“While Miss Ella Burdick and some friends were out fishing on Lake St. Clair, one evening last week at sundown, a dark peculiar looking object was seen coming up the lake. They rowed very close to the object and were able to get a good look at it. It appeared to have a head somewhat like a dog, with huge eyes protruding and tusk-like projections on each side of the head. Its body appeared to lie some seven or eight feet under water. Some fishermen also saw it and claimed it was some sort of sea serpent. It was certainly a very dangerous and horrible-looking object and was swimming at a very rapid rate.” Excerpt from cryptozoo-oscity about the 1800s sighting of the Lake St. Clair sea serpent…
Humanities greed and destruction has made many creatures extinct, or at serious risk for extinction. While research companies such as Colossal are trying to bring back those that are extinct, some conservation experts are simply trying to save what exists today. Which brings us to the strange, but beautiful looking creature.
This amazing animal once walked with the ice age giants like the wooly mammoths. Their image is painted on cave walls by early man. But sadly, like the mammoths, they too were hunted to near extinction for their hides and horns.
These creatures somehow survived us, and it’s worth telling their story.
The Saiga antelope’s story stretches back over 100,000 years,
when it roamed alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave lions. Fossil evidence suggests that it was once widespread across Europe and Asia, even reaching Britain and Alaska during glacial periods. Its uniquely structured snout helps filter out dust and regulate air temperature, something that helped it survive in frigid landscapes.
Despite surviving the Pleistocene mass extinctions, the Saiga began to retreat eastward due to climatic shifts and human expansion. Today, it remains in isolated pockets across Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, and Uzbekistan.
Showing its long history beside man, it appears in our Mythology and Folklore record. It has had cultural and spiritual significance across Eurasia, where nomadic peoples revered it as a “messenger between worlds”.
In Turkic and Mongol tribes, the Saiga was considered a “divine messenger of Tengri”, (the sky god). Its horns were believed to carry mystical energy, and were used in rituals and offerings to bring prosperity and good fortune to their people.
In Siberian folklore it was said to be capable of summoning rain during times of drought. Some legends even spoke of Saiga antelope “communicating with spirits”, guiding shamans through the invisible realms.
In Kazakh folklore the Saiga represents rebirth and endurance. Some ancient stories tell of wounded warriors seeing visions of Saiga leading them back home.
Art by Сауле Баймышева
The Saiga antelope appeared in prehistoric cave art, suggesting it was a part of early human life. In the Cosquer Cave a near France, it was depicted alongside bison, deer, and horses. This artwork confirms it’s part in the Ice Age ecosystem, and its connection with early hunters.
To save this beautiful creature from going out like the mammoth, it is in protected status. They are cracking down on poachers in the area, the horns are wanted for Chinese medicine, creating an underground trade for the animal. In 2015 a devastating disease wiped out 200,000 of them. It’s at risk from both climate change and habitat destruction. So far, global conservation efforts have gotten the population up to over a million. And currently migration corridors have been safeguarded to ensure the species can roam freely…
As relieved as I am to see that this species is rebounding and protected, all animals are in constant dire threat from us. It’s something that keeps me up at night. We need to change, we need to stop tearing down woodlands and just live within what we have already constructed, if we don’t it’s the beginning of the end for all of us…
“It was 1972 in a sleepy little Cincinnati suburb when a police officer noticed what appeared to be a four-to-five-foot tall FROG standing on its hind legs near the Little Miami River.
He reported the sighting in Loveland, which quickly took off across the small town of 13,000, garnering surprise and mysticism as residents asked themselves if the story of a human-sized frog could possibly be real.
Days later, a second officer spotted the creature and shot it. After retrieving the carcass, he discovered it was an iguana and brought it to the second cop to see if that the creature he saw.”
The Bergman Bear , is supposedly a giant bear native to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
This giant bear ended up intriguing Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman.
Bergman first brought attention to this elusive bear in the 1920s after examining a hide that was far larger than any known bear species. He described it as having short black fur and weighing between 450 and 2,500 pounds!
Bergman believed in the existence of this giant bear due to the physical evidence he encountered such as a massive paw prints measuring nearly 15 inches long and 10 inches wide. While no firsthand sightings have been recorded since the 1920s, local legends and rumors suggest that a few might still roam the remote regions of Siberia.
But could it be possible that this bear is still roaming Siberia? I believe it is.
There are other unbelievably large bears roaming in that area, let’s look at the Kamchatka brown bear for instance. The Kamchatka brown bear is the biggest brown bear in Eurasia with a body length of 7.9 to 9.8 ft tall on its hind legs, and it weights up 1,430 lbs.
