Tag Archives: cryptozoology

“Spectacular, ridiculous, experimental things”

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Reading The Tomb of the Mili Mongga by Samuel Turvey for New Scientist, 6 March 2024

Pity the plight of evolutionary biologist Samuel Turvey, whose anecdotal accounts of fossil hunting in a cave near the village of Mahaniwa, on the Indonesian island of Sumba, include the close attentions of “huge tail-less whip scorpions with sickening flattened bodies, large spiny grabbing mouthparts, and grotesquely thin and elongated legs”.

Why was a conservation biologist hunting for fossils? Turvey’s answer has to do with the dual evolutionary nature of islands.

On the one hand, says Turvey, “life does spectacular, ridiculous, experimental things on islands, making them endlessly fascinating to students of evolution.”

New Caledonia, a fragment of ancient Gondwana, boasts bizarre aquatic conifers and even shrubby parasitic conifers without any roots. Madagascar hosts a lemur called the aye-aye; a near primate equivalent to the woodpecker. But my personal favourite, in a book full of wonders, pithily described, is the now extinct cave goat Myotragus from predator-free Majorca and Menorca. Relieved of the need to watch its back, it evolved front-facing eyes, giving it the disconcerting appearance of a person wearing a goat mask.

But there is a darker side to island life: it’s incredibly vulnerable. The biggest killers by far are visitations of fast-evolving diseases. European exploration and colonisation between the 16th and 19th centuries decimated the human populations of Pacific archipelagos, as a first wave of dysentery was followed by smallpox, measles and influenza. Animals brought on the trip proved almost as catastrophic to the environment. Contrary to cliche, westerners on the island of Mauritius did not hunt the dodo to extinction; rats did. And let’s not forget Tibbles, the cat that’s said to have single-handedly (pawedly?) wiped out the Stephens Island wren, a tiny flightless songbird, in 1894.

There are lessons to be learned here, of course, but Turvey’s at pains to point out that islands are accidents waiting to happen. Islands are by their very nature sites of extinction. They may be treasure-troves of evolutionary innovation, but most of their treasures are already extinct. As for conserving their wildlife, Turvey wonders how, without a good understanding of the local fossil record, “we even define what constitutes a ‘natural’ ecosystem, or an objective restoration target to aim for”.

A tale of islands and their ephemeral wonders would alone have made for an arresting book, but Turvey, a more-than-able raconteur, can’t resist spicing up his account with tales of Sumba’s resident mythical wild-men, the “Mili Mongga”, who, it is said, used to build walls and help out with the ploughing — until their habit of stealing food got them all killed by the infuriated human population.

Why should we pay attention to such tales? Well, Sumba is only about 50 kilometres south of Flores, where a previously unknown (and, at just over a metre tall, ridiculously small) hominin was unearthed by an Australian team in 2003.

If there were hobbits on Flores, might there have been giants on Sumba? And might surviving mili mongga still be lurking in the forests?

Turvey uses the local island legends to launch fascinating forays into the island’s history and anthropology, to explain why large animals, fetched up on islands, grow smaller, while small animals grow larger, and also to have an inordinate amount of fun, largely at his own expense.

When one villager describes a mili mongga skull as being two feet long, and its teeth “as long as a finger”, “I got the feeling,” says Turvey, ”that there might now be some exaggeration going on.” Never say never, though: soon Turvey and his long-suffering team are following gamely along on missions up crags and past crocodile-infested swamps and into holes in the ground — sometimes where other visitors, from other villages, habitually go to relieve themselves.

“There was the cave that some village kids told us contained a human skull, which turned out to be a rotten coconut under some bat dung,” Turvey recalls. “There was the cave that was sacred, which seemed to mean that no one could remember exactly where it was.”

Turvey’s more serious explorations unearthed two new mammal genera (both ancestral forms of rat). It goes without saying, I should think, that they did not bring back evidence of a new hominin. But what’s not to enjoy about a tall tale, especially when it’s used to paint such a vivid and insightful portrait of a land and its people?

How to catch an elephant

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Reading The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary by Hana Videen for the Spectator, 11 November 2023

How to catch an elephant.

Find a tree, and saw most of the way through it, without felling it. Sooner or later an unwary elephant is bound to lean up against it. Down comes the tree and down comes the elephant which, since it has no joints in its legs, will be unable to get up again. Dispatch your elephant with, um, dispatch, lest the herd arrives in answer to its plangent call. In that case the youngest of them, being lower to the ground, will be able to lift their fallen comrade back on its feet.

