Speaker 2: The one risk is that it's someone in a suit, right,
Speaker 2: And but but as far as the if you look
Speaker 2: at the number of claims, right, that that implies since
Speaker 2: they're in every state of Hawaii according to the sidings.
Speaker 6: Hawaii as well.
Speaker 4: People say that, you know, I think Hawaii has a
Speaker 4: hairy hominid of some sort.
Speaker 6: Really, I'm sure I've read it in the literature. Yeah,
Speaker 6: even a place in the world that doesn't have a
Speaker 6: hairy hominid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well right that that that makes me suspect even
Speaker 2: more that it's more of a psychological thing than well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know that people claim to have seen these
Speaker 4: kinds of creatures in Europe, as in Spain, France, the UK,
Speaker 4: and there's there's one there's one report from South Antarctica.
Speaker 4: I mean, it just It just seems that the kind
Speaker 4: of motif of the the sort of man a hybrid,
Speaker 4: the hairy hairy monster man ape thing just does seem
Speaker 4: to be a thing that goes everywhere with us. It's
Speaker 4: kind of like part of our sort of cultural baggage.
Speaker 4: And maybe that's because we're all programmed to see the
Speaker 4: human shape, you know, everywhere we look.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I certainly think there is a big kind of socio cultural,
Speaker 4: psychological kind of component to the to the phenomenon doesn't
Speaker 4: mean there isn't a biological signal in there as well.
Speaker 1: And I was just curious to find out where are
Speaker 1: the claims coming from.
Speaker 7: In the UK.
Speaker 4: There's a place called Bolum Lake somewhere in northern England. Oh,
Speaker 4: dear mondre Preece, is it really want to let me
Speaker 4: down there?
Speaker 3: I think it's some forest areas and that's right, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we're talking about a handful of sightings
Speaker 4: and again, you know, imagine sightings and quotes there. But
Speaker 4: it's I think it's kind of like a friend of
Speaker 4: a friend's stories. But a few years ago now it
Speaker 4: did actually get quite a lot of media coverage, people
Speaker 4: claiming to see this black garrida like creature running around
Speaker 4: in the woods, and there was there was a photograph
Speaker 4: taken of one. And forgive me, because this may not
Speaker 4: actually be the same case. I can't pretend to follow
Speaker 4: this in great detail, but there was a photograph.
Speaker 6: And that did turn out to be a hoax.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I don't think anybody really takes these seriously.
Speaker 4: The same for this the Spanish and French startings and
Speaker 4: so on, that they can be used two to kind
Speaker 4: of throw a bit of sort of cold water on
Speaker 4: the fire when people are talking about you know, it
Speaker 4: kind of helps to it sort of shows that we
Speaker 4: have to be careful and you know, be really cautious
Speaker 4: in like, you know, the idea that these things.
Speaker 6: These things everywhere.
Speaker 4: I mean this this came up a lot in discussion
Speaker 4: lately on my blogsp when we were talking about the
Speaker 4: yowie in Australia. I mean, for many people that's kind
Speaker 4: of a real, real problem. The idea that there might
Speaker 4: be a big Foot like animal living in Australia just
Speaker 4: seems utterly ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And in the Blue Mountains.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and again you know, not just not just
Speaker 4: in the kind of sensible places as well.
Speaker 7: But yeah, well you know in Australia, I was gonna say,
Speaker 7: Australia also has the the people who spot thyla scenes,
Speaker 7: which I would love to be still alive.
Speaker 2: That'd be fantastic unless I was a chicken farmer or something,
Speaker 2: But I mean, in general, I think having thilets can
Speaker 2: still be alive would be great. So that reminds me
Speaker 2: of the the idea of seeing something that ought not
Speaker 2: be there but is a perfectly real animal, right so,
Speaker 2: a lot of times, or at least I guess in
Speaker 2: what sort of maybe in the late nineties, the alien
Speaker 2: big cat phenomena seemed to really get the UK. You
Speaker 2: mentioned it when we were doing our correspondence that that
Speaker 2: that seemed like a plausible thing and at least it's
Speaker 2: a real animal. What are your thoughts about the alien
Speaker 2: big cats?