Kamchatka brown bears are generally not dangerous to humans. During a study on the animal, one researcher found only 1% of his 270 encounters ended in a human attack.
Then there is the Irkuiem bear otherwise known as the “god bear”.
The Irkuiem bear is considered a cryptid bear, also from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. According to Fandom’s Encyclopedia of Cryptids, the descriptions of its enormous size and odd limb proportions led to the theory that it could be a short-faced bear, that would mean believing they weren’t actually extinct. Now it is believed to be a unique form of brown bear.
With one large known bear strolling around, would it be so impossible to believe that these currently labeled, “cryptid bears” could be out there as well?
William T. Cox was the first State Forester and Commissioner of Conservation for Minnesota. He worked as a forester for the United States Forest Service. In 1929 Cox even traveled to Brazil to organize the Brazilian Forest Service. But what William T. Cox is most remembered for now is a brilliant field guide he wrote back in 1910 about imaginary creatures, or cryptids as we now know them today.
Some of the amazing creatures featured in this book were the hodag, and the brilliant creature, the hugag. The Hugag is described as being similar to a moose with an extensive upper-lip, preventing it from grazing, and jointless legs preventing it from lying down.
The hugag
But not all were completely fictional some were just embellished from strange creatures actually reported such as the Hyampom Hog Bear and the Snoligoster. Whether you’re reading about the fictional or the embellished critters here, it makes for a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again this weekend and definitely recommend it for the lovers of cryptozoology.
“In the 1990s, a strange creature emerged from the Brazilian Amazon Basin. Known as the Holadeira, or “sawtooth dolphin,” this cryptid was reportedly spotted by local and named the Holadeira and it even captured the attention of adventurers like Jeremy Wade.
Wade reportedly first saw the animal in 1994 about 100′ away from his boat while fishing. With its notched dorsal fin and elusive nature, some believe it was a unique species, while others think it might have been an injured Amazon river dolphin.
Wade, after witnessing it again and being able to photograph it on his second expedition out there, confirmed it was a dolphin, perhaps mutilated by fisherman…
I was reminded of this little legend on Reddit , if you’d like to keep up with the conversation on it over there here is the link…
In the late 1960s, a Soviet historian became fascinated with reports of a giant ape-like beast roaming the mountains of Central Asia. His obsession led him to develop an elaborate theory that these sightings were not of a mysterious cryptid, but of surviving Neanderthals who had endured since the last ice age.
Born in 1905, Boris Porshnev was a Soviet historian who dedicated much of his career
to studying mainstream academic topics, like popular uprisings in 17th-century France and the Thirty Years’ War. However, his scholarly pursuits were later peppered with an unorthodox interest in cryptozoology, especially the strange reports of the so-called Almas.
For centuries, reports of the Almas have emerged from people living within the mountain system of Central and East Asia, including Mongolia, the Altai and Tian Shan Mountains, Xinjiang, Gansu and Qinghai in China, and the Tuva Republic in Siberia.
As reports continued to surface, Porshnev secured approval from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the 1950s to formally investigate the Almas. In 1958, he led an expedition to the Pamirs of Tajikistan, accompanied by a team of folklore experts, geologists, and botanists. After collecting a load of anecdotal reports about local sightings, the commission compiled a 400-page report on the topic, concluding that the Almas was most likely real and residing in the region between the Tian Shan, Pamir, and Mongolia.
After the expedition, Porshnev began to suggest that the Almas were, in fact, a living Neanderthal. He had flirted with the idea in previous publications, but it was most explicitly laid out in his 1974 book called L’Homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant (French for Neanderthal Man is Still Alive), co-authored with explorer and prominent cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.
“One must say that Porshnev and I were both quite convinced of the existence of wild hairy men in the broadest and loosest sense,” Heuvelmans wrote in the intro to Porshnev’s other book, The Struggle for Troglodytes.
“However, there was a point on which we never managed to agree: I saw the Himalayan snowman as an anthropoid ape while Porshnev saw an actual human, more specifically a Neanderthal man survivor from the recent Pleistocene,” he added. Fossilized remains of the extinct hominin species have been uncovered in this part of world.
But what do you think about his theory? I have always been on a line believing more that what ever this creature turns out to be, they have likely been here along. After all we know now thanks to more recent findings that several different types of hominids were existing side by side, might the infamous cryptid wandering out forests be one of them. I think yes. Man? Ape? Something in between most likely.
Maybe some day we’ll know for sure, hopefully in our lifetime…
Have a great day everyone and please I’d love to hear your thoughts…
Sasysquatchgirl 