Is Prof Sykes putting the nail in the Yeti coffin?

by Andrew Masterson, www.brisbanetimes.com.au

October 2013 will go down as a bittersweet watershed in the curious field of cryptozoology - the study of creatures that probably don't exist.
Cryptozoologists are people who search for animals of folklore and rumour: yowies, bunyips, rogue panthers, ape-men, the Loch Ness monster, the Beast of Buderim, the Goatman of Maryland, Oklahoma Octopus and many more.
In October, though, something really weird happened.
A well-respected mainstream geneticist, Dr Bryan Sykes, from Oxford University, announced that he had done DNA tests on two hair samples collected, centuries apart, by yeti hunters. The samples, he reported, both came from a species unknown to science.
For believers in the Abominable Snowman, that was the good news. The bad followed immediately: the species was not an ape, but some type of bear. The mysterious creature roaming the Himalayas was not so much Yeti as Yogi.
Sykes' research, yet to be published in full, has done little to dampen the enthusiasm of Australia's cryptozoological community. The hunt for our own ape-man, the Yowie, continues unabated.
Prime among the Yowie hunters is Rex Gilroy, 70, self-proclaimed ''father of Australian cryptozoology'', author, naturalist and hunter of improbable beasts.
''The silly sketches of Yowies as giant, hairy apes are all wrong,'' he says. ''Yowies are a living form of [human ancestor] Homo erectus.''
Gilroy claims to have collected a number of fossil hominid skulls - of Homo erectus and the even earlier Australopithecus - which he says proves that human ancestors were living in Australia long before the arrival of Aborigines.
Some of his best specimens were discovered near the Fish River in the central western district of NSW.
''I believe there is a population of Homo erectus still living there,'' he said.
''The Yowie is no gorilla-like monster. It's a fire-making, tool-making hominid. I've found campsites and stone tools, some of them only a few months old.''
Gilroy is also active in the hunt for two perennials of Australian cryptozoology - the thylacine and wild panthers.
This last is a popular target for investigation in Victoria. Reports of big cat sightings appear frequently in country newspapers, blurry video clips crop up on telly, and shots of hideously mauled dead sheep are often cited as evidence of big cat kills.
Indeed, in 2012 one of the first acts of incoming Victorian Premier Denis Napthine was to commission a review of big cat sightings. The review, conducted by the Department of Primary Industries, concluded that feral panthers, jaguars or other feline peak predators were almost certainly not roaming around the state.
However, because it is impossible to prove a negative, the report's findings are unlikely to dampen the spirits of the cryptozoological sleuths. Prime among them is Simon Townsend, of Geelong, who heads a group called Big Cats Victoria.
''We are desperate for actual specimens,'' he said, ''but that's a difficult thing. We think the cats are Malay leopards - black leopards - and there are maybe only a couple of dozen across the state.''
Townsend is careful to separate his pursuit from the windier shores of crypto-research.
''We take this as a totally serious undertaking,'' he said. ''We keep well away from the 'goblin university' folk. They're not very useful when you're after something that kills sheep and eats roos.''
Townsend enjoys a long-term collaboration with crypto-sceptic historian Dr David Waldron, based at Federation University in Ballarat. In 2012 the pair combined to produce a book: Snarls from the Tea-Tree: Big Cat Folklore. Waldron said that while ideas of yowies, bunyips and other fabulous beasts can be traced to the creation myths of different Aboriginal communities, the big cat idea arrived with the Europeans.
''Big cat stories go way back into the 19th century,'' he said.
''Settlers found themselves in an alien landscape, and they had to try to make sense of things such as stock predation and farm failures.
''Their tools for doing this derived from European colonial experience in Africa and Asia - where there were big, dangerous animals, including big cats.''
Some early settlers, he said, were startled that there were no monkeys in Australia. In 1826, settlers visiting Rottnest Island heard sounds in the night, noted dig-marks in the ground, and saw a large shape in the water. They concluded the place was home to hippos.
Big cats in the bush are not, in one sense, mythical at all. There have been several cases, especially in the later 19th century, when lions, pumas and so forth have escaped from travelling menageries and nicked off into the scrub. Waldron has a collection of skeletal remnants lodged in Federation University's library.
The myth kicks in with the idea that these cats somehow survived, bred, and established permanent populations. The usual evidence for this - bizarre stock mutilations - is easily explained.
''Most likely, the mutilations are caused by multiple animals,'' said Waldron. ''A wild dog kills the sheep, then a fox has a go, then birds, rats, and so forth. The result looks unusual.''
Back in NSW, Rex Gilroy, perhaps surprisingly, rejects the idea of wild big cats roaming the bush.
''The panther is a marsupial,'' he says. ''It's a large marsupial, possibly a relation to the extinct marsupial lion. There have been plenty of sightings around Katoomba.''
While many professional scientists dismiss cryptozoology as complete fruit-loopery, Professor Bill Laurence, a distinguished biologist at Queensland's James Cook University, sees great value in the field.
He points out that cryptozoologists have a good record of finding ''Lazarus species'' - types of animals presumed to be extinct but subsequently rediscovered. If the thylacine turns out not to be extinct, it will be a cryptozoologist who finds it, if only because no one else is looking.
''I think there is something similar between cryptozoologists and people who search for aliens, for instance,'' Laurence said. ''There's a desire for mystery, a love of the notion of something out there that we don't understand. It touches something deep in the human spirit.''
As for Sykes' possible Himalayan bear-cum-yeti discovery, Laurence is waiting for the full results to be published.
''A giant bear there would be very remarkable,'' he said. ''What's its food base? I'm a bit leery about it, but it's certainly put the cat among the pigeons.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/where-the-wild-things-arent-20140103-308eu.html#ixzz2pfaz5zAE

