Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

Introduction
If We Don’t Search, We Shall Never Discover
Passion and cryptozoology go hand in hand.
Enthusiasm and zeal fill my mind and body
when I think about getting into the field in pursuit
of real, flesh-and-blood animals waiting to
be discovered.
Did excitement dwell within me, you might
wonder, when a game warden and I trekked for
hours in the mud on a hot midwestern afternoon
in 1963, looking for signs of a black panther?
Was it fun during the nights of cold in
that tent in the Trinity-Shasta area of California,
as I tracked an elusive BIGFOOT through
those forests in 1974? Was it enjoyable to experience
the biting rain on myself and my lads,
Malcolm and Caleb, during the daylong soaking
we received in an open boat on Loch Ness
in 1999?
Needless to say, the answer for a cryptozoologist
is “Yes!” With a fervor that flourished in
another time, groups of women and men spend
their todays searching for cryptids that may tomorrow
be new species, pursuing creatures that
may not even exist, looking for animals that the
thinnest of evidence says are real, and listening
to rumors and tales of others just over the horizon.
The late Bernard Heuvelmans wrote in
1988: “Cryptozoological research should be actuated
by two major forces: patience and passion.”
While he may have never caught a single
cryptid in his life, he knew all too well about the
search.
Cryptozoologists are reliving a time two centuries
ago when all of zoology was in an age of
discovery. This field preserves the spirit of those
days. But by the beginning of the twentieth century,
zoology seemed to have slipped into a period
in which new species were fully revealed
only as a circumstance of taxonomy and cladistic
debates were far in the future. Animal discoveries
were incidental, certainly not the true
mission.
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That would all change, first with a quiet tradition
of examining the curiosities of natural
history beginning at the end of the nineteenth
century, as seen in the writings of, for example,
Philip Henry Gosse and Francis T. Buckland.
With the advent in the twentieth century of a
modern generation of zoology authors, such as
Willy Ley and Henry Wendt, the time was ripe
for a renewed interest in fauna whispered about
but not acknowledged. It was then that two
gentlemen came along whom I knew personally
and who would inspire a fresh cohort of
searchers.
Ivan T. Sanderson, a Scottish zoologist living
in the United States, wrote an article for the
January 3, 1948, Saturday Evening Post titled
“There Could Be Dinosaurs.” In France, Belgian
zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans read this
essay on the possible survival of extinct animals
in Africa, and it changed his life forever. Sanderson
had trekked through tropical jungles (we
call them rain forests now) in South America,
Africa, and Asia. Heuvelmans had spent years
reviewing the scientific literature and gleaning
the zoological treasures hidden there. In the
1995 revision of his On the Track of Unknown
Animals (pp. XXIII–XXIV), Heuvelmans expressed
the stirrings he found inside himself that
would call for a release in cryptozoology:
In the 1950s, I was an angry young
zoologist, indignant at the ostracism
imposed by official science—we would say
today the scientific Establishment—on
those animals known only through the
reports of isolated travelers, or through often
fantastic native legends, or from simple but
mysterious footprints, or the recital of
sometimes bloody depredations, or through
traditional images, or even a few ambiguous
photos.