Cryptids - Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and the like

[Niggernerd]

"First of all, I'm 1/64th Navajo"
"I was hiking alone in the woods at night"
"Suddenly, I smelled rotting meat"
"I heard the voice of my grandma, but it sounded... distorted, like it was coming from an old radio"
"Then I saw it. It looked like a zombie with antlers"
"I ran, with the creature right behind me"
"Somehow, I got away"

I'm also a 5'2 wahmin so you know im badass and independent

 

[Intelligent Calcium]

Parabreakdown does short debunking videos, has some good stuff once in a while.

 

[Pignat]

I don't know where else to post this, so I'll revive this dead thread. Coyote Peterson, a retard known for getting bit by animals for the amusement of children unearthed an alleged bigfoot skull in British Columbia.

It could be a hoax by him, a prank that someone placed there years ago, or a corpse of a gorilla that some rich Vancouver chink dumped after he got sick of taking care of it.
Whether or not it is real is not important, the notable thing is how he reacted, by keeping it secret and smuggling it over the border at significant personal risk. He could get in serious legal trouble from Canada for admitting to smuggle a skull, even if it's just a gorilla skull. His channel is also doing fine, his videos average out to 1 million views each, so risking his credibility for a silly bigfoot larp would be an odd choice to make.
Some more pictures from his post instragram post:

 

[Hallucinogenic Penguin]

I don't know where else to post this, so I'll revive this dead thread. Coyote Peterson, a retard known for getting bit by animals for the amusement of children unearthed an alleged bigfoot skull in British Columbia.
View attachment 3469596
It could be a hoax by him, a prank that someone placed there years ago, or a corpse of a gorilla that some rich Vancouver chink dumped after he got sick of taking care of it.
Whether or not it is real is not important, the notable thing is how he reacted, by keeping it secret and smuggling it over the border at significant personal risk. He could get in serious legal trouble from Canada for admitting to smuggle a skull, even if it's just a gorilla skull. His channel is also doing fine, his videos average out to 1 million views each, so risking his credibility for a silly bigfoot larp would be an odd choice to make.
Some more pictures from his post instragram post:
View attachment 3469597View attachment 3469598

100% a Gorilla skull. Even has the cranial ridge which is the attachment for the powerful facial muscles.

 

[Gimmick Account]

If bigfoots are buying gorilla skulls on ebay and burying them we need to reconsider some assumptions

 

[Male Idiot]

I cast negromancy on the thread.

I bring you the most fun cryptid ever:


The popobawa, or batwing, is a cryptid djinn from Zanzibar who gets aroused by democratic elections, where he flies to the houses of locals and rapes them good. If they don't tell everyone they got raped, he rapes them again. No nigga can be down lo when this coom demon is in town. The ultimate buck breaker, the one eyed monster.

Spoiler: NSFW art showing the popobawa nude

 

[Yugica]

I think if any cryptid exists, its in the deep part of the oceans.

I actually have seen a video relating to this that you might enjoy -- you know, almost a decade after your post.

The TL;DW is that through a general rule of thumb with collections of things that you don't know the initial amount of unique types are in, extrapolating with that model shows that there should be quite a few more large animals left to discover in the oceans. Most of my money would be on species of beaked whales(who are often hard to spot and dive deep. Wikipedia even says "[...] are a family of cetaceans noted as being one of the least-known groups of mammals because of their deep-sea habitat, reclusive behavior and apparent low abundance.").

There is also the 52 hertz whale which has been heard but never actually seen whilst making its calls. There have also been potential other hearings of this call in other areas meaning that more than one could exist, which would make it seem like a true potential species or a hybrid(as is one of the theories).

I cast negromancy on the thread.