Speaker 4: We can be absolutely confident that we have here in
Speaker 4: the UK. We definitely have more than one species of
Speaker 4: non native cat running around in the countryside. We actually
Speaker 4: seem to have jungle cats, which this is an animal
Speaker 4: of northern Africa, the Middle East and all the way
Speaker 4: across Asia to India and Style. It's not very big,
Speaker 4: it's any about a third larger than a domestic cat.
Speaker 4: Then we definitely have leopard cats, which are similar sized
Speaker 4: spotted cat from Asia, not to be confused with the leopard,
Speaker 4: it's called the leopard cat. We definitely sometimes have lynxes,
Speaker 4: which again is about you know, say, four times the
Speaker 4: size of the domestic cat, And we seem to have
Speaker 4: pumas and leopards as well. It sounds ridiculous to claim
Speaker 4: that all these animals are there.
Speaker 6: I'm confident they are there because.
Speaker 4: For jungle cats, leopard cats, lynxes, and pumas, we have
Speaker 4: dead ones. We have animals that have been hit by
Speaker 4: cars or have been shots. They still exist, they're in museums,
Speaker 4: or they've been photographed before they were buried. And the
Speaker 4: field evidence that we have, and that includes photographs and
Speaker 4: video footage as well as tracks and hairs, is absolutely
Speaker 4: our livestock kills and kills of deer and of animals
Speaker 4: absolutely absolutely compelling. I've got no doubt about this at all.
Speaker 4: And we're now at the start of the stage where
Speaker 4: people are putting this stuff into the proper literature. There
Speaker 4: was a paper published and last year and I think
Speaker 4: it was a Journal of Archaeological Science, on tooth pit data.
Speaker 4: So this archaeologist Ross Cole, I think he's called, he
Speaker 4: became interested in the idea that there might be alien
Speaker 4: big cats. I really hate the term alian big cats
Speaker 4: because it's attached because obviously people when they hit alien
Speaker 4: they think of you and those and stuff, so it's
Speaker 4: got like a bad connotation. But these animals might be there.
Speaker 4: If they are there and they're responsible for, you know,
Speaker 4: killing sheep on Dartmore or whatever, then you should be
Speaker 4: able to find evidence for their bimarks on bones. He
Speaker 4: collected a huge number of bones from I think it
Speaker 4: was whales, and compared to the bite marks with those
Speaker 4: of all the known carnivorans, so with red foxes and
Speaker 4: badgers and fell dogs and whatever. And he did find
Speaker 4: a sample of bite marks on bones and in the
Speaker 4: UK that match leopards and humors.
Speaker 6: So and the evidence is the evidence is just is
Speaker 6: just so good.
Speaker 4: I think anyone who now kind of denies the existence
Speaker 4: of non native cats in the UK is either not
Speaker 4: aware of the evidence at all, or they are deliberately
Speaker 4: being difficult. And some people, certainly in kind of conservation bodies,
Speaker 4: are kind of deliberately saying these animals aren't there for
Speaker 4: whatever reason, And in a way, I kind of think
Speaker 4: it isn't a big deal because we know, again, we
Speaker 4: know without doubt that even the most exotic specialized cat
Speaker 4: can escape in the British countryside. Britain isn't a particularly
Speaker 4: difficult place to live for a cat. It doesn't suffer
Speaker 4: from any extremes of climate, and there's plenty of things
Speaker 4: to kill, tenny of places to hide if you're in
Speaker 4: the right areas. We know these animals can escape, they
Speaker 4: can hide out, they may disappear, they may get shot.
