What is cryptozoology?

I was both amused and bemused to read the letter by Sharon A Hill [ FT379:74], claiming that, contrary to my statement in Alien Zoo [ FT376:22], the discovery of the spotted siren Siren reticulata was not cryptozoological. How ridiculous. The animal had long been spoken of by local people who referred to it as the leopard eel (hence it was ethnoknown), whereas its existence remained unrecognised by science until eventually sought for and successfully collected by the scientists who subsequently formally described and named it. This is a perfect example and vindication of the classic cryptozoological method in action. Yet Hill bizarrely claims that “following up on local reports of a mysterious, unfamiliar-sounding beast and obtaining physical specimens, then subjecting them to formal zoological examination, culminating in determining new species... is not cryptozoology, just zoology”. This demonstrates that she doesn’t understand what cryptozoology is.

To begin with: as a sub-discipline of zoology, not a separate discipline in its own right (as Hill appears to think), all of cryptozoology is by definition “just zoology”. However, the specific portion of zoology that the term ‘cryptozoology’ has been applied to ever since it was originally coined, i.e. the aforementioned seeking of ethnoknown but scientifically unknown animals, is exactly what I have described in my spotted siren news report, yet which, paradoxically, is exactly what Hill has denied it to be. Has she not read anything about cryptozoology, including Heuvelmans’s standard definitions of it and its method? If this were not cryptozoological, then the classic, entirely comparable discoveries of the okapi, mountain gorilla, giant forest hog, Congo peacock, and all of this discipline’s other, more recent successes (see my three books on new and rediscovered animals) were not cryptozoological either, because this is exactly

the procedure via which they too were discovered (remember, it was only the actual term ‘cryptozoology’ that was devised later, not the cryptozoological method itself, which had always existed but had simply not been given a specific name).

As for Hill’s claim that cryptozoology is only concerned with large, mysterious, legendary beasts, this too is nonsensical. In reality: in his classic checklist of apparently unknown animals with which cryptozoology is concerned ( Cryptozoology, vol. 5, 1986), Heuvelmans included a number of relatively small, nondescript creatures, including some mammals and birds. In any event: bearing in mind that the spotted siren was one of the largest and most visually distinctive new species of animal to have been described in the USA for several decades (thereby making science’s overlooking it for such a long time so unexpected), this should be enough to warrant categorising it as a cryptid when taken together with its earliernoted ethnoknown status and mode of discovery. Moreover, even David Steen, its co-discoverer and co-author of the formal scientific paper describing it, stated in a National Geographic interview (5 Dec 2018) that it was “basically this mythical beast”. Hill ends her piece by claiming that “the definition of cryptozoology remains unresolved”. That may be true for her, but not for those of us who actively conduct cryptozoological research.

Dr Karl Shuker

Wednesbury, West Midlands