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| Mokele Mbembe |
(An interview we found with skeptic's and some "monsters" names you all know)
There's ample circumstantial evidence for all these creatures:
eyewitness accounts, blurry photographs, mysterious footprints. For many
cryptozoologists—the people who search for legendary animals—that evidence is
enough to confirm a monster's existence.
But it will take more than shadowy sightings to convince Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero that
Bigfoot or any of the other monsters are real. What Loxton and Prothero want is
scientific evidence. In their new book, Abominable
Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids, they
analyze the history of mythic beasts and the clues to their existence.
Loxton and Prothero come at Cryptozoology from different directions.
Loxton, a staff writer for Skeptic magazine,
was an ardent believer in monsters as a kid, having spotted a Bigfoot print in
the woods and a pterodactyl winging over his backyard. (Now, he suspects the
print was a prank and the pterodactyl was a great
blue heron.) Prothero is a paleontologist, who is also trained in biology
and geology. He has written over 250 scientific papers and 28 books, including
five textbooks on geology.
here the autors speak
about bringing skepticism and science to the study of cryptids.
First of all, what is a cryptid?
DP: A cryptid is any animal that has never been described by science,
usually something very unusual along the lines of a Loch Ness monster or
Bigfoot, something that stretches the limits of what is scientifically
plausible.
DL: It's based on the word cryptozoology, which means hidden life or
animals. It implies a creature that's been recorded through folklore, something
that we have reason to suspect exists.
What can science tell us about cryptids?
DP: The first thing, of course, is that a cryptid can't be a single
animal. If there's one of them, there's got to be many of them. You can talk
about their population density, the size of range they should have based on
their estimated body size. All of that tends to weigh against them being real
because they should have had huge ranges, and they should have been spotted a
long time ago if they really did exist. And then there's other aspects, like
geology, something you never hear the cryptozoologists mention. All the lake
monsters, not just Loch Ness but the ones here in North America, in Lake
Champlain and Lake George, were all under a
mile of ice 20,000 years ago. The cryptozoologists never asked the question,
"Well, how did the monster get in the lake if the lake was completely under ice,
the lakes are all landlocked, and there's no way for a marine creature to get
there at all?" Those are all things that are not news to geologists, they're not
news to biologists, but they're apparently news to cryptozoologists.
All the cryptids that you discuss in the book – Bigfoot, the
Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Mokele Mbembe – are very similar to things that
exist or existed in the past: bears, primates, plesiosaurs, sauropods. Why the
similarity?
DL: In some cases I think it's because they are the same. Bears are
often associated with ogres or wildmen in folklore because they're pretty
humanlike. Once that folklore is underway, you have the opportunity for people
to make these misidentification errors where they see a bear and think it might
be a bigfoot. (Read a National Geographic magazine story about Europe's
wildmen.)
DP: These animals look like something familiar to us because the
myths grow around whatever we've already just seen. Daniel pointed out in the
book that the Mokele Mbembe myth emerged right about the time that large
sauropod skeletons were first mounted in New York City and illustrated by people
like Charles R.
Knight. Then lo and behold, someone starts reporting one in the Congo, where
it doesn't have any history prior to that.
So Mokele Mbembe definitely does not exist?
DP: We have an excellent fossil record of Africa. We have very great
confidence that there have been no dinosaurs around in the last 65 million years
because we have bones of large animals from Africa of all kinds but they're all
mammals. Same goes for plesiosaurs. Worldwide, there are no bones of plesiosaurs
in any marine deposit after about 70 million years ago. There are plenty of
places where they should show up if they actually lived, but they don't. That to
me is not just absence of evidence, that's very strong evidence that they don't
exist.
That sentence -- the absence of evidence is not the evidence
of absence – occurs a lot in the book.
DL: It's a really good thing for people to keep in mind, but it's not
always true. If the claim that you are advancing implies some kind of evidence,
then failing to find that kind of evidence is evidence that thing does not
exist. Take, for example, the idea that there might be plesiosaurs in Loch Ness.
Well, plesiosaurs had bones. That implies that there should be bones littering
the loch. Well, they've dredged the loch to see if there are any monster bones
down there, any plesiosaur bones, and there aren't. That goes to the truth of
the claim.
Do you ever encounter people who say, "No, I saw
it!"
DL: Oh yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for that. If you have the
experience of seeing something with your own eyes, it's natural that should
trump my "talking head" skepticism and Don's arguments about why that's probably
not so. But there's only so much I can do with your personal experience that I
did not share. I accept that it's compelling to you, but it cannot be as
compelling to me.
DP: By and large, all of the evidence for these really strange
cryptids is from eyewitness testimony. People are fooled by their senses,
especially sight, because we are notoriously bad witnesses. One of the sightings
of the Yeti, or the abominable snowman, turns out to be a rock outcrop. The guy
saw it move the first time and then he had to leave. He came back finally a year
later--after his sighting had been all over the media--and it turns out that it
was just a rock he was shooting pictures of.
What do you think the connection is between people believing
in cryptids and the level of scientific literacy among the general
public?
DP: Lately cryptozoology has been connected to creationism in a lot
of ways. People who actively search for Loch Ness monsters or Mokele Mbembe do
it entirely as creationist ministers. They think that if they found a dinosaur
in the Congo it would overturn all of evolution. It wouldn't. It would just be a
late-occurring dinosaur, but that's their mistaken notion of evolution.
Is there any one cryptid that you wish was real?
DL: All of them.
DP: I'm a paleontologist. I'd love to have Mokele Mbembe and a
plesiosaur!
(This interview has been edited and condensed)
