OOPA: Golden Possum turns up in Brisbane

We love it when unusual wildlife turn up where they're not supposed to - in this case the rather splendid-looking Golden Possum, a rare colour phase previously only known to turn up in small pockets of Tasmania (and every once in a Blue Moon, on the outskirts of somewhere like Sydney).

These beauties have a hard time in the wild - it's tricky staying out of sight from large predators like Powerful Owls when your fur is as blingy as this bloke's!

So our thanks to Queensland-based CFZ Australia reader Dylan Smerdon for sharing his friend Auresh Yousefpour's pictures of this rare beauty, which appeared in a suburban backyard in Highgate Hill, Brisbane recently. We've never heard of a Golden Possum so far north.

Have you seen an Out of Place Animal (OOPA) in Australia? Send in your pics, we'd love to see and share them on the blog.

Book review: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan

The Science of Monsters by science journalist Matt Kaplan

Review by Mike Williams

It was with some trepidation I initially delved in to this book. Perhaps it was the title 'The Science of Monsters' that was a bit off-putting (cue: slightly patronising tone and allusions to 'frightened, hysterical peasants'). But it turned out to be a really fun read on legendary monsters...and how they might be explained by modern science and the cultures that lived in awe and fear of them.

Did dragons really terrify people?
How did the legends of werewolves and vampires really start?
Could science resurrect dinosaurs? And would you really want a T.Rex living next door?

Kaplan discusses animals that really did exist, such as the fierce Eurasian cave lion, which was about 25 per cent bigger than today's lions, and then elegantly segues to giant European boars and the 2004  Alabama 'Hogzilla' which, when dug up, suddenly shrank in dimensions.

And he makes a thorough job of sifting through folklore, history and literature for clues to the origins of monsters. With references to everything from King Kong and giant squids to demons and vampires (and more than a few nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other icons of popular culture), it's sure to interest most readers.

Grounded in facts that would one day bear the fruit of fiction, The Science of Monsters is all about humans making sense of the world around them, even if it means putting fangs, fur and fear into the equation when it comes time to grapple with the great unknown.

The last word must go to Kaplan: "People have always looked to the horizon and feared that which they did not understand…"

If you like history, fables, with a dose of real science, then you will love this book.

Blue Mountains Panther Walk

Save the date!

On October 5, Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers authors Rebecca and Mike are hosting a Blue Mountains Panther Walk during the annual Festival of Walking in the Blue Mountains of NSW.

It’s one of Australia’s greatest wildlife mysteries – do ‘big cats’ really roam the bush? Sightings of black panthers have been made all over Australia, many of which have taken place in the Blue Mountains.

Join the authors of Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers and hear about some compelling local sightings, see casts taken of suspected ‘big cat’ prints, look at some of the best photos taken of monster moggies, and find out what might be behind these stories.

Are you brave enough to join the hunt?

Come join us for a walk and a talk.

Register here: http://festivalofwalking.com/events/blue-mountains-panther-bushwalk-in-search-of-big-cats/

Seen a big cat? Tell us about it!

Meet the Cryptozoologist: Dr Karl Shuker

How did you first get involved in researching strange and mysterious creatures?

I'd always been interested in the more unusual animals as opposed to the familiar ones, so when I was bought a copy of Bernard Heuvelmans's book On the Track of Unknown Animals as an early teenager by my mother, it sparked what has become an enduring, life-long interest in cryptozoology.

What were some of the early influences in your life?
Heuvelmans, definitely, also my mother, whose own interest in animals and nature immeasurably encouraged and directed my own.

Have you personally seen one of these creatures?
Sadly, no, though the upside of this is that I can remain entirely objective in relation to cryptid cases, not being influenced by personal experience.