Snarls From the Tea-tree looks at Victorian big cat reports

The Australian big cat phenomena gets the academic treatment from David Waldron and Simon Townsend, who have penned an examination of Victorian reports in their new book Snarls From the Tea-tree: Victoria's Big Cat Folklore.

Check out the book blurb:

Big cat scares have for generations haunted Victorians; stories of stock killed, claims of paw-prints left behind, rumours of 'beast' attacks only breeding the 'myth'.

Often there was a large local response, with massive bushland hunts that focused on the notion of escaped lions, tigers or other big cats.

The 'myth' of the big cat has evolved over time, but relates closely to Australia's engagement with its environment.

Waldron and Townsend study this big cat folklore evolution across Victoria.

No reward for big cat scalp

Last week's story about the hunt for big cats throughout Victoria has caused plenty of interest for readers of the Weekly Times.

The Victorian Government will not be offering a reward for a big cat.

There are fears a cash reward would lead to a rush of indiscriminate shooting and trapping across the state.

The Victorian Government has been taken aback by the huge public interest in its big cat hunt since it was first reported in The Weekly Times last week.

Thousands of people have taken part in media polls and many hundreds more have offered reports of eyewitness sightings of the elusive big cats.

Several people have suggested the Government offer a dead-or-alive reward as a cheaper way of doing its largely office-bound research.

Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh offered a flat "no" to the idea.

Big cats researcher and author, Dr David Waldron of the University of Ballarat, said a reward would be terrifying.

"You will get people going out there who don't know what they are doing," he said.

"The likelihood that someone would get seriously hurt is very high."

The state's leading big cats researcher, Simon Townsend, said a reward would be inappropriate.

"You would have a lot of incompetent people wandering around in the bush ... some of them would be trigger-happy, something tragic would happen," he said.

Many rewards have been offered for evidence of a big cat over the years.

One of the most recent was in Gippsland's Glengarry, where a hunting store owner offered $10,000 for a big cat killed with an arrow. The reward was never claimed.

A national magazine offered $20,000 for the capture of the Beast of Bealiba in the 1980s.

The beast, supposedly a rogue puma living and hunting in central Victoria, was never found and the reward never claimed.

This big kitty has Victoria talking...

This footage was recently shared with the Australian Animal Folklore collection at the University of Ballarat, curated by Dr David Waldron.

The man who filmed the cats thought it could go some way to explaining the source of the many large black cats seen in the Ballarat district of Victoria. He estimated the cats were more than two feet long in body length.

The man said the cats had given him a scare a couple of times at night on his property and near where he keep his chooks. The film shows some slightly larger than average feral cats.

A couple of interesting features in the film though regarding the social behaviour of the two adults and the single kitten and the fact that all are black, despite it being a rarer colour for feral cats in Australia.

From the archives: The Northam Monster (1935)

 

