THIS BOOK EMERGED from our very different but complementary experiences and backgrounds in cryptozoology. For that reason, we chose to write each chapter separately and maintain our individual voices, describing our personal experiences in our respective chapters.
Daniel Loxton (
chapters 2,
4,
5, and
7) brings with him a lifelong love of monster mysteries and a sense of fellowship with all those who seek to solve them. He spent his childhood obsessed with cryptids—engrossed in the school library, planning his future monster-hunting expeditions, or passionately arguing with the other kids on the playground about the Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster. When he discovered the skeptical literature while in high school and university, Loxton learned about the other, lesser-known half of the cryptozoological story, but never lost the sense of curiosity and adventure that brought him to the topic in the first place. Today, he writes as a “professional skeptic” with a special interest in cryptozoology. In that role, he secretly hopes (or at least wishes) that some of those he critiques may turn out to be right after all.
Donald Prothero (
chapters 1,
3,
6, and
7 [all with contributions by Loxton]) approached this topic in a different way. He was one of those kids who got hooked on dinosaurs at age four, but never wavered in his determination to become a paleontologist. During his thirty years as a professional paleontologist and geologist, Prothero had to meet the hard-nosed requirements of the scientific community, according to which every statement has to meet the most rigorous standards of scientific scrutiny. In particular, the problems with creationism and its effects on science and education have been a major concern during his career. In his undergraduate education, Prothero learned the methods of field biology and ecology, so he is acquainted with the more rigorous approaches to understanding animals in their environment and the techniques and assumptions that modern field zoologists employ. Prothero’s background as a geologist and paleontologist in particular gives him a broader understanding of what the fossil record says and does not say, as well as how it counters the arguments of cryptozoology.
We did not attempt to make the book an encyclopedia of every known cryptid, since that would make its length prohibitive. Instead, we focused on a handful of the best-known and most-familiar examples because they require the most detailed treatment in understanding their history and debunking their myths. Most of the caveats and issues that apply to these creatures also apply to all cryptids, so discussing them all would be largely redundant.
Thus our approaches to the topic are very different, but both of us are guided by the rules of naturalistic scientific inquiry and a commitment to critical thinking and skepticism. As we point out again and again, such an approach is sorely lacking in most cryptozoological research, yet it must be applied to cryptids, as it is to the rest of science, if cryptozoologists wish to be taken seriously as scientists.