According to Indonesian folklore, a small primate known as the orang pendek walks on two legs, deep in the Sumatra highlands, among the monster flowers and sun bears. The legend says that an enormous, 50-foot crocodile, known as mahamba, devours entire canoes and passengers. There is no proof that these creatures or other storied cryptids exist, but Richard believes they are out there. He traveled around the world looking for monsters, from the Gobi Desert to the Brazilian rainforest.
In Search of Real Monster is a new book by the author, who talked with Atlas Obscura about cryptid stories, the Victorian obsession with the unknown, and why he believes the great days of zoology are not over.
A lot of animals were once thought of as legend. The folklore says that the mountain gorilla was a monster that sometimes would descend from the mountains and beat an elephant to death. We know that they don't do this. The mythology that is built around them is big and scary. They are not. They are quite placid.
Sometimes the stories have a grain of truth in them. There is a giant leaf frog in South America. In South America, Indigenous people say that this frog has magical properties and that it will stop you from being thirsty and hungry. The feelings of thirst and hunger were wiped out when biochemists looked at its secretion.
There was a lot of exploration in Victorian times. You would look for new species. They would shoot them all in Victorian times. Scientists listened to the stories of creatures that were unknown to the west. A giant gorilla from the jungles of Africa was found to be hairy. There were stories of a beast that was a hybrid of a giraffe and zebra and it turned out to be a short-necked relation of the giraffe. The Komodo dragon and giant panda were found in the early 20th century.
I think people are scared. They fear what their peers might think of them because they are scared of being controversial.
There is no paradigm shift. You have to think about life after death or psychic power if you look at ghosts. A branch of zoology is called cryptozoology. The animals are unknown to science. It is not all scary monsters. The rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which is a large species of woodpecker in Cuba and the southern states that was supposed to have died out after World War II, is just as interested as any other rediscovery.
There is a precedent for these things. The night parrot in Australia was thought to have been extinct for decades. leopards were thought to be extinct, but have recently been rediscovered. If leopards can live on a small island without being seen, then surely the wolf can live on a larger island. Animals that were thought to be extinct or new are turning up all the time.
The world is not fully explored. There is a false notion that because of satellite photography the world is explored and mapped. There are large swaths of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America that are not known. The great days of zoology are not over. Things are being discovered all the time.
That was in Russia in 2008. Two miles from a little village in the Caucasus Mountains, we found an abandoned farmhouse. We were looking for a wild man. The Soviet Union had a snowman commission that included people like Pyotr Smolin, who was the head of zoology at the Darwin Museum in Moscow. Russian and Ukrainian scientists were with us. We set up traps. We put out food and waited.
We went inside to warm ourselves up. The door was slightly 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 From outside, we hear a big guttural vocalization. We hear something walking on the veranda and it is big. The starlight and moon were blocked out by the door. It had to be at least seven feet tall. We checked the camera traps in the morning, but we didn't get any shots of the vegetation.
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