 | | Stoneage | | When I was about 12 years old my parents bought my siblings and I a set of World Book Encyclopedias. For about 2 seconds I thought about what I’d look up first and then went straight for Abominable Snowman. Well, kind of straight. Trying to find abominable at age 12 when you are a lousy speller is an adventure in itself. I think I’ve been look for old Ab and his ilk every since. |
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| | Why crypto animals of today aren’t the monsters of yesterday |
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| My version of a sea 'monster' published in the Gallery in Cryptozoology.com |
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| My idea for the Dragon of the Ishtar Gate published in the Articles in Cryptozoology.com |
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I’ve often wondered why most of cryptozoology seems to want all its unknown animals to be creatures that once existed rather than new, completely unknown forms. Most of the crypto ‘experts’ who write books, create web content or produce videos insist on wrapping their monsters in skins of animals long gone. Sea serpents are plesiosaurs, Bigfoot is gigantopithecus blacki, Mokele-Mbembe is an Apatosaurus and so on. Many fans of cryptozoology buy into these assumptions maybe because it’s easier to believe that all the large unknown creatures are animals that managed to escape extinction rather than true unknowns. Maybe they’re the victims of too many science fiction/monster movies. Whatever the cause it’s one reason many don’t take cryptozoology seriously because belief in animals unchanged by time is to say you don’t believe in evolution. Or if you do believe in evolution you’re saying it doesn’t apply to your favorite monsters. But to believe in evolution you must accept one basic tenet: Evolution doesn’t stand still.
Evolution is a journey, not a destination. And it’s a journey that seldom travels in a straight line. It’s a series of loops and whorls, false starts and dead ends that culminates in every living thing on the planet wherever or whenever it happens to be at any point in time. Sure there are a few, a very few, animals that have managed to place evolution on hold by finding a form and a niche that has allowed them to stay basically the same for millions of years, the horseshoe crab being probably the best-known example. Horseshow crabs first showed up in the Ordovician period, about 500-440 million years ago. Over the next 200 million years or so they slowly changed reaching the form we know and love in the early Triassic.
But most, as in 99.9999%, of animals alive today have evolved into their current forms from creatures vastly different. Even the coelacanth, the most famous ‘living fossil’, is not the same creature as those in the fossil records. They are different from those found in the fossil records from the oldest of 360 million years ago and the youngest of 80 million years ago. They have evolved to the point that modern coelacanths belong to a different genera than their 80 million year old kin.
Life changes to adapt. Failure to adapt, in most cases, is to die. Many fail, as can be seem in the reminders scattered throughout the natural history of our planet. But they do try. And the attempt to adapt doesn’t have to be the slow, methodical system of changes that most consider the hallmark of evolution. If need be, changes can happen in an evolutionary heartbeat. Take the blue mussel, found in the waters of New England, for example. In the late 80’s Asian shore crab were introduced to the waters shared by the blue mussels. The bivalves, prey for the shell crushing crabs, quickly responded by thickening their shells. As of yet the crab haven’t accelerated this biological arms race but who’s to say what the future holds?
Speculation as to what ‘monsters’ may be out there is part of the fun of cryptozoology but every ‘monster’ theory must take evolution into consideration. To insist that the Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur is to ignore both the Cretaceous extinction and evolution. But even if the animals survived the extinction, evolution would have kept busy changing the animal, tweaking it to fit the world as it was at any given moment, not as it was 65 million years ago. If it had survived, today’s plesiosaur would most likely look like something vastly different than its forebears.
But maybe that one reason there will always be cryptozoology. Even if all the life on Earth is found and placed in the Encyclopedia of Life evolution is always at work, making new things. And looking for new life is what cryptozoology is all about.
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