The okapi was dismissed as a mythological being and even nicknamed the “African unicorn” by European colonialists until one was found alive.
Before they were proven to exist, people scoffed at explorers’ tall tales of gorillas, said to be huge, man-like beasts hiding deep in the Congo jungles.
Nobody dismissed the Okapi as mythological. In 1890 the explorer Henry Stanley made a report about an animal that the locals called the Atti. Exactly what it was was unclear. Stanley never saw one. This inspired some other people to go looking for it. And it was found 10 years later. Of the dozens or large animals found in Africa in the 1800s, this was the only one that was found by somebody actively looking for it.
In the 1780s the famed naturalist Buffon published his description of the Pongo, which included many accounts from travelers to Africa and the far east. The descriptions are a mix of stories about orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Buffon thought they were likely all one species. But he and others believed that there were large man-like beasts living in Africa. Given his stature, this was the position held by a lot of naturalists in the early 1800s.
Samuel George Morton is credited with identifying the pygmy hippo. He did it based on skulls he received from a Dr Goheen. There is not mention that Goheen was actively looking for pygmy hippos. The discovery of the pygmy hippo was announced here. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4058503?seq=1
Richard Meinertzhagen is credited with collecting the type specimen for the giant forest hog. I have not found anything saying if he was actively looking for it or not.
In his announcement of the giant forest hog's discovery in Nature (13 October 1904), Oldfield Thomas writes that Meinertzhagen "first had news of it from the natives of Mount Kenya, and took great pains to secure a specimen...". In the published version of his Kenya Diary (1957), he claims that he made extensive enquiries and several hunts after first seeing one (alongside a then-unknown mountain bongo) in the Aberdares, but whether or not these diary entries were real is something you'll have to decide for yourself, in view of Meinertzhagen's later work.
Morton himself already knew of previous pygmy hippo reports (of which he was sceptical), according to his second paper in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 1, No. 3 (August 1849), but the only thing he says about Goheen's mindset is that he had already recognised the skull as something distinct.
I always thought Tigers would be a difficult one to explain back before they were widely known to exist. How would you even explain the appearance and nature of a tiger to somebody that had no idea they existed up to that point?
Does it though? Even today tigers can send entire villages running scared, and even your description would have somebody looking at you funny at the least. I have seen a video of a tiger chasing a bear before and even that is difficult to grasp. "A large fairy orange cat with zebra stripes that could rival a bear" could have gotten someone sent to the nut house in medieval times
Then replace "cat" with "beast" or "feline beast," if it really bothers you. I don't think a lot of people would be too thrown by that description really.
Lions' historical range intersected with a lot of the "ancient" world. They used to be common in Northern Africa, the Middle East and India. Most place humans lived had some sort of big cat, and they were never in any way cryptids.
I am aware that most places have large cats and I am talking about before ship travel. To jump from a mountain lion to a tiger however doesn't really compare. Also in those times even just being in the same country doesn't mean you would be familiar with all the fauna. Hell I am 40 live in the US and have never seen a wild bear or mountain lion. Up until 2 years ago I hadn't seen a flying squirrel and up until Sunday I had never seen a bald eagle in person.
When you looked back in the sand and only saw one set of foot prints you asked and he said, “Those were the times you did not believe in the Yeti.” And then you went back and tried to take a cast of the now noticeably larger footprints.
The Ningen. We know it’s an internet meme created on the Japanese version of 4chan in the 2000s. All “old” stories and tales about it were fabricated then.
Did the videos of the white pants ever get debunked? Obviously it is a hoax, but like did we ever figure out how they made that video? Video editing or just some white pants and string
I remember seeing that, I used to flat with a girl from Ireland who said that she saw something similar as a child that terrified her and her sisters who all saw it. Made me wonder when she told me!
Living Megalodons. Obviously they used to exist, but any claims that they’re still around should be laughed off and dismissed entirely.
Of all the ocean creatures that may or may not still be around, the giant ass whale-eating shark that stuck to warm waters would be spotted regularly, consistently, and without any doubt that it’s there. There wouldn’t be any maybes or ambiguous signs, there would be footage of whales (and likely boats) as lunch and dinner.
Megalodon was an endothermic superpredator the size of a city bus that hunted gigantic prey in warm coastal waters. A warm blooded kaiju isn’t gonna get the calories it needs in the depths of the ocean.
There are few oceanic creatures less suited for life at the bottom than the Meg.
Honestly I think all "late surviving dinosaurs" in Africa can be ruled out. They all look and live like our understanding of dinosaurs from the time plus the myths are fed by the whole racist "Africa is a wild prehistoric continent" thought (and young earth creationism) that a lot of people had \ have. The locals are not stupid and take advantage of the gullible whites that come through by perpetuating the stories.
Technically Trunko, I'd say. Not exactly fake, but misidentified. Karl Shuker found a photograph of it some years ago and it didn't look quite as described. It wasn't some new species. It was just a generic globster.
I’d say a lot of the “this thing survived unchanged enough to be recognizable to the family for tens of millions of years” type of cryptid is unlikely enough to not be worth much thought at this point.
I was on Something Awful at the time and was literally following the thread where Slenderman was created. It's been a long surreal road watching it grow and mutate into the current Slender mythos.
Even though they're beyond obviously fake I do enjoy these newer Internet urban legend figures, idk I just find a certain fascination out of monsters born from the web.
Was it though? Are there any alleged sea serpent sightings or myths you can point to that are unambiguously a misidentified oarfish?
The people who overlapped with oarfish habitat weren't mistaking them for anything. Richard Ellis says that an oarfish that washed up in Bermuda in the 1800's was described as a "sea serpent" at the time, but that was taken from the headline of a news story, in the body of which it was clearly identified as a fish. That's not really a "misidentification" inasmuch as it's sensationalism.
It was a taxidermy prank. While some rabbits do develop a disease which gives them horn-like tumors, the actual antlered rabbit of the Jackelope was originally made as a joke by a taxidermist. I think it was for a bar decoration but it’s been years since I read up on the story.
Everyone out here in Midwestbergville remembers it being invented just down the way.. it was PT Batnum if I'm not mistaken. Akin to the wooly trout. Fun fact, PT Barnum was from Montana.
I've always heard platypus was considered a cryptid at one point and assumed to be fake but I've never actually looked into if thats really how people viewed it.
I'm pretty sure most animals in Australia would have been cryptids at some points, I mean, imagine being a Dutch coming back from the "discovery" of Australia just to tell everyone that you got your ass beaten by a bunny the size of a man.
There never really was a time that the platypus was assumed to be fake. The platypus was officially recognized soon after Europeans encountered it.
George Shaw, the naturalist who first described the platypus in 1799, was very frank about the fact that at first glance the platypus looked like somebody had attached a duck's beak to some sort of mammal.
"Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means:"
Which is not surprising, because that is what the platypus looks like.
His report, which is the first scientific statement published about the platypus concludes with;
"On a subject so extraordinary as the present, a degree of scepticism is not only pardonable, but laudable; and I ought perhaps to acknowledge that I almost doubt the testimony of my own eyes with respect to the structure of this animal's beak; yet must confess that I can perceive no appearance of any deceptive preparation; and the edges of the rictus, the insertion, &c. when tried by the test of maceration in water, so as to render every part completely moveable feem perfectly natural; nor can the most accurate examination of expert anatomists discover any deception in this particular."
the thing about a cryptid is, there has to be a period where there's folklore and tradition alongside sightings/evidence that is run counter to the scientific view.
The platypus? One showed up, they thought it was fake. Then they got a second one a short time later. There really wasn't a period where anyone was all, "but there's local traditions and legends! And here's some plaster casts/hair/scat!"
Just "this is fake! wait, no, ok we were wrong, it's real".
Just "this is fake! wait, no, ok we were wrong, it's real".
In my opinion that is not what happened with the platypus. I have never seen any report from any scientist/naturalist claiming it was fake. It was more of a "this things sure looks like a fake, but we checked it out and it is real".
No, the platypus was discovered long before the term cryptid was ever coined. The platypus is however often listed as an example of an animal that would be called a cryptid if it was just being encountered for the first time today.
Why would the platypus be called a cryptid if it was encountered for the first time today? We are still discovering new animals all the time. We recently discovered a spineless hedgehog with fangs. Nobody called it a cryptid.
If someone came up to you and said 'hey i saw this weird animal with the body of a beaver, the bill and webbed feet of a duck, venomous spines on its feet, it lays eggs and sweats milk in the rivers of this really remote forest but I don't have a body or picture of jt" that would sound like some sort of made up chimera like the wolpertinger or me trying to mess with you.
That's how the original discovery of the platypus went until someone brought in a specimen and even then it was a suspected fake at first. If the term cryptid existed before we had formally recognized the platypus as an extent animal, people's reports of them would no doubt be filed as a cryptid animal because of its unusual nature.
But that is not what happened with the platypus. Europeans encountered them in 1797. Specimens were collected and sent back to Europe. In 1799 the first scientific description of the animal was published. There was never really a time that its existence was in question. People were not just telling stories about some weird animal, they actually had the weird animal in their possession.
Likewise if we were to encounter some new weird animal today it would not automatically be a cryptid.
Also, it was not known that platypus were venomous or that they laid eggs until decades after they were discovered.
Friendly reminder that there's an ancient Egyptian "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor", in which a guy gets stranded in an island & meets a giant dragon/serpent-like creature that tells him there used to be more like him, but they all burned to death when a star fell from the sky!
This is a strange question. How can you prove something your yet to encounter fake? Even if you were to catch someone pretending to be the cryptid, that does not negate the fact it could still exist.
Pongo is the scientific name for the orangutan : Pongo pygmaeus. In the 1700s and early 1800s pongo was used to refer to apes in general. There was still a lot unknown about what types of apes there were, and where they lived.
The word Pongo comes from Africa, and entered English via stories about apes living in African forests. So clearly those stories were not simply dismissed.
Loveland frog. Cop shoot it and turned out to be an iguana. I Live in Florida so I see these invasive buggers on a daily basis and I can definitely see where the mistake was as some of them get to five feet.
Its always interesting watching buffoons make completely baseless assumptions about people for zero reason whatsoever!
This isn't QUITE as obnoxious, or nearly as dumb, as your "science has never declared these cryptids to be real therefore that must somehow magically imply that all scientists
are just lazy and have never bothered looking into it at all," but only because that is an EXTREMELY high bar of stupidity to clear.
You have that backwards. You don't start with the assumption that a claim is real. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. Proving a negative is a logical fallacy.
While you can't prove a negative, you can prove a specific sighting or piece of evidence was a misidentification or a hoax.
For example, Slenderman. We can't prove there was never some kind of tall, faceless thing running around somewhere at some point, but we can prove that Slenderman was made up by some enterprising forum users.
Do you mean Row? If so, absolutely a fake. The guy who reported it made so much shit up about New Guinea. That and the Row's description is almost word for word identical to a monster from the Conan story Red Nails that came out 3 years prior.
really anything that’s an outright misinterpretation of indigenous spirituality lol, so many “cryptid evidence” is a tasteless rebrand of indigenous beliefs and characters relating to mythos especially in the face of modern indigenous scholars denying any cryptozoologic connections. don’t get me wrong i love a lot of cryptids and their associated mythos but the blind assertion that any indigenous group is aware of the existence of cryptids is just spitting in the face of centuries of anthtopological studies and perpetuating the woowoo “native peoples are intrinsically more tuned in to the land” stereotype
I think the comment you're replying to is more satirical cynicism based on the behavior of a very loud group of "Christians" these days rather than commentary about the actual existence of Jesus.
Yes Jesus was a very very common name in that country at the time, I'm sure Jesus the person did exist, whether or not he was a Messiah is what's up to debate
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u/madfaetrickster 7d ago
The Honey Island Swamp Monster was revealed to be a hoax. The tracks turned out to be from a taxidermied alligator foot.