KARL SHUKER on forgotten fish, a very rare tiger and a monster museum in the making...
MONSTER MUSEUM
For some years now, artist/sculptor Kendall Hart has been travelling across North America with a show entitled Gardens of Myth, which consists of several incredibly detailed, larger-thanlife-sized sculptures of various legendary monsters and fantastic beasts of folklore from all around the world. These include the Arkansas gowrow (a gigantic lizard), bigfoot, Scandinavian troll, Oriental dragon, and Japanese kappa (a shellbearing, amphibious humanoid entity). However, since meeting John Burroughs, former director of the Rogers Historical Museum in Arkansas, Hart now has his eyes set on something even greater. As recently announced in the media, he and Burroughs have combined their efforts in the hope of establishing a permanent, stationary exhibition in northwest Arkansas to house Hart’s breathtaking creations, whose planned name is the World Myth Museum, and which will be unlike any other museum ever conceived. To quote Burroughs:
“This will be the only museum of its kind in the world to offer a comprehensive exploration of myths and legends. We want to inspire people to understand how culture has defined legends and the process of mythmaking and storytelling. We want to inspire people to be curious, and we want to have conversations with our visitors about legends they may have experienced. And we want to inspire people to appreciate all of the stories that attempt to explain the world around us. The strength of our exhibits will be in the life-like sculptures that will bring our visitors face to face with legends.” And judging from photographs of those exceedingly impressive sculptures, the World Myth Museum will guarantee its visitors a truly astonishing, unique spectacle that will live in their memory for a long time to come. We at FT await further developments with great interest, and very much look forward to the day when everyone can visit this veritable museum of monsters, to gaze in awe and wonder at its amazing legends come (almost) to life! www.arkansasonline.com/ news/2021/may/30/the-myth-ing-link/.
SEEKING LOST FISHES
In collaboration with Re:wild and the IUCN-SSC Freshwater Fish Specialist Group, the fish-themed partnership Shoal has compiled a list of over 300 species of freshwater fish that are currently missing, and which will now be the targets of specific expeditions sent out to their often obscure or remote last-recorded locations in the hope that at least some of these AWOL, seemingly lost to science species will be successfully rediscovered and subsequently conserved. At present, the full list has been narrowed down to create a top 10 most wanted species. All of them are strange with very unusual histories. They include Colombia’s aptly named fat catfish, distinguished from all other fishes by its extraordinary rings of fatty tissue that encircle its entire body like a series of onion rings, so that it resembles a piscean Michelin Man; the Haditha cavefish of Iraq, a blind species recorded from only a single underground sinkhole located directly beneath a holy shrine near Haditha; and the Syr Darya shovelnose sturgeon, formerly known from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which not only is one of the world’s smallest sturgeon species but also is characterised by an astonishing whip-like tail filament that is almost as long as its total head and body combined. Funding is now being sought to assist in financing searches for these and the other seven species on Shoal’s Top Ten list. https://shoalconservation. org/search-for-lost-fishes/.
TIGER, TIGER, GOLDEN BRIGHT
Down through the ages, several very unusual freak colour or pattern varieties of tiger have been reported in the wild state, including white tigers, black tigers, pseudo-melanistic tigers, red tigers, even blue tigers, and tigers without stripes. Moreover, a particularly distinctive variety has occasionally appeared among captive tigers, known variously as the golden tiger, golden tabby tiger, or ginger tiger, on account of its extremely distinctive gingery-gold coat colour, marked only with exceedingly thin, pale stripes and complemented by very conspicuous snowy-white underparts. The precise genetic basis of this very rare colour morph has yet to be determined, although a recessive mutant gene allele is suspected, and which would now seem to have arisen in the wild state as well. For the very first verified example of a golden tiger known to exist in the wild has lately been not only sighted but also photographed, in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, India. It was encountered and snapped there by Mayuresh Hendre, with his superb full-colour photos of this beautiful, exceedingly rare animal, dubbed Goldie, subsequently shared by Indian Forest Services (IFS) officer Parveen Kaswan. Although originally reported in July 2020, this remarkable creature’s existence and history have only recently come to widespread attention online. www. deccanherald.com/national/india-s-onlygolden-tiger-spotted-in-assams-kaziranganational-park-860334.html 12 July 2020.