In her second foray into the Old English lexicon and mindset (The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English came out in 2021), Old English scholar Hana Videen is out to explore a world where animals hold sway. (A “deor”, by the way, is the Old English word for any animal, and opening this volume, you are as like to be confronted with a spider or a dragon, a dog-headed man or a tusked woman, as you are by anything so commonplace as a “deer”.) These living, breathing sources of knowledge, enchantment and instruction provided the feedstock for countless bestiaries, which flooded the Medieval book market for a good three hundred years. No earlier, Old English bestiary survives. Still, there’s lore enough in “tales, poems and medical texts, riddles and travel logs, sermons and saints’ lives” to justify Videen’s putting a synthetic one together from the available material.

Though it helps to know a bit of German, Old English is a captivating tongue. What’s not to love about a language that collides nouns in kennings like “gange-wæfre (walker-weaver) and wæfer-gange (weaver-walker), to name a spider? (At least we’ve retained the gærs-hoppa (grasshopper).)

Where Old English becomes arduous is in its religious texts, that cannot leave anything alone, but must constantly be making things act as metaphors for other things. That stiff-legged Elephant we started with is God’s Law, you see, that ultimately fails to keep us from committing sin. The other adult elephants (prophets of the Old Testament) try to help their fallen brother, but it’s only with the help of the little elephant (Christ) that the fallen can rise again.

There is, Videen explains, nothing particularly dogmatic or esoteric going on here — only people’s ongoing effort to explain their world in the most vivid and entertaining terms available. (We do the same today, and quite as unthinkingly: our plugged-in views over smooth-running power brunches of start-up meltdowns would surely addle the most visionary mediaeval mind: do these people imagine they are machines?)

Old English literature becomes a lot less arduous when we realise that its rhetorical fancies are fancies: they’re a poetic register, not a secret sign, and they aren’t designed to stand much scrutiny. In the Old English Life of St Margaret, for example, poor Margaret is swallowed by a dragon, splits it in two by making the sign of the cross, and steps out into the world again unharmed — making her the patron saint of women in childbirth. If you overthink this, you’ll tie yourself up in knots wondering at a metaphor that kills the mother-to-be while making her the instrument of the devil. The point is: stop being so needlessly scholastic. Focus on the first things the image brings to mind — the blood and the pain and the miracle of birth. Treat the language like a language, not a codex from the Beyond.

Much time has passed, of course, since “doves congregated in multicoloured flocks”. Videen is an excellent guide to lost lore (black doves were associated with obscure sermons, and “blac”, by anyway meant “glossy”) and sees us safely through some disconcerting shifts in meaning. Today we associate owls with wisdom, “yet mediaeval bestiaries compare the owl’s daytime blindness to the spiritual ‘blindness’ of the Jews,” Videen explains, “who refuse to accept the ‘light’ of Christianity.” When other, smaller birds flock around an owl in an Old English sermon, don’t assume they’re paying homage to the wise old bird.

Not every Old English text feels the need to find moral instruction in the birds and the beasts. There is also a sizeable quantity of what Videen charmingly terms “Alexander fan-fic”: imaginary first-person accounts of Alexander the Great’s adventures in Ind, or Ethiopia, or Lentibelsinea (home of the self-immolating chicken, the fabled “henn”), or wherever the heck else he was supposed to have got to (and sometimes, mark you, on the back of a griffin).
“Did people struggle to imagine creatures of Alexander’s campaigns like the teeth tyrant and moonhead?” Videen wonders. “Were the solutions to riddles more obvious than they are today?”

Though her charming, endlessly fascinating book is chock-full of archival detective stories (and not a few shaggy dog stories into the bargain), Videen would rather we entertained the possibility that the early English mind was quite as imaginative as the modern one, and just as intelligent, and had not yet lost the art of appreciating a tall tale or even, Heavens defend us, a joke.

The coasts of Britain and why to avoid them

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A piece for the Financial Times to mark National Maritime Museum Cornwall’s Monsters of the Deep exhibition, 14 March 2020 

In February this year, even as Stuart Slade was in Falmouth assembling the exhibits for a new museum show on sea creatures, a 60ft fin whale was washed up and died on a nearby beach. “Nothing compares to seeing such an animal up close,” he says. “You come away awed, and full of wonder, and just a little bit afraid.”