Speaker 4: And when I said this, you know this is the
Speaker 4: case for even the most specialized cats. I say that
Speaker 4: because a clouded leopard, which is not a leopard's distinct
Speaker 4: kind of big cat, famous for its very long tail,
Speaker 4: it's got really long canine teeth, and it's famous for
Speaker 4: being particularly our bory are very good climber. One of
Speaker 4: those escaped from how At Zoo, and I think it
Speaker 4: was nineteen seventy five. This is the most specialized, the
Speaker 4: most tropical of the big cats, and it lived in
Speaker 4: the world for I think it's about a year until
Speaker 4: it was eventually shot, and it was perfectly healthy. It
Speaker 4: was in good condition. It has been killing and eating sheep.
Speaker 6: And if the.
Speaker 4: Clouded leopard can do that, well, why it's basically no
Speaker 4: surprise at all. The animals like pumas and leopards, which
Speaker 4: are the ultimate generalists. I mean, they can live everywhere
Speaker 4: and they do. You know, tumors are found from the
Speaker 4: tip of southern South America right, that's you know, the
Speaker 4: fin off of Canada. There's just no problem with these
Speaker 4: animals making the living once they get out. All they
Speaker 4: have to do is get out. And again we've got
Speaker 4: a good days in showing that people have not only
Speaker 4: deliberately released them over time, but also the animals escape
Speaker 4: fairly regularly from zoos that maybe aren't.
Speaker 6: So good, but also from really good zoos.
Speaker 4: I could discuss cases I know of in recent years
Speaker 4: where people have been expensive and new enclosures for leopards,
Speaker 4: but there's one little thing they haven't thought of, and
Speaker 4: the cat has been able to exploit that and escape.
Speaker 4: And in those cases they've sometimes lost the cat and
Speaker 4: it's just gone and they never see it again. So that,
Speaker 4: in a nutshell is my general thinking about British Greek
Speaker 4: can Wow.
Speaker 2: So that's a lot more positive than the documentaries I've
Speaker 2: seen on it. That's really interesting. So wow, I'm going
Speaker 2: to have to go find some of these accounts and
Speaker 2: look at the literature a little closer.
Speaker 4: Well, the problem is, I'll say, is that okay, everything,
Speaker 4: well much of this stuff I've just told you that
Speaker 4: actually doesn't exist in the literature. I think that the
Speaker 4: people interested in British big Cats kind of full time,
Speaker 4: you know, if they're like main sort of passion. This
Speaker 4: does link to some of the stuff we were talking
Speaker 4: about elier On. I think they've actually done a really
Speaker 4: poor job in actually making this data well known, and
Speaker 4: they certainly have done a terrible job in getting it
Speaker 4: into the literature. Now, I do appreciate that, you know,
Speaker 4: as a publishing scientist, in my perspective on this is
Speaker 4: is kind of different from theirs. Because if I discover
Speaker 4: something new, if I see you know, whatever it is,
Speaker 4: you know, something come interested in a new specimen or
Speaker 4: a new bit of behavior or whatever, I immediately think,
Speaker 4: you know, well there's a little paper there might not
Speaker 4: only be a day's work, you know, two page paper.
Speaker 4: You can publish it very easily, particularly something to do
Speaker 4: with animal behavior.
Speaker 6: Or a new record.
Speaker 4: You can there's so many little like biology magazines or
Speaker 4: journals or whatever, you can easily get these things out there.
Speaker 4: Nobody's done that with this huge pile of data on
Speaker 4: British big cats. And I've actually been to there's an
Speaker 4: annual meeting that's held in this country on the British
Speaker 4: big cat phenomenon, and I've said at this meeting, you
Speaker 4: guys have.
Speaker 6: Got to work hard up to get your stuff in
Speaker 6: Journal's like there's.
Speaker 4: A thing called British Wildlife which is read by everyone
Speaker 4: interested in British wildlife, and it's like they're fairly sympathetic
Speaker 4: to the British big cat phenomenon. You could easily say,
Speaker 4: you know, we've found this diagnostic kill, we found this scat,
Speaker 4: this you know trackway, We've got this photograph which is definitive.