THE NORTHAM MONSTER.
A Mystery of the Avon.
Bv N.LO.
J* ONSTERS have stalked the pages of history and tradition from the earliest times, and it is not necessary to consult Mr. H. G. Wells's 'Lost World'.
to find them in savagery unadorned. There was Medusa, the serpent-haired offspring of Phorcys, who turned every one gazing on her into stone, and in our own time the Dusseldorf Monster whose career was brought to an end by the German police after he had effected quite a considerable reduction in the female population, there were Bluebeard his prototype. 
Chimera, the fire-breathing monster whose talents, however, do not compare very favourably with those of the modern Indian fire-eaters; there were the Loch Ness Monster, Argus the hun dred-eyed, the s.ea monster discovered in April of this year near Narooma (New South Wales), Minotaur, the half bull and half man who was slain by Theseus, and the Rottnest Monster which despite the high hopes at first entertained re garding it, was finally pronounced to he ;he flesh and blubber of a whale. 
But in relation to all of these the Nor thern Monster stands on a plane of its own. Most of the ancient monsters came to violent ends or were turned into harmless creatures by the heroes or magicians who acted as policemen in those far-off times, and the modern monsters have failed to survive the on slaughts of public opinion as expressed through the law courts, or the investiga tions of interfering scientists anxious to find commonplace explanations for the most romantic things. 
But, as I have said, the Northam Monster was different. It came with the best of credentials, the attestation of a police officer, it remaind long enough to excite the wildest expectations, and it departed before it was found out and before the prying hands of inquisitive experts could be placed upon it, and a plausible explanation of its existence could be formulated.
If ever a monster deserved well of a disillusioned public it did. It did not excite great expectations and then ruthlessly wreck them. It did not display its partly decomposed carcass in blatant vulgarity, inviting the scrutiny of inquisitive scientists, as did the Rottnest Monster. Indeed if anything its actions indicated a retiring disposi tion. A Mysterious Swimmer.
On Saturday, January iz, 1929, a Mrs. Whitworth saw what she stated appeared to be an alligator reposing on a sand bank near a bridge spanning the Avon River at Northam, but whgn she reported the matter to her husband he ridiculed the idea. On the following day, however, the creature was again noticed by some youths and that night at the conclusion of a band concert which was held in a park by the side of the Avon River the Monster was seen swimming around a bridge. 
The young men who saw it waited in the vicinity until after midnight and then communicated with the police. Inspector G. Johnston, accompanied by a police constable, proceeded to the bridge to investigate. The electric lights of the town had by then been turned off, but they were switched on by the night ope rator, and by the light of an incandescent globe, Inspector Johnston stated, he clearly saw the Monster, which others who were present declared to be a shark. 
The discovery caused great excitement and bathers were warned, although the fact that many continued during succeed ing days to bathe hi the river without apparent fear, was a rather significant commentary. Early on Monday morning a constable, accompanied by the police black tracker Norman, patrolled the river when, however, no sign was seen of the Monster. 
Crowds thronged both shores of the river, and the bridges spanning it were packed on Monday night with sightseers. Many claimed that they saw the creature, and were prepared to de scribe it, but the general attitude did not encourage them. A large number of people, however, waited in the vicinity of one bridge until one o'clock on Tues day morning when Norman, the black tracker, saw what at first he stated was an alligator and later a 'big lizard.' In spector Johnston at that time was armed with a rifle, but he deemed it inadvis able to discharge it. 
On Tuesday-morning, however, the police were informed that the creature was to be seen partly out of the water on a bank. A constable was dispatched to the scene, and fired two shots at the alleged alligator, the second finding its mark. It was then discovered to be a log! The Last Glimpse. 
On Tuesday evening the Monster put in an appearance at a spot about 50 yards from the central bridge, where it caused a great sensation. A light was flashed on the river at the spot where it was believed the creature had splashed, whereupon it dived below the surface. 
That was the last that was ever seen of the Northam Monster. 
On Wednesday Constable Davis took a canoe and visited the various sandbanks and islands in the river, with out finding any trace of the intruder. When the matter was again referred to Inspector Johnston he denied that the creature was an alligator. 
Its back had guttered in the light like a silver surface, he insisted, and it was obviously some sort of fish. Mr. G. C. Jessup, an authority on the fish of the Avon River, suggested that the Monster might be a large Murray Cod. A number of these had been placed in the river 15 years previously, much to the chagrin of the then president of the Fish Acclimatisation Society who stated that they would feed upon every other type of fish in the river. 
Others suggested that the crea ture might be an alligator which had been brought from the North- West when it was a baby, and a reporter of the staff of a Bunbury newspaper alleged that the 'crafty townsmen' of Northam, like the landlord in Andreyev's play, had 'manu- factured' the Monster to increase the tourist traffic. He called upon the citizens of his own town to exhibit similar enter prise. 
A Publican in Pyjamas. Several attempts were made to capture the Monster, the most serious being that of a portly publican who, clad in py jamas and armed with a rifle, secreted himself near the bank of the Avon when most of the townspeople had retired for the night. 
He had not been there long before doubts as to the wisdom of his action began to assail him, and these were increased by youths who in passing did not hesitate to call him an old fool. 
'You're right, son.' said the publican mildly, and retired to his bed. 
The Monster is only a memory at Northam today. Possibly the creature was a shark, which by some means had found its way up the river during a flood period, or an alligator as some insisted, but whatever it was it preserved its secret.

Australian Big Cats in the news

http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2010/10/28/251721_national-news.html

Author Rebecca Lang, who co-wrote the recently releasedAustralian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers, said in the early days of their research the stories and personal experiences they heard about were unnerving.

But she said when the strange predation reports started filtering in of animals cleanly killed and almost surgically stripped of flesh within a few hours "we knew something had to be out there."

"The witnesses themselves are quite compelling farmers, hunters, outdoors people but we've been even more impressed by the veterinarians, zoologists and ex-pat South Africans who have reported seeing black leopards in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia," Ms Lang said.

"They clearly know what they're talking about. This isn't just a case of mistaken identity."