Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

The word cryptozoology (in French, “la cryptozoologie”)
was coined by Bernard Heuvelmans
in the late 1950s. It comes from the Greek
kryptos (“hidden”) + zoon (“animal”) + logos
(“discourse”), which when combined yield “the
science of hidden animals.” More accurately,
cryptozoology is the study of the evidence for
animals that are undescribed by science. The
word first appeared in print in 1959 when
Chief Game Inspector of the French Overseas
Territories Lucien Blancou dedicated his book
Géographie cynégétique du monde to Heuvelmans:
“Bernard Heuvelmans, maître de la cryptozoologie”
(Bernard Heuvelmans, master of
cryptozoology). Heuvelmans has also credited
Ivan T. Sanderson with inventing the word independently
when Sanderson was a student,
which would have been at Eton College in the
1920s.
Defining the Field
xlvii
The use of the word cryptid for unknown animals
was proposed by John E. Wall of Altona,
Manitoba, in a summer 1983 letter to ISC
Newsletter.
Dracontology, now in use for the study of
both FRESHWATER MONSTERS and SEA MON-
STERS, was coined by French Canadian Jacques
Boisvert in the early 1980s. It was accepted by
l’Office de la Langue Française du Québec (as
dracontologie) in 1984 and by the American Heritage
Dictionary in 1985.
The term hominology was invented by Russian
researcher Dmitri Bayanov in the early
1970s to describe the study of existing HO-
MINIDS that do not belong to our own species,
Homo sapiens. In a letter to primatologist John
Napier in 1973, Bayanov said the term was intended
to “bridge the gap between zoology and
anthropology.”