From Legend to Zoology: Animals Science Once Doubted

Anyone who has argued about Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster has heard it: scientists once scoffed at the platypus, the gorilla and the giant squid, too. The zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1955 book, published in English as On the Track of Unknown Animals, helped found the field that came to be called cryptozoology, built much of his case on such examples. The word cryptid, coined in 1983, describes an animal that has been reported but not confirmed by science.

The examples are real, and they make a fair point: large animals have been discovered in modern times, sometimes after years of local reports that outsiders dismissed. But they also make a second point that is often skipped. Each of these animals passed from doubt to acceptance in the same way, through a body, a skin, a skull or, in the case of the giant squid, carcasses and eventually photographs and video, that anyone could examine. The stories below are worth knowing for their own sake and for what they show about the kind of evidence that settles a question.

When the first preserved platypus skin reached Britain from New South Wales at the end of the 1790s, it looked like a joke: a furry body with a broad, flat bill like a duck's, webbed feet and a beaver-like tail. Fake composite creatures stitched together from parts of different animals were well known in Europe at the time, and George Shaw of the British Museum, who described the animal scientifically in 1799, wrote that it was hard not to suspect some deception. A story that he took scissors to the skin looking for stitches is often repeated. Shaw nevertheless concluded that it was a genuine, previously unknown animal.

The arguments were far from over. For much of the nineteenth century naturalists debated how to classify such a creature, and whether it laid eggs, as Aboriginal Australians had told settlers it did. The question was settled in 1884, when the zoologist William Caldwell found a female platypus with an egg in Queensland and announced by telegram that monotremes laid eggs. The platypus is now understood as one of the few surviving egg-laying mammals, along with the echidnas. Its lesson is that a strange body can still be a real one, but it took a body to settle the matter.

Around 1890 the explorer Henry Morton Stanley wrote of a donkey-like animal that people in the Congo forest had described to him. About a decade later Sir Harry Johnston, then the British commissioner in Uganda, followed up the reports. He never saw a live animal, but he obtained strips of striped skin, which went to London and were first described in 1901 as a possible new kind of horse. When a complete skin and skulls arrived later that year, they showed the animal was something else entirely: a forest relative of the giraffe, now named the okapi, Okapia johnstoni. It lives in the rainforests of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it had been unknown to Western zoology until the twentieth century.

Gorillas themselves had been formally described by Western scientists only in 1847, from skulls collected in what is now Gabon. The larger mountain gorilla of central Africa's Virunga volcanoes went undescribed until October 1902, when a German officer, Robert von Beringe, shot two on the slopes of Mount Sabyinyo; the animal was named Gorilla beringei in 1903. Both stories began with local knowledge that outsiders had not taken seriously, and both ended with specimens that any zoologist could examine.

Coelacanths are lobe-finned fish known from fossils hundreds of millions of years old, and their fossil record ends about 66 million years ago, around the time the last dinosaurs died out. Scientists assumed the coelacanths had vanished then too. In December 1938 the skipper of a trawler working off the mouth of the Chalumna River in South Africa contacted Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the museum in East London, who had asked fishermen to show her unusual catches. The large blue fish with fleshy, limb-like fins was unlike anything she knew. She sketched it and wrote to the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith, who recognized it as a living coelacanth and named it Latimeria chalumnae, after her and the river.

It took fourteen years, and a reward notice circulated along the East African coast, before a second specimen turned up in 1952 in the Comoro Islands, where local fishermen had been catching the fish occasionally all along. A second species was found off Sulawesi, Indonesia, in 1997 and 1998 and described in 1999. The coelacanth is often called a living fossil, although the living species are not identical to their ancient relatives. Its lesson is that the deep sea can hide large animals and that, once again, the proof was a fish that scientists could examine.

Tales of the kraken, a sea monster said to be big enough to be mistaken for an island, circulated in Scandinavia for centuries, alongside reports of huge many-armed creatures washed ashore. In 1857 the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup drew on those reports, and on a large beak from a stranded animal, to describe the giant squid scientifically as Architeuthis. Over the following decades carcasses washed up, most famously in Newfoundland in the 1870s, and dead or dying specimens reached museums. The living animal, at home in the deep ocean, stayed out of sight.

That changed only recently. In 2004 the Japanese zoologists Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori photographed a live giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time, with a camera lowered to about 900 meters off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo; the images were published in 2005. In 2006 Kubodera's team filmed a live giant squid brought to the surface, and in 2012 a team including Kubodera, Edith Widder and Steve O'Shea filmed one in the deep from a submersible, using a lure that imitated a glowing jellyfish. In 2019 a camera system designed by Widder recorded one in the Gulf of Mexico, the first seen alive in U.S. waters. An animal accepted from carcasses for about 150 years had finally been watched alive.

Discoveries of large animals have not stopped. The saola, a forest-dwelling relative of cattle, was discovered in 1992 in the mountains along the border of Vietnam and Laos, first from horns found in hunters' homes, and new species of deep-sea animals are described every year. The world clearly still holds surprises, and some local reports that outsiders dismissed have turned out to be right.

But the comparison with Bigfoot or Nessie breaks down at the decisive point. The platypus, the okapi, the mountain gorilla, the coelacanth and the giant squid were all confirmed through physical remains that could be obtained and examined, and several were known from skins or carcasses before scientists ever saw one alive. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster have been searched for intensively for most of a century with modern tools, from sonar to DNA sequencing, and have yielded no bone, no carcass and no genetic trace. The animals science once doubted are a good reason to keep an open mind about the unknown, and an equally good reason to ask the question that settled every one of them: where is the body?