If this thread is being revived then I can bring about a theory I have for a not-so-well known cryptid, the oil pit squid. After reading some of the archived headlines and news clippings from the time and thinking on it all, I put forward the fairy shrimp are behind the sighting. Namely the original news clippings describe the oil pit squid in the following ways:
>potentially having eyes, thus hinting at dark spots that could be eye spots
>a nondescript number of tentacles
>reddish gray color
>resembling nightcrawlers, thus presumably having "rings" or something that looks like rings.
And then there's stuff that we can infer from them specifically being compared to squids, despite those traits. Namely that these critters must've dart away, backwards, when approached. All of this fits in with fairy shrimp and there are fairy shrimp in that area. The only issue is that the fairy shrimp in Indiana are at most maybe an inch long. Here's a picture showing what inaturalist shows of fairy shrimp for Indiana:

Also, a picture of a neglected fairy shrimp that I think is the most likely culprit of a strain of these shrimps that had adapted to the oil pit:

My theory is that the "squids" found in that pit(which were noticed after a sprinkler system for the sludge pit broke and needed repairs) is that they were from a strain of fairy shrimp that had been evolving to live longer lives in the sludge pit and that they had also grown much larger. They were almost certainly feeding on bacterial growths(that a manager from the plant and some environmental guys later said must've been the squids but that doesn't line up with a worker having killed one and put it in a jar. You don't delude yourself into saying that slimy mats can be killed nor swim.).

Sadly it wasn't that long after these guys were spotted that the site needed to be remediated since it was leaking hazardous chemicals into the ground(seemingly because if it was lined, which isn't likely since the plant was from like WW2 times, that lining had broken down). The top soil was removed too so any eggs that could've restarted their cycle and gotten us new oil pit squids are likely lost or gone. The best hope would be finding where that soil was stored/placed as fairy shrimp eggs can last for decades in their dehydrated form. I've also posted about this elsewhere under another alias in the very, VERY unlikely chance someone(a person behind 1 of the 15 views it has) tries to call me a plagiarist.

Also when a fairy shrimp is taken out of water it does look more worm-like and there is a species of fairy shrimp that grows to about the/close to the length of the oil pit squids(6-8 inches as reported) and that's B. gigas, pic here is one in someone's hand.

They almost certainly weren't B. gigas though as B. gigas occurs in the western part of the US, but it could possibly have been a very windswept colony of them started in that sludge pit.

 

[Male Idiot]

Fairy shrimp are amazing creatures if you can get over their tiny size. Perhaps they just found some larger, undocumented species?

A lot of cryptid sightings are in the dark where people can misjudge size so much easier.

 

[Yugica]

Fairy shrimp are amazing creatures if you can get over their tiny size. Perhaps they just found some larger, undocumented species?

A lot of cryptid sightings are in the dark where people can misjudge size so much easier.

They did find a relative to B. gigas, that's not quite as big but is predatory not too many years ago over in Idaho, so it is possible. In my experience with selective breeding though you can make animals with very short life cycles grow very small in just a few years, so the over 50 years that the plant was running is more than feasible I think for just making one group of fairy shrimp evolve to be very significantly larger. Here's a picture showing a male and female B. Raptor.

The one on the right is a male and the one of the left is a female for reference. The scale bar is 1 cm as well.

 

[Male Idiot]

That's yuge, they are usually well under a 1 cm. Could the big ones be sold for kids? Sea-monkeys on roids!

 

[Yugica]

Pretty sure B. gigas is protected because their habitat is really restrictive and I'd figure B. raptor might be as well. So those two are almost certainly off limits. Some people sell another fairly big fairy shrimp species; the beavertail fairy shrimp is sold online and they can grow to be over an inch long. Their tails are also cool looking. Here's a picture from a seller online:

Here's a picture, from the same seller, showing off various fairy shrimp species near each other for scale for any alternatives though.

So there is at least these guys for kits online(or you can buy just some eggs and make your kits for a relative). They sell other kinds of crustaceans too, I remember and loved a triops kit I got as a kid. You can keep the shrimp going over multiple generations by removing the water(or just the sediment itself) after they've had enough time to lay a bunch of eggs and then drying out the sediment at the bottom over the course of a few hours. They produce two kinds of eggs: desiccated eggs that'll need to dry fully before being able to hatch(and don't all hatch at once, some skip a cycle), and normal eggs that can hatch right away. For sea monkeys people mostly just have the latter kind of egg in their system to keep them going but the people who sell the kits are selling the collected, desiccated eggs.