The objects filling Slade’s gallery for the mysterious Monsters of the Deep exhibition are by turns terrifying, wonderful and funny — sometimes all three. Some are real, some reconstructed, some, like the worrisomely convincing corpse of a mermaid, are assembled out of parts to entertain or gull the public.

The show, at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, marks the moment Falmouth’s “local” museum learns to punch well above its weight, embracing global phenomena and potentially difficult themes, such as the discomfortingly large role imagination plays in how we see the real world.

Hoaxes, which you might think would be something of an embarrassment here, prove central to the exhibition’s vision. In any event, they can’t be ignored, not while Falmouth’s very own sea monster, Morgawr (first sighted in 1975), could be prowling the bay. According to a report from around the time in the Falmouth Packet: “Mrs Scott said she would ‘never forget the face on that thing’ as long as she lived.”

It transpired that Morgawr was mischievously fabricated from coordinated fictional “sightings”, but the lines between fact and fiction tend to be blurred whenever sea monsters are involved. On September 25 1808, on Stronsay in the Orkney Islands, a large carcass was washed ashore. Edinburgh’s leading natural history society, the Wernerian, decided it was a new species, probably a sea serpent.

By the time the London anatomist Sir Everard Home realised it was more likely a decayed basking shark, the Beast’s reputation had firmly rooted itself in local folklore. Google (if you dare) pictures of dead basking sharks. Their jaws, dorsal and caudal fins disappear first, leaving them with tiny heads and long necks, like ancient reptiles transported from some deep corner of the Mesozoic.

Most sea monsters are real animals, misidentified under extreme circumstances. In 1493, Christopher Columbus “quite distinctly saw three mermaids” off the coast of Haiti. “They are not so beautiful as they are said to be,” he remarked in his journal, “for their faces had some masculine traits.” They were in fact manatees: four-metre long marine mammals with prehensile upper lips and widely spaced eyes (it had been a long voyage).

Most useful to the Falmouth show are the depictions of sea monsters in art, because it’s here that we get to grips with the key question: why have creatures that do not exist persisted in our imaginations since we first put pigment to cave wall?

Some believe sea monsters are a folk memory of creatures long extinct. Native Australian legends of the fearsome Bunyip (head of an emu, body of a dog, tail of a horse) might just scrape by as descriptions of extinct Australian marsupials such as the diprotodon or Palorchestes. But what are we to make of Mishipeshu, which terrified generations of Anishinaabe in the Great Lakes region of Canada? This was an underwater panther, for whom, needless to say, no fossil records exist.

These forms of wonder and fear change across time. The Kraken is supposed to be an octopus, at least according to the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. But in 13th-century Greenland, the Kraken was more like a giant crab. Slade, who has been head of public programming in Falmouth for 15 years, says: “The conversations I’ve had about this exhibition tend all to go the same way. People point out that only 5 per cent of the oceans has been explored. From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to saying, ‘There must be something else out there that hasn’t yet been discovered.’”

The inference is mistaken but not obviously so. Back in 1893, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley wrote in The Times: “There is not an a priori reason that I know of why snake-bodied reptiles, from fifty feet long and upwards, should not disport themselves in our seas as they did in those of the cretaceous epoch which, geologically speaking, is a mere yesterday.”

Palaeontologist Darren Naish, who is lead curator of the Falmouth exhibition, is willing to entertain Huxley’s theory: “His was the right attitude to take at the time, because the life of the deep oceans was only just being discovered.” (Monsters of the Deep makes much of the groundbreaking research expedition led by HMS Challenger, which between 1872 and 1876 discovered a staggering 4,700 new species of marine life.) “Large fossil dinosaurs and early whales, and some amazing gigantic living animals, had been discovered only relatively recently,” Naish points out. “The whale shark, the world’s biggest fish, was a mid 19th-century discovery.”

In an effort to make the new findings comprehensible, folkloric sea monsters were associated with ancient reptiles. Accounts invariably began with the observation that, for years and years, people have talked about giant serpents in the oceans and long-bodied monsters, then go on to point to the actual fossil evidence that such things were a reality. The earliest artists’ impressions have the plesiosaur (50ft long; extended neck; four oar-shaped flippers on a broad, flat body) as a giant, coiling serpent.

How, then, can we be certain that such beasts aren’t out there? In 1998, Charles Paxton, an aquatic ecologist at the Animal Behaviour Research Group at Oxford university, used a statistical technique to estimate the current diversity of large marine animals, based on their rate of discovery.

Extrapolating on data from 1830 to 1995, Paxton produced a graph showing the rate at which these animals are coming to light. He estimated that at most there are around 50 new large species still waiting to be discovered and, according to his graph, we’re likely to come across one every five-and-a-half years or so.

What will they look like? Cryptozoologists — researchers who aspire to the scientific study of undiscovered animals — have for years held out for the existence of radically novel animals, “living plesiosaurs” that have somehow survived from the time of the dinosaurs. These “cryptid” animals come with brilliant names like the super-otter and the father of all turtles (names invented by Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1968 book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents kick-started marine cryptozoology). They are meant to be gargantuan, more than 15 metres long, and unlike any creature known to science.

However, as Naish observes, “Of all the animals that have been discovered in recent decades, none has been radically novel.” Recent discoveries have included the Megamouth Shark and a couple of new types of beaked whale (the most recent was spotted by local whalers in Hokkaido, Japan last September). And as each new whale or shark is discovered, the chances of there still being a complete outlier in hiding — something really out there in terms of what’s possible — grow infinitesimally small.

So where did they all go, those writhing sea serpents, gargantuan crabs and city-block-sized squid? An article in an 1875 edition of the West Briton (a local Cornish weekly, still in print) offers clues. It tells the tale of two fishermen, setting nets in Gerrans Bay near Truro, who discovered a serpent “coiled about their floating cork. Upon their near approach, it lifted its head and showed signs of defiance, upon which they struck it forcibly with an oar”. Later, they pursued it and dragged it ashore for a look-see, “after which, it was killed on the rocks and most inconsiderably cast out to sea”.

Which is to say, if sea monsters existed, we must already have killed them. It’s something we’re worryingly good at. “It’s difficult to be tremendously optimistic about the persistence of ecosystems and many animal species,” says Naish, looking to the future of the oceans. “I find it hard to think that marine mammals and ray-finned fishes and sharks will persist into the future.” Instead, the sea monsters of tomorrow are going to be small and numerous, as the oceans, ever warmer and more acidic, fill with cephalopods, jellies, nematode worms and algae.

We can, however, look forward to some new invasions from the deep before that. With whole ecosystems shifting poleward as the planet warms, lionfish, sea snakes, crown-of-thorns starfish and at least three species of shark (hammerhead, ragged tooth and blacktip) are already heading for UK beaches.

Meanwhile, octopuses and squid will fill the niches vacated by over-harvested fish. Their life cycles are so short that they’ll be able to adapt faster than anything with a backbone. Right now, squid are multiplying crazily in British waters, although they’ll eventually lose out to the true inheritors of the oceans: the jellyfish.

In 2009, in the Sea of Japan, the giant Nomura jellyfish (up to two metres in diameter and weighing 200kg) began clogging and bursting fishing nets. This was deemed worthy of headlines at the time, but the jellyfish — most little more than gelatinous bags containing digestive organs and gonads — had barely begun their campaign of conquest. These days, they’re just as likely to be found blocking the seawater intake valves of British nuclear power plants.

For the future, Naish envisions a massively simplified food chain dominated by fast-growing things that can survive in warm seas where there’s very little oxygen. “You’re talking about a vast biomass but made of small detritus feeders living on algae,” he says. Given a few billion years of natural selection, some jellies may evolve into colonial super-organisms quite big enough to stride about on. “I like the idea of giant colonial jellies — like enormous but squishy islands,” he muses, “or big serpentine things that move slowly, drifting along on the weaker, less oxygenated currents of the future.”

That’s not all. A new surface fauna may evolve from mid-water and deep-water plankton, says Naish, “in which case your large surface-dwelling animals would be weird, spiny and translucent. A sea full of translucent, floating crustaceans; I see some merit in that idea.”

Mind reeling, I walk out of the exhibition past a Jenny Haniver. That’s the carcass of a ray or a skate that someone has cut and folded and dried, so that it ends up looking like a fairy, or a mermaid, demon, or dragon. No one really knows what they’re for. In some places, they’re said to have magic powers; most often they were simply made as curios for sailors. You find these sorts of things all over the world, from Mexico to Japan.

Morgawr may be a fake, and the Stronsay Beast just a hillock of rotten fish meat. Still, the monsters of the deep live. And for as long as human beings tread the earth, they cannot die.