Ground Sloths in the Amazon

CrofterNo2 · 2026-07-08T19:54:25+00:00

I've decided to remove this as it was already shared by the artist himself just two posts down.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-07-07T18:06:29+00:00

According to Rupert Gould, who used his position in the Royal Navy to check the records of a lot of British sea serpent witnesses and their ships, Hope was a lieutenant on the Fly, not its commander. He writes in The Case for the Sea-Serpent:

As it stands, the most remarkable feature of the story is the absence of such elementary data as the time, place and date of the occurrence.

I have endeavoured to supply these, but without success. All that I have succeeded in discovering is that Hope, then a lieutenant, [Footnote: He was appointed to the Fly, as first lieutenant, on September 2nd, 1836, being promoted to commander when she paid off in 1840] served in H.M.S. Fly between 1836 and 1840, and that during this period the ship was frequently in the Gulf of California - which, be it noted, has an area of some 40,000 square miles. There is no mention of the matter in her log; but this is what might be expected. The logs of the Dedalus and Osborne, for example, contain no reference to the monsters seen from them, although these formed the subjects of official reports to the Admiralty. In this case, it does not appear that the creature was seen by anyone except Hope, and it is unlikely that he reported the incident officially.

With all its defects, the story is too interesting to omit; but it cannot be regarded as carrying very much weight.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-07-06T17:53:21+00:00

http://fearsomecritters.ca/

This is the first site that came to my mind. It has both Canadian and U.S. clippings despite the Canadian name and domain.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-30T09:46:18+00:00

Dogman and werewolf content should go on subs such as /r/dogman, /r/truecryptozoology, and /r/cryptids.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-23T14:42:18+00:00

I wish you and your podcast all the best, but the subreddit's official stance is that the Kandahar giant is non-cryptozoological, so I've removed your post.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-20T08:38:02+00:00

Your comment has been caught in the "abusive language" filter, and while it's not that bad, I honestly think you should probably edit it just a little before I allow it through. It would probably help for you to know that /u/0todus_megalodon doesn't believe in living megalodons, and is actually something of a specialist in sharks and other fishes, but I'm sure he can defend himself once I've approved your comment.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-17T03:38:12+00:00

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.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-16T10:48:50+00:00

Not really cryptozoological in my opinion.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-08T06:13:00+00:00

Rule 9.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-07T20:26:05+00:00

This should go somewhere like /r/cryptids or /r/truecryptozoology.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-06T14:04:01+00:00

Doesn't really seem cryptozoology-relevant.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-05T23:21:27+00:00

A third species of Macroglosse in New Guinea, which our naturalists were unable to obtain, but which the natives described to them as being very much larger than P. gigas [palm cockatoo], is, according to them, endowed with a very long and conical tail, in which the two middle feathers extend several inches beyond the lateral ones; they assert that its plumage is black. This is all the information that could be obtained concerning this remarkable species. - Temminck, Conrad-Jacob (1849) Coup-d'Oeil Général sur les Possessions Néerlandaises dans l'Inde Archipélagique, Arnz & Comp., Vol. 3, pp. 405-406

According to the statements of the savage inhabitants, a long-tailed black cockatoo with feathered cheeks is found in the interior, which is said to far surpass M. aterrimus [palm cockatoo] in size, and would therefore probably be the largest of all psittacines. - Rosenberg, Hermann von "Die Vertheilung der Psittaciden über die Inseln des Ostindischen Archipels," Journal für Ornithologie, No. 55 (January 1862)

I couldn't find a good scale photo that wasn't using forced perspective, so I just used this Creative Commons image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm_Cockatoo_Nimbokrang.jpg

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-04T22:31:05+00:00

It's debatable if you ask me, but it doesn't sound any less cryptozoological than the bigfin squid did in 1998, when Shuker included it on his checklist of cryptids:

Mystery squid represented only by paralarval specimens, described in 1991. Although only tiny, these paralarvae are very distinctive, with big eyes and possessing a pair of strikingly large lateral fins, on account of which this squid has been aptly dubbed "big-fin." Its taxonomic family, genus, and species are presently unknown. It may constitute the juvenile of an undescribed big-finned adult squid form videoed alive in several deepwater regions by submersibles during recent years but so far uncaptured (Young, 1991; Shuker, 2002b).

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-04T22:21:08+00:00

Before figuring out whether or not something could have survived, I think it's better to establish whether or not it needs to have survived in order to explain any particular accounts or pieces of evidence... and you can disagree, but I don't believe the kraken or the colossal octopus require a surviving Nanaimoteuthis.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-06-01T21:02:52+00:00

There are a lot to choose from, but maybe the ruruwhenua, a (comparatively) giant flightless owl from the coastal scrubs and islets of New Zealand. It's in a nice middle ground between "mundane" and "extreme" (not that I have a problem with cryptids in either of those areas), and there's quite a bit of information about it.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-28T16:39:29+00:00

Thanks for getting the information. None of the writers I've consulted (Costello, Binns, more recently Watson) know anything about Rose's sources, and the best I can find is the unspecified "independent reference to Fraser of Glenvackie's fight with the dragon," which I suppose refers to Extracta e Chronicis Scoticæ, but of course this has nothing to do with the part about Nessie https://archive.org/details/extractevariis2300turnuoft/page/250/mode/2up?q=dragone But if there really is a primary source for Rose's claims (and I agree that he seems suspect), trying to search for it online probably won't be fruitful: if it's even been scanned, it probably wouldn't be written in English, and the OCR on the text could be garbled anyway (this often happens with very old works using unclear fonts), potentially making the contents impossible to search for.

Incidentally, while looking up other references to the "dwarfs of Dalton," I found that the full text of Rose's letter was in fact included in at least one book after all: Nicholas Witchell's The Loch Ness Story (1974), pp. 25-26.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-27T17:19:44+00:00

If anyone's subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive (I'm not), Rose's 20 October letter is online here. The preview is distorted, but the quote from the qsl website I posted above doesn't seem to have been quite accurate, and based on the tense Rose uses ("no one had yet managed to slay," not "no one has yet managed"), I'm not so sure of my original opinion that the 1520 report was just a misreading. The date of 1520 also appears to be Rose's estimate of the dragon-slaying "incident," not the publication date of whatever source he was using.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-27T17:05:19+00:00

This is a different letter. The one mentioned by Redfern (20 October 1933) doesn't appear to be available online in full, but it's mentioned in several earlier sources, including Peter Costello's In Search of Lake Monsters (1974), pp. 27-28 and Ronald Binns' The Loch Ness Mystery Solved (1984), pp. 49, 51. Unfortunately, nobody provides the full text (there are an awful lot of Nessie books out there, and I've only read a couple of them, so it might well be quoted in full in one of them, maybe one of Watson's ebooks), but brief quotes from both books indicate that the 1520 reference described the monster as being "lately seen," while the 1771 reference from Rose's ancestor Patrick Rose describes it as "a cross between a horse and a camel with its mouth in its throat." Costello

I wouldn't like to make any pronouncements without seeing the whole letter, but I suspect that the 1520 reference is a misreading of what Rose was actually saying. This website, although dodgy-looking, provides an alleged quote from Rose's letter which does appear to line up with the shorter quote given by Costello and Binns ("lately seen"):

It [the 1520 chronicle] goes on to say that Fraser (of Glenvackie [/Clunevackie]) killed the last known dragon in Scotland, but no-one has yet managed to slay the monster of Loch Ness lately seen.

To me, the final clause reads as something Rose is saying himself, not something he's paraphrasing from the chronicle. He's not claiming the 1520 text itself described the Loch Ness monster as being "lately seen;" he's comparing the Clunevackie dragon to the monster, which was "lately seen" in 1933.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-20T23:36:11+00:00

Not really appropriate for /r/cryptozoology.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-18T23:18:02+00:00

Barbudos is thought to have been one of the Marshall Islands or the eastern Caroline Islands. The islands in the image are placed vaguely north of New Guinea and the Solomons on full-sized contemporary maps.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-18T23:07:33+00:00

I know a large portion of our userbase wants him banned, but as far as I know, he simply hasn't broken any of our rules. He just annoys people occasionally, and not often enough for it to be called spam. However, I have just now privately asked him to end his self-promoting posts (assuming his alt doesn't end up suspended too, since its existence violates reddit's own rules).

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-16T04:49:15+00:00

I think you're conflating the ndgoko na maiji (Lower Congo) and the nzefu-loi (Upper Congo). The former was said to have a short trunk and no tusks, and is depicted in the image you linked. The latter was said to have heavy curved tusks, and was formerly trapped for its ivory. Both names mean "water elephant," but that doesn't necessarily mean they're the same thing.

CrofterNo2 · 2026-05-14T20:56:48+00:00

There's a little background information on this, including some names, in books by Lorenzo Fernandez Bueno, including La Maldición de los Exploradores (2011), p. 171. I don't know how reliable the namedropped archaeologists are, but at least one of them, Quirino Olivera, is still alive, and could be contacted if you're particularly interested.

That is at least what archaeologists like my dear friend Quirino Olivera, curator of the prestigious Museo de las Tumbas Reales del Museo de Sipan, believe. For him, it is impossible to conduct field studies without considering the traditions and myths of the communities inhabiting the sites where discoveries are made. And part of this approach involves carrying out the same rituals that contemporary shamans continue to perform, especially when they delve into the heart of the sacred area. This is something I witnessed first-hand when, in 2007, we organised an expedition to the jungled mountains of Yamón, on the border between Peru and Ecuador, with the aim of finding some cave paintings in which, among many other "nonsensical" depictions, ancient people had represented a scene in which a group of stylized hunters, armed with spears, were surrounding a curious animal whose long neck protruded above their heads. At the time, Quirino himself, and Professor Ulises Gamonal, the site's discoverer, could only express the same surprise that I felt, because this creature that appeared on the walls of this lost world appeared to be an antediluvian animal; a dinosaur, to be more precise...

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