 

[skykiii]

Bigfoot is very much real. I knew him in high school. We called him Bob the Smelly and constantly told him he needed to take a shower.

 

[Male Idiot]

Pretty sure B. gigas is protected because their habitat is really restrictive and I'd figure B. raptor might be as well. So those two are almost certainly off limits. Some people sell another fairly big fairy shrimp species; the beavertail fairy shrimp is sold online and they can grow to be over an inch long. Their tails are also cool looking. Here's a picture from a seller online:
View attachment 7281751
Here's a picture, from the same seller, showing off various fairy shrimp species near each other for scale for any alternatives though.
View attachment 7281755
So there is at least these guys for kits online(or you can buy just some eggs and make your kits for a relative). They sell other kinds of crustaceans too, I remember and loved a triops kit I got as a kid. You can keep the shrimp going over multiple generations by removing the water(or just the sediment itself) after they've had enough time to lay a bunch of eggs and then drying out the sediment at the bottom over the course of a few hours. They produce two kinds of eggs: desiccated eggs that'll need to dry fully before being able to hatch(and don't all hatch at once, some skip a cycle), and normal eggs that can hatch right away. For sea monkeys people mostly just have the latter kind of egg in their system to keep them going but the people who sell the kits are selling the collected, desiccated eggs.

Setting up a self containing ecosystem with tiny critters like this has always been something I would have loved to do but I'm not really qualified to do well, plus the smell. This is why I'm doubtful on Bigfoot being a common animal. There is simply not enough ecological space to support a large population of them, so if it was a real thing, it would have to be a rare creature that is at least critically endangered.

 

[Yugica]

Setting up a self containing ecosystem with tiny critters like this has always been something I would have loved to do but I'm not really qualified to do well, plus the smell.

I'd love to do some myself too, but on a bigger scale. I've had all kinds of dream projects for self-contained ecosystems, even chemotrophic ones that I'd make to selectively breed them to handle. This is the cryptids thread so I won't derail it to talk about some of the cool chemotrophic ecosystems elsewhere in the world or what are possible, but I will say that the best way to get something a single person could own in a home that's self-contained is to have lots of very small animals and you can selectively breed animals for that and oligotrophy(adaptations for eating very little or enduring long periods of little to no food).

This is why I'm doubtful on Bigfoot being a common animal. There is simply not enough ecological space to support a large population of them, so if it was a real thing, it would have to be a rare creature that is at least critically endangered.

I think if he does exist it's most convincing that he lives in the Pacific Northwest of the US an Canada. There's tons of woodlands and mountains up there and it's very scarcely populated. All of the largest North American animals live in that region too, along with Alaska. The larger subspecies of Grizzly Bear, the Kodiak Bear, living in Alaska being a great example. There's also of course meese(the only correct plural form of 'moose', this is a hill I will die on ).

North America is very weird as far as primates are concerned, South America too to an extent. Primates are actually thought to have originally emerged from North America nearer to when the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs had occurred. PBS Eons actually has an amazing video covering that too:

Beyond that though is South America's lack of a large primate. Eurasia and Africa have had lots of large primates in their past. Even the lemurs of Madagascar had their own equivalent of gorillas, the Archaeoindris genus, which went extinct around the time humans were colonizing the island. Here's some palaeo art of one:


South America though, to my aspergic knowledge, lacks any large primates comparable to gorillas or orangutans or anything like that. They may have possibly existed in the past and are now extinct. Primate fossils are often very hard to come by and are rare, so it's very likely that South America did at one point have its own gorilla or pongo analogue and we just haven't found any fossils yet.

I did find the discussion about cultural memories of Bigfoot and hominids neat though. There's actually evidence that hominids were in the Americas long before humans were. Miniminuteman on YouTube has a great video covering that and the title says it all: