Meet the Cryptozoologist: Jonathan McGowan

Jonathan McGowan on the big cat trail in Dorset.

How did you first get involved in researching strange and mysterious creatures?
I first got interested in searching for strange creatures when I saw out-of-place large cats in the early 1980s, and also having a fascination for the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti and Bigfoot.

What were some of the early influences in your life?
My early influences were Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious world and books about Bigfoot.

Have you personally seen one of these creatures?
I have seen more than 20 large cats in UK, no sightings of yeti or Bigfoot.

What creatures particularly interest you?
The Yeti and Bigfoot interest me more than any other.

What cryptids are most likely to exist in your opinion?
The Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine), and the Yeti.

What’s your favourite?
I don't do favorites, but I love the Yeti and Bigfoot, if it exists. My favourite Australian cryptid has got to be the Queensland Tiger.

Have you developed any theories around where the more unusual animals - i.e. yowies/bigfoot - have come from?
I have developed some theories about most cryptids.

Have you written any books/articles?
I have just completed my book on big cats, which is yet to be edited let alone published, but I hope it gets out soon.

Do you have a website? How can people contact you?
My website is not so much about cryptids but generally natural history with a 'big cat' blog. You can visit it here - www.thenaturalstuff.co.uk.

How many mystery animal reports would you receive a year?

I receive hundreds of reports of large cats a year.

What’s the closest you’ve personally come to finding something?
I have been a metre away from a leopard in Dorset and also a puma. On expedition with the CFZ we found evidence of a Yeti and also an Orang Pendek.

What’s next for you - any trips planned? Books or articles to write? Talks to give?
I'll be joining the CFZ team on expedition to Tasmania, and probably Sumatra again at some time in the future. I give many talks on big cats and I am due to give a talk on the Yeti.

Could you share some of your favourite cryptozoology book titles with us?
I like all books on cryptozoology, especially those on the huge apes, and big cats. Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers is one of the best.

Jonathan McGowan on expedition in Sumatra in 2011 with David, his guide.

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.

Queensland Tiger rears its head once again

The Northern Rivers may be home to a thylacine-type animal thought to be extinct on the mainland for more than 3000 years, according to a wildlife expert.

With recent sightings of an unusual animal reported in the Nimbin Valley and Byron Bay, and many more sightings in previous years across the region, wildlife expert Gary Opit said a thylacine was a possible explanation.

Mr Opit is an expert in identifying fauna and hosts a weekly wildlife segment on ABC North Coast.

He said he had received about 50 reports of a creature he calls the "mystery cryptic animal of Northern NSW."

Many of the sightings have occurred around Mullumbimby and Byron Bay.

One of the most compelling accounts came from a Byron Bay veterinary nurse in 2008 when she saw a large fawn creature weighing about 18kg in her backyard.

"At 6am she heard a sound that was like possum grunting," Mr Opit said.

"She saw what she at first thought was a dog about to attack a cat and rushed between them to protect the cat from the dog and realised it wasn't a dog.

"It was nothing like a dog. It was dog sized. It gave these bizarre possum like coughing grunts at her. She observed it for 5 minutes."

Mr Opit himself has encountered a similar animal on four occasions, once in 1969, on the Pacific Hwy, north of Beenleigh, and three times since 2007 in the Billinudgel nature reserve at Yelgun.

The animals could be thylacines or the marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex, he said.

"There is nothing in the fossil record of the thylacine on the mainland since 3000 years ago, but there have been lots of reports of them from the early days of settlement to the present.

The marsupial lion was only known from fossil specimens which were 38,000 years old.

The thylacine was perceived to be extinct 50 or so years ago, he said, which made it much more likely it could still be in existence.

"It is more than likely they are all of the one species," he said.

Byron Bay biologist Mary Gardner has also seen an unusual animal which she was unwilling to try to classify.

In late October or early November last year she was walking along Lighthouse Rd at Byron Bay with a friend when both saw the animal.

"I don't know what it was," she said.

"It was something that does not fit in with anything I know at all.

"It had a long snout, thick rounded ears, a bony rump; it had a long wiry tail and a lean, hard body with stripes toward the rump."

Ms Gardner said when she first saw the animal she thought it would hop because it had long back legs and a raised rump, but was surprised when it moved with a rocking pacing gait.

She knew of two other local people who reported seeing an animal "which confused their expectations," at about the same time.

Ms Gardner said the starting point in determining what the animal was would be to discover what it was eating.

If someone could gather some good evidence then research could possibly be done, she said.

Thylacines spotted in northern NSW

More alleged thylacine spottings have been reported to the ABC Radio's wildlife expert Gary Opit.

Officially they no longer exist, but that hasn't stopped wildlife watchers spotting thylacines in northern New South Wales.

Also known as tasmanian tigers, the last known thylacine is believed to have died in a Hobart zoo in 1936.

Since then, there have been hundreds of unconfirmed sightings of the animals across Australia, including a handful around Nimbin in recent weeks.

ABC North Coast wildlife expert Gary Opit says the recent spotters insisted the mysterious animals were not dogs, cats or foxes.

"It's not a dog or a cat, but it's about the size of a dog," he says.

"It's described as having a banded tail, a greyish animal with stripes across the tail and stripes along the flank."

Gary hopes the rise in popularity of smartphones will mean that eventually someone can capture the creature on camera.

"It's usually always the same thing, people driving their car and an animal they've never seen before crosses in front of them," he says.

"People are always adamant it's not a dog.

"No one has ever been able to get a photo of one, so we don't know what it is or if it really exists, but the fact that people keep reporting them is interesting."

From the archives: The Queensland Tiger (1929)