HO! HO! HO!

Ronan Coghlan is Santa at the Ulster Bank.

Is this Bigfoot? Google Earth 'finds' mysterious hairy beast lurking in Canadian woodland

Image sparks speculation that a Sasquatch may be stalking the forests of North America

Is this bigfoot?  Now read on....at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/is-this-bigfoot-google-earth-finds-mysterious-hairy-beast-lurking-in-canadian-woodland-8918455.html

Marina Chapman, photographed at age 17, now a granny living in England, but raised largely by monkeys.

GIRL OF THE JUNGLE

A female Tarzan perhaps?  Marina Chapman was taken from her Colombian home and left in the jungle.  She claims she joined a troupe of capuchin monkeys, who at first ignored her.  She would take refuge in the hollows of trees.  One day she ate something unsavory which made her ill and she writhed about, howling with pain.  An elderly monkey made her drink water, she vomited up the food and felt much better.

After this, the monkeys seemed to accept her more as one of their number.  They groomed her and she groomed them.  She learned basic monkey communication skills.

Eventually she was found by hunters, but sold into a brothel from which she escaped.  She was adopted by a family who ultimately sent her to Bradford, Yorkshire, with which they had associations.  She married a scientist and now has two daughters, Joanna (32) and Vanessa (28).  Joanna now has children of her own.
Marina is particularly good at climbing trees.

Marina tells her story in a book which appeared last year,The Girl With No Name (Pegasus, $26.95).  A paperback edition is due to appear in 2014.

HOW DO REINDEER FLY?

Where, you might sometimes wonder, did people get the idea that Santa's reindeer flew?  Some books will tell you that it derives from the notion that the Norse god Thor had a wagon pulled by flying goats.  However, I think a more likely answer is to be found in Finland.  Here they believed that Old Man Winter flew through the air in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.  What, I hear you ask, is the origin of this belief?  Finnish shamans probably induced an ecstatic condition in which they believed they were flying by ingesting fly agaric mushrooms; but these have an unhappy side effect, in that they make you throw up.  Reindeer, however, consume these mushrooms without any such results and, if you then drink their urine, you will undergo the illusion that you are flying through the air.  In this, I  think, we probably have the origin of how reindeer and flying came to be associated.  If you don't believe me, next time you're shopping, buy a bottle of reindeer urine and try it out.

CRUELTY TO DOGS

When most people think of cruelty to dogs, they think of physical mistreatment and, indeed, there are shocking cases a-plenty of this.  I, however, want to draw your attention to another kind of cruelty - deliberate inbreeding.

I'm sure you are aware that in Dog Shows, breeds have to have the right number of points to win.  Certain dog breeders, however, feel the best way to produce the dog most likely to win is to inbreed for as many generations as possible, in order to produce the 'perfect' dog.

The result may be a dog that will win, but all sorts of physical deformities inside the dog can arise from this.  Bulldogs, for example, can suffer from respiratory difficulties.  The gene pools of many a canid are so small that numerous disorders can result.

Nature has its own remedies to stop inbreeding.  If there is a litter of young in a mammalian species, the females will attain maturity before the males and will mate with males from another litter.  In humans, children who grow up together for their first six years with siblings do not (as a rule) find those siblings sexually attractive.

But I am informed that there are people out there who, to have the "finest" dogs to place on show, use inbreeding to the point that dogs are produced which undergo a life of suffering.  Those who organize dog shows should be persuaded, not alone to discourage this, but to take active steps against it.  Those Dog Shows that do not should be boycotted by all who have the welfare of animals at heart. 

To create or not create. That is the question.

Columbian mammoth - courtesy of Wikimedia commons

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Ian Malcolm says to John Hammond "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
This is the question now being raised, not in a fantasy film, but in a real life setting, and in a very serious and heated debate.

Japanese scientists hope to have woolly mammoths gracing parks across the globe by the year 2016. ( Please refer back to my March 18, 2011 blog post at Crypto Haven Research & Investigations titled " Lyuba, the little mammoth with a big story "

But Japan isn't the only country in the running.

 In March of this year, scientists with The Lazarus Project in Australia made the astonishing announcement that they had been able to clone embryos of an odd little amphibian known as the gastric brooding frog ( Look them up, you'll love what you learn about them ), which was declared extinct in 1979. A cousin to it, the northern gastric brooding frog was declared extinct in 1985. All succumbed to de-habitation and a nasty little destroyer of frogs known as the chytrid fungus.  

De-exctinction, as it is called, is part of a newly emerging field of science called "revival biology". But it is at the very least a controversial subject, and the lines in the sand aren't clear enough yet to know which way this is going to go in the next five to ten years, let alone the distant future of genetics and DNA modification.
But one thought this brings up for me as a cryptozoologist is the question of exactly how long this has been going on and what creatures they have experimented with and created that we do not know about..........yet.

Could we actually be witness to mammoths roaming our zoos along with elephants and chimpanzees in the next handful of years? The answer seems to be a resounding YES.

But..........................should we?

Did these animals have their time on earth and die out for a reason?

Could bringing them back upset the current balance of nature even more than it is now?

Admittedly, I would probably shove through the line and push children out of the way be the first pair of eyes to catch a glimpse of a newly born Columbian mammoth in the Detroit Zoo.

Wouldn't you?

A Grumble from Me

It is no unusual thing to see scientists grumble at Forteans, to which they zealously grumble back; but you would expect scientists to at least use logic in their deliberations.  Don't misunderstand me...I am not one of those anti-scientists who goes around grumbling about the short-sightedness of the Establishment, though I don't deny it can be short-sighted at times.

However, the other night I was doing what I do best, videlicet as  little as possible, when a prominent scientist appeared on television.  He proceeded to speak on the subject of alien abductions.

Now, I don't have any opinion on the cause of alien abductions, be they real or imaginary.  (Elegant use of Subjunctive there - readers please note).  I feel we need a good deal more data on the phenomenon before we  pronounce upon it; but this savant claimed to have the Answer.

"They don't happen," he informed us, "because if there were UFOs out there, our scientific devices would have picked them up."

Now, this astronomer (for such he was) didn't seem to consider that any civilization that was so advanced that it could send conveyances light years across space would be more than able to evolve artifacts that could easily avoid detection by our puny satellites, telescopes, spacecraft and anything else we might have. If there are aliens who can send spacecraft so far, we must be a long way behind them.  Their non-detection doesn't prove anything, positive or negative.

As for why this is placed in a Crippled Zoology, I mean Cryptozoology, blog, the two subjects are at times not unconnected, although many a cryptozoologist has a somewhat illogical tendency to distance himself from all other paranormal phenomena.