Speaker 4: Put it out there easy, just you know, to get
Speaker 4: the community to appreciate how good the evidence is. And
Speaker 4: this hasn't been done. So in frustration, this is something
Speaker 4: I've taken on myself, which I really wish I hadn't.
Speaker 4: Another project that's kind of like on the back burner
Speaker 4: for several years, myself and a colleague book with John
Speaker 4: McGowan who's very interested in britchbig cats. We've been trying
Speaker 4: to write a po technical paper that talks about the
Speaker 4: tracks that the hairs, the droppings, the diagnostic kills, and
Speaker 4: some of the better photographic evidence. And I know that
Speaker 4: if this was done and if we published it somewhere
Speaker 4: like Journal Zoology, which is you know, kind of what
Speaker 4: I have in mind, you'd have all that data there
Speaker 4: in one go.
Speaker 6: And at the moment you don't have that.
Speaker 4: You have to go through a load of popular books
Speaker 4: that often read like the kind of you know, adventure diaries.
Speaker 2: That like my personal would sure, sure, sure, very.
Speaker 4: Common in cryptology literature. I'm not saying they've done a
Speaker 4: bad job. You know that that's a fairly nice body
Speaker 4: of literature. But you just don't have people doing the
Speaker 4: job properly and getting the data.
Speaker 3: So it's the.
Speaker 2: Delineation issue, isn't it. I mean, between popular this is
Speaker 2: a hobby and this is an actual journalistic type of science, right,
Speaker 2: so it's got to be taken more seriously if there's
Speaker 2: real things there. So right, it would be like the
Speaker 2: guys who claim they found bigfoot in Georgia. Now, if
Speaker 2: I found a big foot and killed it, The very
Speaker 2: first thing I would do, after making sure it wasn't
Speaker 2: a guy of suit and I didn't need to get
Speaker 2: rid of a body, is h is contact some biologists immediately,
Speaker 2: and because it's got to be examined, written up, diagnosed,
Speaker 2: drawn up and published. If science happens in the journals,
Speaker 2: not in my diary, right, not on my right.
Speaker 1: So and I was going to ask, how do you
Speaker 1: amateurs become involved in academia.
Speaker 4: Well, they have to cooperate with people who were able
Speaker 4: to have the smart to do this. And if they
Speaker 4: do that, they've got there is no problem at all
Speaker 4: with them getting the appropriate credit. I think that's one
Speaker 4: of the issues. They're concerned that if they suddenly, you know,
Speaker 4: if they shone up doctor so and so at the
Speaker 4: local museum and say we've got a bad big foot,
Speaker 4: then that person is going to take it away and
Speaker 4: publish it, and the finders are not going to get
Speaker 4: the credit.
Speaker 6: Well, that just that just will not happen.
Speaker 4: If anything, there's you probably know this.
Speaker 6: But maybe it's not well known enough.
Speaker 4: The there's a big thing today, a big kind of
Speaker 4: you know, ethical movement where people are making sure that
Speaker 4: the right people get the credit for doing research and
Speaker 4: going to the trouble of you know, finding and procuring
Speaker 4: and retrieving let's say, the carpets of the mystery animal.
Speaker 4: That's a huge amount of work. I'm absolutely sure that hypothetically,
Speaker 4: if someone were to discover one of the big famous cryptids,
Speaker 4: the finder would would They wouldn't have to do the
Speaker 4: hard graph they wouldn't have to you know, write the
Speaker 4: technical paper and do the DNA profiling and everything. You
Speaker 4: could get people to do that for you, but that
Speaker 4: the finder would get the credit. The problem with some
Speaker 4: of these cases is obviously, well I'm thinking of the
Speaker 4: more dish, the dish of people once they obviously were
Speaker 4: interested in kind of fame and fortune, and that that's Georgia.
Speaker 6: Oh right, yeah, the thing hoax thing but from.
