At last we’ve reached the end of our menagerie tour. I hope you’ve been at the very least amused by these tantalizing tales of cryptid creatures and fabulous beasts. For those who find it difficult to give even a shred of credibility to these stories due to the microchip era that we live in, I offer you some things to ponder. Despite remarkable developments in technology, our planet is still vast and largely unexplored. Around three-quarters of the Earth is covered by an extremely deep-water environment that we know virtually nothing about. About half of the remaining land is wilderness area, essentially untouched by man. Consider all of the impassable mountain ranges, sprawling jungles and forests, remote swamps and deserts, and, not to mention, the expansive tundra. The potential for discovery is immense, and, indeed, discoveries have been made. In the last century, many megafauna animals including the colossal squid (confirmed in 1925), kouprey (1937), megamouth shark (1976), Vu Quang ox (1993), giant muntjac (1994), Perrin’s beaked whale (2002), and Kabomani tapir (2013) have been formally described by scientists. We still haven’t documented everything that is out there.
So the very next time you are walking alone along the edge of the twilight forest and something just out of sight begins to move, causing the brush to pop and crack, remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that our ancestors huddled around a fire in the darkness of night, anxiously whispering about a myriad of rare but monstrous creatures that one hopes to never encounter … The world is not such a different place today.