NO FUN GABY DUNN

Jul. 12, 2011 at 3:52pm with 84 notes

Reblogged from 100interviews

#35. LOREN COLEMAN - “A cryptozoology expert.”

“It has a head like a deer, stands upright like a man and hops like a frog,” reads an account of an unknown creature by 1700s explorers. “It sometimes sports two heads –- one on the shoulders, and one on the stomach.” Picturing such an animal brings up some pretty weird images. Claims of having seen it were widely ridiculed.

That is, until Europeans discovered the kangaroo in 1770.

About a month ago, I finished reading Bill Bryson’s popular science book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything.’ In it, he talks about how museums and governments used to finance expeditions to the far corners of the Earth to seek out a new animal or plant species. On a timeline of the Earth’s existence splayed out like the wingspan of a person holding their arms up to the side, humanity takes up less than a fingernail. We haven’t been around very long.

In the era Bryson’s writing about, people in general had an easier time accepting our small place in our planet’s autobiography. We don’t know everything the vast Earth has to offer, ergo, let’s trek around and find out. Explorers sought to catalog every living being on Earth. New creatures were discovered in droves.

In Yann Martel’s novel ‘Life of Pi,’ the main character wonders how a Bengal tiger could hide in a city without being sighted. His zoologist father answers that animals are better at hiding than people would ever guess — if you took the world and shook it out, animals unlike any we can imagine would fall out of even the most populated metropolises.

A good number of the animals that we take for granted now were discovered only about 100 years ago. The mountain gorilla was not discovered until two were shot in 1902. No one had seen a living giant panda until the very end of the 1800s. In the last 10 years, four hundred new animals larger than household cats were found and classified.

So why is it so hard to believe there are still animals we have yet to discover?

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