Speaker 4: What matt Ricord whatever they call it, some crazy name
Speaker 4: for it, but yeah, it's it's a matter of contacting
Speaker 4: the right people. And today, I mean, what with the
Speaker 4: Internet and everything, that is easier than ever before that
Speaker 4: you have no excuse at all for not finding the
Speaker 4: relevant person in the field and the relevant expert and
Speaker 4: talking to them.
Speaker 6: And yeah, well there's a.
Speaker 2: Lot of distrust in cryptozoology. I mean that between researchers, right,
Speaker 2: which always bothers me, because right that in science, if
Speaker 2: I understand it, which I'm not a professional working scientist,
Speaker 2: But if you're worried about people getting on your stuff,
Speaker 2: you publish a general paper and then come back with
Speaker 2: something more specific later. You lay your steak out, you
Speaker 2: stake your claim. I guess that's true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, people do do a lot of kind
Speaker 4: of well territorial markings, you like, right.
Speaker 6: There, there are all.
Speaker 4: Kinds of little battles and warring factions and so in
Speaker 4: every every single branch of science.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 4: But I can't see that that would be a problem
Speaker 4: with any of any of these, any of the superstars
Speaker 4: of Cripper's orgy.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so. Even if you go back
Speaker 2: to like, what was it the discovery of cosmic microwave
Speaker 2: background radiation. Those guys got a Nobel prize and they
Speaker 2: weren't even looking for it. Will Meanwhile, in another lab,
Speaker 2: people were looking for it deliberately and didn't find it,
Speaker 2: So the credit went to the guys who found it,
Speaker 2: even by accident. Right, So yeah, I think science is
Speaker 2: pretty good, you know, I trust my science pretty.
Speaker 4: Well, should think Yeah, a lot of this mistrust is
Speaker 4: completely misplaced and just kind of comes from without wanting
Speaker 4: to sound really does kind of come from ignorant about
Speaker 4: the way things work and also about what people are like.
Speaker 4: I mean, bear in mind that a lot.
Speaker 6: Of the I think there's also there's also.
Speaker 4: The implication that scientists, because they often are paid to
Speaker 4: pursue their interests, they kind of have like a big
Speaker 4: financial stake in it or whatever.
Speaker 6: But loads of us do.
Speaker 4: I mean, most of the work we do is basically
Speaker 4: done kind of for fun and for free. I mean,
Speaker 4: the weird research that I've done that sort of surrounds
Speaker 4: the core of like kind of PhD based research I've
Speaker 4: done has been done entirely on my own time, my
Speaker 4: own kind of funding, And that is absolutely common, absolute
Speaker 4: typical scientists generally, almost without exception, are you know, interested
Speaker 4: in it for the sake of getting the data out there?
Speaker 4: That might mean, you know, putting forward during cherished typothesists.
Speaker 6: Obviously, do you get you know, there is kind of
Speaker 6: some of you go stroking involved, sure, but yeah, we.
Speaker 4: Want the data out there. It's not that's nobody's interested
Speaker 4: in keeping these things to themselves, keeping them locked away.
Speaker 4: And not letting people see them. And you do see
Speaker 4: that in the cryptological community that.
Speaker 1: Is often a claim as well. And earlier you were
Speaker 1: talking about evidence that's found by cryptozoologists and that it's
Speaker 1: usually bad evidence. But I was just wondering, as a
Speaker 1: broad question, have there been any new creatures that have
Speaker 1: been discovered by lay people by cryptozoologists.
Speaker 4: I think most of the new species I can think
Speaker 4: of that have been named in recent years have been
Speaker 4: found by biologists, qualified biologists who have gone out into
Speaker 4: the field and seen them. They must there must be
Speaker 4: some cases though where I can't think of any particularly
Speaker 4: good ones off the top of my head, but I'm
Speaker 4: sure there must be cases where someone has, you know,
Speaker 4: donated a bird or a lizard or something to a
Speaker 4: museum and it's and it's been named as a new species.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously that turns out that that happens all
Speaker 4: the time. But all of the larger and more impressive animals,
Speaker 4: terrestrial or marine, has been been found by by biologists.
Speaker 4: And I can think of many cases in recent years
Speaker 4: where they've gone to a you know, a team has
Speaker 4: gone to a certain area to do a survey and
Speaker 4: they've learned from the local people about you know, this
Speaker 4: this primate or this bird or this antelope or whatever,
Speaker 4: and that has turned out to be a major, a
Speaker 4: major new discovery.
Speaker 6: But yeah, now I'm afraid of I can't think.
Speaker 4: Of any but that doesn't mean.
Speaker 6: They don't exist.
Speaker 1: And you've written a lot about Caddy and the famous
Speaker 1: photo of an alleged corpse sometimes called the Naden Harbor carcus.
Speaker 1: Could you tell our listeners a bit about the photograph
Speaker 1: in your analysis?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, so people have been reporting this long bodied
Speaker 4: sea monster with large eyes and supposedly with horns or hair.
Speaker 4: They've been talking about it since well for a long time,
Speaker 4: I think, certainly since the eighteen hundreds, the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 4: and that creature has become known as Cabrasaurus, and people
Speaker 4: have got a fairly clear idea of what it's meant
Speaker 4: to look like. During the nineteen nineties, it was discovered
Speaker 4: by two scientists who are particularly interested in Cabrasaurus, Ed
Speaker 4: Bousfield and Paul Le Blonde. They rediscovered in archives some
Speaker 4: photographs taken in nineteen thirty two at a whale flending
Speaker 4: platform in the Queen Charlet Islands, British Columbia. A place
Speaker 4: called a carcass had apparently been retrieved from the stomach
Speaker 4: of a sperm whale at this flending platform and maiden
Speaker 4: harbor whales to the whaling station, and apparently the whalers
Speaker 4: had recognized the carcass was extremely unusual. They put it
Speaker 4: on wooden crates and they'd photographed it. And the story
Speaker 4: goes that the carcasses of unknown whereabouts. Nobody knows what
Speaker 4: happened to the carcass, and it's been suggested that it
Speaker 4: was sent either to the biological station at the may
Speaker 4: Note or to the museum in British Columbian Victoria, British Columbia.
Speaker 4: But so the carcass is gone very familiar story in
Speaker 4: criks already.
Speaker 6: But the photographs remain, and the photographs do.
Speaker 4: Seem to show a creature that matches with the Cadbrasaurus
Speaker 4: creature that people had been talking about for ages. So
Speaker 4: Booster and the Blonde suggested that they are one and
Speaker 4: the same. They suggested that the carcass is actually a
Speaker 4: carcass of this Cabrosaurus creature. So they're not only saying
Speaker 4: that it's real, they're saying that we had a carcass
Speaker 4: we've lost it, but these photographs are definitive and a
Speaker 4: proper well, they did publish booths Fill and Le Blonde
Speaker 4: published a very lengthy paper, a very controversial paper. They
Speaker 4: were bold enough to name the carcass as a new species,
Speaker 4: and they actually formerly erected Cabrasaurus will they as kind
Speaker 4: of like a proper scientific name. They said that all
Speaker 4: the kind of salient features of cabra sauce are obviously
Speaker 4: present in the carcass. And they even identified the animal.
Speaker 4: They said, you can tell from the photograph that is
Speaker 4: a reptile and that specifically it belongs to a group
Speaker 4: of fossil reptiles called pleasosaurs, and that's kind of and
Speaker 4: they used quite they used eyewitness evidence to sort of
Speaker 4: back up their their claims and so on, and they
Speaker 4: drew in quite a lot of them different business pieces
Speaker 4: from the criptological literature. So a huge deal if if
Speaker 4: they're right, I certainly skeptical about kind of all the
Speaker 4: different stages of inference involved in this. I would like
Speaker 4: to see a proper detailed investigation done off the carcass
Speaker 4: of well of the photographs of the carcass, given that
Speaker 4: the carcass itself is lost, and there are conflicting reports
Speaker 4: on what it is. Now, it does appear to be
Speaker 4: a long bodied peculiar vertebrate. If it is, does it
Speaker 4: match with the Camerasaurus creature that people claim to have seen,
Speaker 4: or is it something else? Is it actually the distorted
Speaker 4: carcass of some other creature that just happens to look
Speaker 4: like the Cabrasaurus entity that knows people say, it's a.
Speaker 2: Lot to digest. It was just a little digestion.
Speaker 4: Basically, a proper analysis needs to be done of that
Speaker 4: photograph and that's something else that's that's kind of in
Speaker 4: the works. Some investigation has been done as the actual
Speaker 4: eyewitness data that boost and Blonde used to back up
Speaker 4: their hypotheses on Cabrosaurus, but certainly all of their stuff
Speaker 4: about identifying it, you know, they claim that it's a
Speaker 4: living con plesiosaur. Well, that was very easy to kind
Speaker 4: of well demolished seems to be too hard a work,
Speaker 4: but it was pretty easy to kind of show big
Speaker 4: holes in their logic. See on the one hand that
Speaker 4: I think there is a biological mystery there that does
Speaker 4: need investigation. On the other hand, they definitely Boosted and
Speaker 4: Blon definitely without shadow of doubt, went way too far
Speaker 4: in you know what you can do with the data
Speaker 4: that you have. It's kind of a classic case of
Speaker 4: kind of sort of a runaway.
Speaker 6: Hypothesis you might call it. But basically they built up.
Speaker 4: A huge house of cards on what this animal might
Speaker 4: be like, how it might have behaved, hat might have bred,
Speaker 4: all this kind of stuff. And I certainly think that
Speaker 4: the carcass is very intriguing in these proper analysis that yeah,
Speaker 4: this skepticism needed at every single level of this of
Speaker 4: this case, not only the eyewitness data, but skepticism about
Speaker 4: the carcass, skepticism about the different eyewitness supports, the boos
Speaker 4: and and Levond news.
Speaker 2: So right, do we have any reason to suspect that
Speaker 2: it wasn't a hoax? I mean, I mean, yeah, people
Speaker 2: were doing hoaxes back then. It wasn't like hoaxes were
Speaker 2: invented in the fifties, you know. I mean, Uh, it's
Speaker 2: such an unusual shaped head. I've always been really curious
Speaker 2: about that, if that really is the head at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I published a paper on this in a short
Speaker 4: lived peer reviewed Crypt's AUDI publication called the kryptos Orgy Review,
Speaker 4: which unfortunately seems to have kind of vanished.
Speaker 6: They seem to have heard of it.
Speaker 4: But the maiden Harbor carcass came from nineteen was photography
Speaker 4: in ninety thirty two, and in some similar times something
Speaker 4: on nineteen thirty four. There's another set of photographs taken
Speaker 4: very close by I've forgotten the location. It all come
Speaker 4: to me, but that is also alleged to be a
Speaker 4: long bodied caddy carcass. Photographs on the shore of British Columbia,
Speaker 4: and that one, I'm absolutely convinced is a kelp stem
Speaker 4: with a rock posing as a skull and then like
Speaker 4: a muscle used as an eye socket, and various bits
Speaker 4: of flotsam and jetsam and bits of plants and stuff
Speaker 4: used to produce a fairly realistic looking at caddy carcass.
Speaker 6: So I totally it could take your point. I absolutely agree.
Speaker 4: I think people were in the habit of that case
Speaker 4: shows that they were in the habit of generating Hope's
Speaker 4: at about the same time and in roughly the same place.
Speaker 4: But whether this goes for the Naden Harbor one as well,
Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean, whether the because Booster and
Speaker 4: von based as you just said, they said there's a
Speaker 4: camera like head. They say there's an obvious pectoral flipper,
Speaker 4: and they say there's a bilobed fluked tail, but if
Speaker 4: you look really really closely, it's Yeah, all of those
Speaker 4: claims are questionable. So yeah, I don't want to kind
Speaker 4: of give too much away, but basically there there definitely
Speaker 4: is scope there for like a proper analysis. I mean,
Speaker 4: the suggestion is already in delicate that it's a basking
Speaker 4: shark carcass that has been made because one authors he's
Speaker 4: now an ichthyologist, and he was he wasn't when he
Speaker 4: started to study, was just like an undergrad student. But
Speaker 4: he's claimed that you can definitely see distinctive features of
Speaker 4: basking shark vertebrae on the body segments of the Naden
Speaker 4: Harbor carcass.
Speaker 2: We've had the Glenn Cuban em because I guess a
Speaker 2: basking shark and as it decomposes does sort of favor
Speaker 2: please us or right.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The making Harbor thing is weird though, because it because
Speaker 4: it just seems to be so long bodied there has
Speaker 4: got these kind of like loops in it. It doesn't
Speaker 4: look like that Zoie Myra carcass or any of the
Speaker 4: other pseudo please you saw.
Speaker 2: Right, It's it's intriguing. Of course, I love old photographs anyway.
Speaker 2: I mean that's oh, I love them.
Speaker 4: This one is very cool and the facts the photographs
Speaker 4: are good enough for big Yeah, they've been able to
Speaker 4: zoom in pretty close and look at quite a lot
Speaker 4: of the detail on the on the tail and stuff.
Speaker 3: But that.
Speaker 4: That boosts and inaban really did go too far in
Speaker 4: how much information they thought they could kind of get
Speaker 4: out of it. So so yeah, hope sing will always
Speaker 4: remain a possibility. But yeah, I just I just don't know.
Speaker 4: I think it's I think it's a weird vertebrate carcase
Speaker 4: of some sort. I don't think it's anything like a
Speaker 4: them like that helps them like the other one. The
Speaker 4: language I was trying to remember. But yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 4: what you said remained valid and then yeah, let's see
Speaker 4: where it goes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you've been very generous with your time. We're
Speaker 2: going to have to have you back again.
Speaker 1: Oh it a lot more to talk about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, this is well. I've learned some things
Speaker 2: today too. This is nice. So this is very informative.
Speaker 2: I want to ask you about Kate Bush and several
Speaker 2: other things.
Speaker 1: You're both fan.
Speaker 6: If you want, we can save it to the next time.
Speaker 2: I will save it. Save it Monster. Thanks for listening
Speaker 2: to this episode of Monster Talk. Today you heard Blake
Speaker 2: Smith and doctor Karen Stalls Now interview doctor Darren Nash
Speaker 2: on the intersection of cryptozoology and science. If you enjoy
Speaker 2: this conversation, you can continue it on our forums at
Speaker 2: skeptic blog dot com. Monster Talk is produced with the
Speaker 2: support of Skeptic Magazine. Music from today's episode comes from
Speaker 2: the Commodore sixty four game mail order Monsters and our
Speaker 2: The theme song is by Pete Stealing Monkeys. Be sure
Speaker 2: and follow Monster Talk's hosts on Facebook and Twitter, and
Speaker 2: if you like the show, tell a friend and we'd
Speaker 2: love to get a review on iTunes. Check out skeptic
Speaker 2: dot com or monster talk dot org for more information.
Speaker 2: Thanks again for listening.
Speaker 8: Want to stay abreast of the latest from Skeptic Magazine
Speaker 8: and the Skeptic Society. Want cutting edge skeptical articles delivered
Speaker 8: straight to your inbox every week, then subscribe to e Skeptic,
Speaker 8: the free electronic newsletter of the Skeptic Society. Visit skeptic
Speaker 8: dot com to sign up.
Speaker 2: So do you consider yourself to be a skeptic. A skeptic,
Speaker 2: what is that