KARL SHUKER
mourns a cryptozoological loss and grins and bears some bad news for yetis
RIP PROFESSOR COLIN GROVES
I am very sad to announce the death on 30 November of Professor Colin P Groves, based at the Australian National University in Canberra. He was 75. One of the world’s leading mammal taxonomists, specialising particularly in biological anthropology, Prof. Groves also had a longstanding interest in cryptozoology. He had contributed papers to the scientific journal of the now-defunct International Society of Cryptozoology, had acted as a reviewer for papers submitted to the current Journal of Cryptozoology for which I act as editor, and had been involved in identifying and describing a sizeable number of major new mammal species down through the years. Some of these had actually been hidden in plain sight inasmuch as their existence had long been known to science but their identity as distinct species in their own right had not previously been suspected.
Among those so recognised and duly delineated by Prof. Groves and co-workers were a new species of warthog, a new gazelle, several other notable ungulates, a new fossil human Homo ergaster, a new genus of bushbaby, plus major taxonomic revisions of the African elephants and gorillas, and most recently a new species of orangutan. He and I corresponded on numerous occasions, and he was especially encouraging regarding my research for my three books on new and rediscovered animals, supplying me with much new information and leads.
Cryptozoology is often thought, particularly by outsiders, to take place principally in the field, seeking strange and exotic beasts in remote, distant localities far from civilisation, but the numerous discoveries made by Prof. Groves and the museum-oriented manner in which he did so eloquently demonstrate otherwise. As he once stated in an interview: “There’s two ways of discovering new species. One is by slogging through the jungle in your pith helmet and binoculars, spotting an animal and saying ‘by Jove, I don’t recognise that!’ The other way is looking through museums, looking at specimens in drawers and finding species that have not been properly classified”. Thanks to his untiring work in the latter capacity, many such species, long unrecognised, have now been properly classified, and his profound influence upon successive generations of research students ensures that many more will be too – a wonderful legacy indeed, from that rarest of beings, namely a mainstream zoologist who was also more than happy to contribute both indirectly and directly to cryptozoological research and advancement. Our sincere condolences here at FT go to Prof. Groves’s family, friends, and numerous colleagues worldwide.
www.cryptozoonews.com/groves-obit/; www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/valeemeritus-professor-colin-groves, 30 Nov 2017.
NEW YETI FINDINGS HARD TO BEAR?
Some more supposed yeti relics have been the focus of phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences, in order to determine their taxonomic identities, and once again they have been found to be from bears (plus, in once instance, a dog), rather than from any species of primate, known or unknown. The results have recently been released in a Proceedings
of the Royal Society B paper, whose team of researchers was led by Dr Charlotte Lindqvist from the University at Buffalo in NYC, USA. Nine different specimens, now housed in museums and private collections but all claimed to have originated from yetis by the various local people from whom they had been obtained, were examined. The outcome of the tests was that with the exception of an alleged yeti tooth that was found to be from a domestic dog, all of the specimens were from Himalayan and Tibetan brown bears.
Cryptozoological sceptics have been quick to claim on social media and elsewhere that these findings confirm that the yeti as an unknown species of primate is fiction, that it is unquestionably merely a bear, and a known form at that. In reality, of course, they confirm nothing of the sort – all that they do confirm is that the individual creatures from which those eight samples derived were bears. The Himalayas constitute a vast, frequently inaccessible terrain where an undiscovered primate might readily exist – or even more than one such form, as traditional yeti lore and eyewitness descriptions consistently delineate three morphologically discrete types, not just one, and all of which are adamantly claimed by locals to be humanoid, not ursine. Even Dr Lindquist herself is quoted in one newspaper interview as stating: “You can never for sure prove that there is nothing out there”.
True, the impossibility of proving a negative can give free rein to all manner of wild, unrestrained supposition in any field of study, but the very sizeable archive of detailed anecdotal evidence on file obtained from local and western observers alike over many decades of cryptozoological investigation remains sufficiently persuasive for this cryptid’s supporters to deem it unlikely that all such sightings merely involve bears and that locals are unable to distinguish such commonplace beasts from something that they claim to be much more intelligent, and much more human. To be continued.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing. org/content/284/1868/20171804, 29 Nov; www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ entry/yetis-just-bears-science_ us_5a1f0135e4b0d52b8dc242db, 29 Nov; https://news.nationalgeographic. com/2017/11/yeti-legends-real-animalsdna-bears-himalaya-science/, 29 Nov 2017.