hitchhikingfrog

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. Supernatural is an anthropological term without an adequate definition (see Dein 2016). Anthropological disciplines survey a variety of cultures, and having terms which can be reliably applied across different cultures is incredibly useful, but a naive goal that’s often doomed to fail. “Supernatural” is a term rooted in the West, science has drawn a clear line between “natural” and “supernatural”. There are many cultures where this is simply not the case. As such, people using the term should define it within the context of the cultures being discussed, something that very rarely happens. This issue affects cryptozoology in two ways. Cryptozoology has historically excluded Western supernatural beliefs...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. A usual and consistent line of inquiry within cryptozoological circles is whether a purported cryptid could represent a late-surviving population of a group of animals thought to be extinct (e.g. "is Mokele-Mbembe a living sauropod?", "if the coelacanth survived, why couldn’t some other Mesozoic marine animals?"). I’m seeking to thoroughly challenge most of these lines of thought. To put it simply, the fossil record is adequate enough to depict the general ecological composition of prehistoric ecosystems, and the absence of certain megafaunal groups is often genuine evidence of absence. Cryptozoology enthusiast’s search for an identity leads them to propose completely anachronistic species as ...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting One of the key traits which separates science from non-science is progress (Thagard, 1978) - whether an area of inquiry is making, or has the potential to make, new contributions to a broader body of knowledge. If cryptozoology is a science, it should be finding new things; this means discovering and describing cryptids. Is that occurring? The answer to this is complex, best summed up as "ehhh..kinda?". To answer this question you first have to establish what counts as discovering. Cryptozoology is an inherently an anthropological discipline, it is dealing with the knowledge of people and their role in shaping it. Although a significant portion of cryptozoological anecdotes are describing zoological species, there are equ...

Cryptozoology is a discipline that suffers heavily from a lack of accessibility - there are no textbooks, there are few reliable compilations of literature, much less concise definitions. This throws the field into disarray quite frequently. Many papers and books are published in non-English languages and never translated, and many remain out of print. I really, really don't want to pay 200 dollars for Roy Mackal's "A Living Dinosaur?" or have to learn German to read "Von Neuen und Unentdeckten Tierarten". What I've done to combat this, partially, is pool what I deem necessary reading all in one spot. I deem these pieces "necessary" because they explain key parts of the cryptozoological methodology from the people who pioneered them. This list will likely be updated on occasion with new relevant publications and when I read more literature. The majority of these books and papers can be found in PDF form online through the u...