The search for unusual, unknown and legendary creatures like Big Foot and Nessie has given cryptozoology a bad name. But let鈥檚 not forget that the world really is bursting with unusual and unknown creatures just waiting for a biologist to stumble across them. Even some cryptozoologists now agree that Big Foot and Nessie will probably seem dull compared with all the wonderful real creatures out there. At the very least, we should make the effort to catalogue them before they go extinct.
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, is among those determined to track down all the world鈥檚 undiscovered beasts. His All Species Foundation is trying to raise billions of dollars to reach that goal within the next 25 years.
Haven鈥檛 we spotted most animals and plants already? That鈥檚 certainly true of mammals: 80 per cent were discovered before 1900. We used to think that there were a manageable 1.4 million species of all life forms to log. Then along came ecologist Terry Erwin in 1981 and moved the goalposts. He estimated that there are 30 million different kinds of life sharing the planet with us. We just hadn鈥檛 spotted them.
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Erwin opened up a new world to human eyes 30 metres or more above ground when he searched for beetles in the rainforest canopy. And up there with the beetles were all manner of other creatures, including frogs, bats and snakes. Twenty years on, species hunts in the rainforest have yielded astonishing results: in Brazil, a new species of monkey has been discovered just about every year since the early 1960s. Two more were found this June.
There are even bigger creatures lurking out there that somehow escaped our attention. The Sao La or pseudo-oryx is the size of an ox but wasn鈥檛 discovered until a few years ago, along with a giant muntjac deer called the Mang Lon.
Where should you go to practise your cryptozoology? Try Vietnam, where some forests remained unscarred by the wars of the last century. This is where the pseudo-oryx hid out. It was in good company. A large conifer, the golden Vietnamese cypress, was found there this summer, as were a couple of dozen new species of orchids.
Do you have to travel across the world to do this? Not always. This April saw the discovery in California of a new kind of beaked whale over four metres long. Difficult to miss, you might think, but this piece of cryptozoology took place in a lab. DNA in bits of whale carcass washed up on beaches were analysed and a new species recorded.
Don鈥檛 forget to load the camera, make casts of footprints and take field notes. And don鈥檛 forget that if you find it, you get to name it. We鈥檙e looking forward to Pseudo-oryx newscientisti.