What creatures particularly interest you?
Even with cryptozoology, I prefer the lesser-known, less-publicised animals as opposed to the more famous ones, so I have a wide range of interests in this field, including many that until I documented them had not been chronicled within the cryptozoological literature - such as the Scottish earth hound, the Sri Lankan devil bird and horned jackal, a vast diversity of mystery birds, the New Guinea devil pig, and all manner of little-known mystery cats from around the world.

What cryptids are most likely to exist in your opinion?
The two that seem most plausible and also most likely to be discovered at some point are the Sumatran Orang pendek and the Thylacine (though the latter may actually be discovered on New Guinea before/if at all on Tasmania or mainland Australia, if only because New Guinea is far less well-explored).

What’s your favourite?
The Fujian blue tiger has always held a particular appeal for me – the thought that there may have been and may even still be tigers with blue fur seems surreal and yet is backed by very reputable eyewitness reports.

What’s your favourite Australian cryptid?
The Yarri or Queensland tiger. I'd love it to exist and to be a living Thylacoleo (marsupial lion) – that would be an immensely significant cryptozoological revelation if one day confirmed.

Have you developed any theories around where the more unusual animals - i.e. yowies/bigfoot - have come from?
The yowie is definitely an enigma, in terms both of its origin and of its identity. In my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, I discussed the lesser-known theory that it may actually be a marsupial, possibly a surviving unusually primate-like diprotodont, which would certainly make sense zoogeographically. If a genuine placental primate, however, it might have arrived in Australia by rafting from south-east Asia. Indeed, although not widely known, there is even a very yowie-like entity reported from New Guinea, so perhaps yowies crossed the Torres Strait from there into Australia.

Have you written any books/articles?
Eighteen books to date, hundreds of articles, and I've been consultant and/or contributor to ten other books, so I've kept myself busy since I began writing in the mid-1980s! My most recent book is Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (CFZ Press: Bideford, 2012), published in December 2012, which contains a lot of information concerning Australasian examples.

Do you have a website?
My official website is at www.karlshuker.com and I also have my award-winning blog, ShukerNature, at www.karlshuker.blogspot.com, which contains nearly 300 articles on a very diverse range of subjects appertaining to cryptozoology and (un)natural history.

How many mystery animal reports would you receive a year?
Lots! I've never actually counted them, but it has to be in the hundreds.

What’s the closest you’ve personally come to finding something?
I spotted two unusually large quails on the New Zealand island bird sanctuary of Tiritiri Matangi when holidaying in Auckland in 2006, which I later read may actually be surviving specimens of the supposedly long-extinct and fairly large native New Zealand species of quail (quails living in New Zealand today are all supposed to be the smaller naturalised Australian quail). When DNA studies of these oversized Tiritiri quails (also spied by others there over the years) were carried out, however, they revealed that the quails were not New Zealand quails after all, sadly.

What’s the farthest you’ve traveled to go ‘in search of’ mystery animals?
I've travelled all over the world, to every continent except Antarctica, and to locations as isolated as Easter Island in the mid-Pacific (which is about as remote as anywhere on the whole of planet Earth, in fact), and I've always combined holidays with mystery beast investigations on-site whenever possible.

What’s next for you - any trips planned? Books or articles to write? 
Talks to give?
All three, hopefully – certainly, more books and articles, from which I earn a living, so it's not just for the fun of researching and writing them, though I do definitely derive immense pleasure from that.

Could you share some of your favourite cryptozoology book titles with us?
Heuvelmans's On the Track of Unknown Animals will always be #1 on the cryptozoological bookshelf for me, but nowadays there are so many others that we're spoilt for choice. Obviously, however, I definitely favour Michael Newton's massive Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology, and George Eberhart's hefty 2-volume counterpart, Mysterious Creatures.

What advice would you give anyone getting into the field of cryptozoology?
Read as much information as possible re: the cryptid that you plan to seek before setting forth into the field – too many crypto-expeditions in the past have set out ill-equipped with knowledge on the animal that they are seeking. Know your cryptid thoroughly, and then you have a decent chance of discovery. A fair time ago, one ill-fated expedition clearly did not do this, because it actually went looking for the cryptid concerned in entirely the wrong country! Incredible but true.

CFZ's Journal of Cryptozoology gets a Naish wrap

A great piece by Darren Naish about the new Journal of Cryptozoology (CFZ Press), the history of similar publications, and why cryptozoology should be taken more seriously.

"...cryptozoology cannot and should not be considered a pseudoscience. Why? Mostly because there is no contradiction whatsoever between the scepticism, hypothesis-testing, self-correction and need for autoptic evidence typical of ‘proper’ science with analyses of cryptozoological data, nor does investigation of cryptozoological data hinge on the assumption that there are always real, flesh-and-blood animals at the bottom of eyewitness reports.

Read the full post over at his Scientific American blog here.

Yowie? We don't think so...

Previous analysis by the CFZ's Mike Williams has shown that this image is in fact of a possum on top of a rock! Note the thermal signature of the 'yowie' is the same as the surrounding trees and the rock - mystery solved!

In the wake of a visiting US television show, which claims to have recorded evidence of a yowie bellowing in remote bushland, Australia seems to be in the grip of 'yowiemania' - or at least our media outlets do.

Secret state government files have revealed a yowie man was recently sighted in the Blue Mountains, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The case emerged among almost 60 suspected panther, leopard and big cat sightings from the past decade sitting in the bowels of the government archives and obtained under freedom of information laws.

But just for the record, these reports haven't been sitting in the bowels of anywhere for a decade - they were liberated at least eight years ago and have since been published in Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers, a massive tome that dedicates more than 430 pages to exploring the phenomenon.

After an overseas TV crew last week claimed it had recorded audio of a yowie man in a remote region on the NSW-Queensland border, documents show the Australian version of Bigfoot was also allegedly sighted last year far closer to metropolitan areas at Springwood, west of Sydney.

In an email to National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers, the witness said he had filmed the creature in March last year and taken photos of footprints. He even drew the yowie man's head, pecs, arms and feet on the picture to make it clearer.

"I have had a seven-year history with this creature," the witness wrote.Canberra crypto-naturalist Tim The Yowie Man, who claims to have seen a yowie in the Brindabella Ranges in 1994, said he was interested in the latest sighting.

"The Blue Mountains has been a common spot for big cats, obviously, but it is not unusual for yowies either," he said. "I have no doubt people believe they are seeing something unusual but many can be cases of mistaken identity."

The NSW Environment Department declined to comment last week. Three years after a government study found there was no evidence of the Blue Mountains Panther - aka the Hawkesbury Big Cat and the Penrith Panther - rangers are still receiving sightings of the creatures.

In an unsolved attack last summer, a Bilpin family's pet alpaca was mauled to death by a suspected big cat that later gutted a kangaroo.

"'Big cat' kill report," Hawkesbury area ranger David Monahan wrote in an email to his boss a few days after the attack.

"Victim was a large alpaca, head crushed, 7cm puncture wounds in skull, adult animal, hairs left on wire fence to be brought in today."

In June 2010, a witness claimed to have seen a cat the size of a german shepherd with yellow eyes beside a "roo on side of the road with head missing", a report said.

On July 13 last year, a man wrote to another ranger after spotting "the panther" on a trip home from Singleton a few days earlier.

There are 400-odd claimed big cat cases in recent decades.

And the rest!

Heuvelmans' On The Track continues to inspire...

The Independent's Michael McCarthy recently reflected on the enduring power of natural mysteries:

"I can't say I've been influenced by a lot of Belgians in my life, but I make an exception for one: Bernard Heuvelmans, a zoologist from Brussels who wrote a book which reverberated through my imagination when I read it as a young man, and still does to this day.

"First published in 1958, it was called On The Track of Unknown Animals and it examined the idea that there were still large, wild creatures left to be discovered, and that some of them might be remarkable relicts from the past.

"Heuvelmans' book formalised an area of inquiry – an enthusiasm, if you like – which came to be called cryptozoology: the search for animals whose existence has not been proven. Cryptozoology is regarded as merely pseudoscience by mainstream biologists, fixated as it is with the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti, and the Bigfoot of the American North-West (now generically referred to as "cryptids"), not to mention ABCs or Alien Big Cats – seen the Surrey puma lately? – and, indeed, it quickly shades into preoccupation with UFOs and the paranormal, and features prominently in publications such as Fortean Times, specialising in Weird News.

"So far, so wacky. They're out there, man. I tell you, they're out there. But Heuvelmans himself was a classically trained zoologist (his doctoral thesis was on the teeth of the aardvark) and his book is a scrupulously sober amassing of information not only on beasts which are formally unknown, but on animals which had been discovered fairly recently, such as the pygmy chimpanzee (the bonobo) and the Komodo dragon, the giant monitor lizard of Indonesia, as well as on creatures which had gone extinct in the recent past, such as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.

"The method is far from fantastical; it is straightforward examination of cases, showing that this one had been found, and that one had disappeared, and this other one was perhaps waiting to be discovered. Some of the cases he highlighted were potentially sensational and have greatly excited adventurers, such as that of the mokele-mbembe, the legendary swamp monster of the Congo river in Africa, which has been the subject of more expeditions than you can shake a stick at, including one last year – all unsuccessful. Other suggestions were much more restrained, and some of them seemed to me entirely plausible.

"One such was that of the woolly mammoth, which we generally think of as dying out tens of thousands of years ago, but which we now know (from carbon dating of its remains) survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until at least 1,650 BC. Heuvelmans' proposition, based on reports from hunters, was that isolated, relict populations of mammoths might still survive in the taiga, the endless conifer forest of the Siberian mainland. We are far more familiar with the Amazon rainforest, yet the Siberian taiga is bigger, with colossal areas still unpenetrated by roads; and I thought when I read his suggestion, and I continue to think: why not?

"It's not that it's a weird or wacky idea: it's simply that nature, often so vulnerable in the face of our interventions, also has astonishing powers of stubborn persistence, even when all the evidence points to a vanishing. The Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti, I can take or leave, not to mention the Surrey puma, but the idea that the pine marten, our loveliest native carnivore, which we think of as entirely confined to Scotland, might be clinging on in the remoter parts of Wales – which is possible – thrills me to bits. Despite the overweening pride we take in human knowledge, we don't know everything, as Heuvelmans was pointing out; and I give thanks that in the natural world, even now, there are still some secrets left."

Crypto books to look out for in 2012

A peek at one of our bookshelves, courtesy of Tania Poole.

The year ahead holds plenty of promise - including a growing list of interesting cryptozoology and naturalist books. We've pulled together a few that have caught our eye and presented them here to share with our readers. (We've just noticed a slight anomaly - if one of the links comes up as a generic Amazon ad, just refresh the page to get the book link.) Enjoy!

The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals by Karl Shuker.

The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors in the African Desert by Rick Bass.

The Kirtlands Warbler: The Story of a Bird's Fight Against Extinction and the People Who Saved It by William Rapai.

The Existence of Sasquatch and Yeti by Carol Hand.

Abominable Science: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie and Other Famous Cryptids by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero.

I'm sure there will be plenty more so keep your wallet handy.

Happy reading!

Cryptozoology: Science or Pseudoscience?

From krakens to gigantic sea serpents, terrifying monsters of the deep have haunted the imaginations of generations of mariners.

Now experts in marine life claim sea monsters might actually exist. Because scientists are still finding new species of underwater life, the discovery of “marine monsters” is not impossible, a meeting in the UK heard last Tuesday.

“The huge number of ‘sea monster’ sightings now on record can’t all be explained away as mistakes, sightings of known animals or hoaxes,” said palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth.

“At least some of the better ones - some of them made by trained naturalists and such - probably are descriptions of encounters with real, unknown animals.”

One such example was reported in 1905 by zoologists Edmund Meade-Waldo and Michael Nicoll, who encountered a strange “sea serpent” off the coast of Brazil.

And in August 1848, the crew of HMS Daedalus saw a 60ft-long sea creature during a voyage to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.

At the time, biologists in London claimed it was most likely an elephant seal - or even an upside down canoe.

Dr Naish told the meeting of the Zoological Society of London: “Because large marine animals continue to be discovered - various new whale and shark species have been named in recent years - the idea that such species might await discovery is, at the very least, plausible.”

Some people have suggested present-day monsters might be plesiosaurs, long-necked marine reptiles that lived at the time of dinosaurs. But this was dismissed by Dr Charles Paxton, of the University of St Andrews, who organised the meeting, entitled Cryptozoology: Science or Pseudoscience?

Cryptozoology is the “study of hidden animals” - or the search for creatures whose existence has not been proved, such as the Loch Ness monster and the Abominable Snowman.

“If there are prehistoric animals alive today it would imply that there’s something very wrong with our understanding of the fossil record,” he said.

Dr Paxton argues it is wrong to assume that all large animals living in the oceans have been discovered. “If the criteria is solely bigness, then this is not the case,” he said. “In 1995 a benthic ray, which lives on the ocean floor, was found that measured 3.42 metres.”

Eight large marine species have been discovered in the past 20 years.

LiveScience interviewed Dr Paxton about his passion for sea monsters in the lead-up to the talk.

While The Guardian attended the discussion and gave a detailed account of the evening.

Panther story resurfaces in new book - South Coast Register, July 21, 2010

Panther story resurfaces in new book
by Frances Rand
South Coast Register
July 21, 2010

FOR over a hundred years big cats have stalked Kangaroo Valley.

They scare people, kill stock and leave big paw prints.

However, when it comes to being photographed, they are very shy.

A new book, Australian Big Cats – An Unnatural History of Panthers, looks into the phenomena of panther sightings.

The authors, researcher Michael Williams and journalist Rebecca Lang, have collected stories about big cat sightings for over a decade.

They theorise that the cats could be the descendants of escaped zoo animals or World War II American military mascots. They could also be mutant monstrous moggies or perhaps marsupial lions never died out.

Various scat and fur samples sent off for analysis have come back as felis catus – domestic cat. The authors weren’t impressed and decided to test the experts with some genuine leopard fur. The result – felis catus – proved science could fail.

Other experts have taken panther sightings seriously and various government departments, including the NSW Department of Primary Industries, have compiled reports. They concluded that more evidence needed to be collected.

Former Kangaroo Valley resident Doris Blinman was responsible for reporting panther sightings in the early 1980s.

During the period her yard was visited up to three times a week by one or two huge black cats for a period of a few months.

According to Mrs Blinman, the cats came both at night and in daylight and delighted in eating the fruit from her grapevine as well as eating local wildlife, including a fruit bat.

Ms Lang said there were some interesting aspects to Mrs Blinman’s story, including a “smell of sulphur” associated with the sightings.

Another local, Clarry Hansen, also sighted big cats and paw prints with a 13 to 14cm diameter.

In 1981 the two shared their stories with a Channel 9 news crew.

“It’s a reasonably well-forested area, with plentiful food sources and also being well populated could account for more people seeing panthers,” said Ms Lang.

The last local panther sighting may have been the last forever.

On New Year’s Eve 2008, a local resident reported driving past a “deceased large feline” on the side of Forest Road.

A Sydney man also saw the deceased animal by the side of the road on the same day.

In a hurry he did not stop, but returned the next day where he could find no trace of the feline.

http://www.southcoastregister.com.au/news/local/news/general/panther-story-resurfaces-in-a-new-book/1890860.aspx