Cryptids That Turned Out Real

People like to point at a few famous animals and say, “Science said this didn’t exist either.” It is a fair point, as far as it goes. The useful question is what changed scientists’ minds each time. Here is the record.

Giant squid: from sailors’ stories to a photograph

Dead giant squid had washed up and been studied for a long time, but nobody had photographed a live one in its own habitat. In 2004 Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori dropped a baited camera line to about 900 meters off the Ogasawara Islands, south of Tokyo. It took a run of photos of a giant squid attacking the bait, which they estimated was more than 8 meters long. They published the pictures in 2005.

Megamouth: a shark nobody knew

On 15 November 1976 a US Navy research ship lifted its sea anchor about 25 miles off Kahuku Point, Oahu, and found a large shark tangled in it. According to Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources it was about 14.5 feet long and weighed about 1,500 pounds, with a huge mouth. Leighton Taylor, then at the Waikiki Aquarium, studied it and, seven years later, formally named it Megachasma pelagios, “giant yawner of the open sea.” It was a new family as well as a new species, and the original specimen is still held at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Saola: a forest animal found through a skull

In 1992 a joint survey by Vietnam’s Ministry of Forestry and WWF in the Vu Quang area found an unusual skull with long, straight horns in a hunter’s home. It belonged to an animal scientists had never described: the saola. WWF calls it the first large mammal new to science in more than 50 years. It is still so rarely seen that its population is estimated at tens to perhaps a couple of hundred.

Coelacanth: a fossil fish in a trawl net

On 22 December 1938 a trawler working about 40 fathoms down, a few miles west of East London in South Africa, brought up a large fish that was still alive. It went to Miss Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London Museum, who sent a sketch to the chemist and fish expert J. L. B. Smith. In Nature in March 1939 Smith announced it as a crossopterygian, one of a group of fish “believed to have become extinct by the close of the Mesozoic period.” The museum had no way to preserve the soft body, so it was mounted by a taxidermist, but the skin and skeleton parts were enough.

Okapi: a zebra that was not a zebra

Travelers’ accounts of a striped forest animal in the Congo had been reaching Europe for years. According to the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Harry Johnston went looking in 1899 and came back with only two strips of hide. From those, Philip Sclater named it Equus johnstoni in 1901, a kind of horse. That same year Johnston obtained a full skin and two skulls, and they showed it was not a horse at all but a new relative of the giraffe. Ray Lankester renamed it Okapia johnstoni. The museum also notes the colonial scramble for specimens that followed.

What they have in common

Not one of these animals was accepted because of sightings alone. Each came with a body, a skull or clear photographs that others could examine. That is the standard we use on this site. A cryptid that turns out real will clear it the same way.

Sources

• Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2005): doi.org
• Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, “Discovering Megamouth”: dlnr.hawaii.gov
• WWF, “Saola”: worldwildlife.org
• J. L. B. Smith, “A Living Fish of Mesozoic Type”, Nature 143, 455 (1939): nature.com
• Royal Museum for Central Africa, “Okapis”: africamuseum.be
• Megamouth image: Oos, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Every image on this page is credited where it appears.