Are there any mythological creatures that haven't been debunked?

From modern hikers spotting tall apes in deep forests to medieval sailors menacing leviathans beneath their ships, tales of unknown beasts have fascinated us for generations.

These ambiguous animals are often thought of as nothing more than stories, but are there any mythical creatures that haven't been discredited? The answer is, yes, sort of.

We looked at the real-life potential of undiscovered creatures from myths. Some cryptids are known to science but have been declared extinct, such as the Tasmanian tigers.

Debunking is hard; you have to expose a falseness or sham. Creatures of myth are not necessarily a sham just because they don't exist exactly as described, and proving with 100% certainty that any creature doesn't exist is almost impossible, because we can't look everywhere at the same time.

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It is said that mythological creatures are restricted to a specific location. In Scotland, the Loch Ness Monster is supposed to live in Loch Ness. Scientists can use what they know about the loch to make a reasonable assessment as to whether it is inhabited by a mythical beast.

Charles Paxton, a statistical and aquatic ecologist at the University of St Andrew's in Scotland, told Live Science that Loch Ness is low in nutrition and unlikely to support a large predator species at the top of the food chain.

When researching legendary creatures, such as the Loch Ness Monster, he focuses on the available evidence rather than looking for the creatures themselves. He doesn't think the Loch Ness Monster exists.

It could be explained by some aspect of human psychology, it could be explained by a misperception of known species, or it could be explained by an unknown.

Not all the species have been documented by scientists. A study published in the journal Science estimated that we have discovered 1.5 million living species out of 5 million. That could be considered a conservative estimate. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that there are more than a trillion microbial species.

As far as aquatic animals go, Paxton thinks we have exhausted big unknown animals close to the surface, apart from possibly some undiscovered beaked whales that can hold their breath for over 3 hours. Almost all of the large animals that humans could have seen in the water are known.

The study was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Large animals living in areas populated by humans are less likely to slip through the scientific net compared with smaller animals living in remote habitats that are difficult to access. According to the study, reptiles are the least explored group of animals with the highest potential for new species to be discovered.

Are there any giant animals humans have yet to discover?

Scholars link the legendary ability to breathe fire to medieval depictions of the mouth of hell, but there is no evidence for real dragons.

Like many mythical creatures, dragons have parallels in nature. Fossil remains of dinosaurs and other extinct animals have helped bolster dragon stories. The skull of the woolly rhinoceros was kept in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt as a dragon skull.

The Map of Life website has an interactive map where you can search the globe for unknown animals. The map shows that the U.S. has less species diversity than the tropics and that it is a good place to find new animals. Two of the states with the best potential for undiscovered mammals are Washington and Oregon.

Bigfoot tales describe a giant, ape-like creature that is most often seen in the Pacific Northwest. There is only a small increased chance of mammals in this region, most likely due to the presence of rodents, shrews or bats.

It doesn't look great for Bigfoot, but that doesn't mean there aren't any undiscovered primate in the world. The best chances for large undiscovered animals are in the primate family, with species such as Plecturocebus, a titi monkey from Brazil, discovered in recent decades.

Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar and Colombia were identified as potential hot spots for undiscovered life. The countries are rich in species and have not been thoroughly studied.

There are many stories of large, mysterious primate in folklore, but perhaps the most promising is said to live in Indonesia. A legendary creature called Orang Pendek is a bipedal ape that is rumored to roam the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

According to The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, Orang Pendek has the best chance of being discovered. In an email to Live Science, Coleman said Orang Pendek will be hard to find, but is the creature he would most like to search for if he had unlimited funds.

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orangutans are a known group of great apes. The range of these reddish primates in northern Sumatra doesn't seem to overlap with where Orang Pendek is supposed to live in central Sumatra.

Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at John Moores University in England who has surveyed orangutans in Sumatra, told Live that there is virtually no stories about orangutans.

The Orang Pendek stories might be about orangutans that used to live farther south before their range was restricted to the north. He said that it is "remarkable" that no one has found Orang Pendek, given the forests said to house them have been monitored with camera traps.

One person who is certain Orang Pendek is, or at least was, out there is Jeremy Holden, a wildlife photographer. He claims to have seen a creature with his own eyes.

The Orang Pendek passed about 23 feet from him, according to Live Science. Its head was turned away from me as if it was listening to someone.

He said the creature was 5 feet tall, powerfully built and covered in hair, and it was dead grass.

I kept quiet because there was a lot of emotion going through my mind at the time, but one of them was fear. He said he didn't confuse the gibbon he saw with the smaller one, which can be the same color.

During the 1994 encounter, he was a tourist. In 1995 he began searching for evidence of Orang Pendek on a three-year research project funded by FFI.

He and Deborah Martyr tried to take pictures of Orang Pendek using camera traps. The project failed to obtain conclusive proof other than several footprint casts that appear not to match any known primate species.

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Between 2005 and 2009, National Geographic funded an Orang Pendek project. Camera traps were used in this project, but they did not get a shot of the creature. Alex Schlegel, who worked on the project and is now an artificial intelligence researcher in the Bay Area, is unsure if Orang Pendek exists.

It is going to be more bizarre for it not to exist than it is for it to exist, according to Schlegel.

Since the FFI research project ended, he has been looking for Orang Pandek. Nepenthes holdenii, a plant in Cambodia that is named after him, is one of the species that he has found. He was the leader of camera trapping teams that photographed new species for the first time.

Even though he still believes that the Orang Pendek does exist, he thinks that all of his work to find the creature can be seen as proof that it doesn't exist.

The Orang Pendek could have escaped documentation all these years because of the Sumatran ground cuckoo. According to the EDGE of Existence website, the ground-dwelling cuckoo went more than 90 years without being seen until an individual was trapped in 1997.

It took me from 1995 to 2015 to get my first photograph of a Sumatran ground cuckoo. I can sympathize with anyone that doesn't believe me because I have nothing more to show than a story.

It was originally published on Live Science.