Macaques and other mysteries

A few days ago, a barbary macaque which up until then had lived quite contendedly in Blåvand Zoo (Blåvand is the westernmost town in Denmark in case you should wonder), suddenly decided, that enough is enough and scarpered. This was in many ways an ill-considered move by said itchy-footed monkey. First and foremost because it has been teeth-chatteringly cold in Denmark lately, with nighttime temperatures hovering around the -15°C  mark and lots of snow, which almost certainly will translate into a miserable time for said macaque. Secondly and thirdly because the zoo was not keen on losing one of their animals, and nobody was particularly keen on having a teeth-wise heavily armed monkey on the loose – barbary macaques are known for their crankiness. The animal was spotted a couple of times in the general area, shortly after its escape, but all has turned quiet now, and there is only the occational glimpse of the thing. It is probably sheltering in a stable or a barn somewhere, waiting for things to get better, and possible for the chance to scare the living daylights out of the owner of the place.

This is not the escapee by the way - its just another barbarymacaque to give you some idea of the culprit.

I await the outcome of the great escape with bated breath – not hoping for at shooting, and if so, with nothing heavier than a tranquilizer-gun. In the meantime, it has inspired me to delve into the depth of my files to what else has been going on in that same general area, ’cause if memorys serves, it is a place of some strangeness. The local lighthouse is haunted, there is a large military training area nearby, which has been connected with several ufo sightings, and the inevitable conspiracy/cover-up/fooling the public theories, and to the immediate south is a large peninsula called Skallingen, where a number of rare and extremely rare birds – even a couple of firsts for Denmark – has been seen. And then of course, there is things of a more cryptozoological nature.

In the middle of the 1980’s this general area was a hotbed of sightings of the so-called ”Jyske Puma” (The Jutland Puma”). It was to all extent and purposes a typical cat-flap. Lots of sightings of a big, brown, short-legged cat with a small head and small ears and a long tail. There was a lot of talk as to where the thing was coming from – an escapee from a small derelict zoo in the other end of Jutland, somebody’s unmanegable and illegal pet or just hogwash and general rubbish. To add to the confusion, a local family, who had a pet serval, wrote a book claiming their animal was the reason for the sightings, as it had escaped and was out and about on its own for a rather longish period before it was recaptured. The only thing wrong with this theory is that servals are only medium sized, spotted, with long legs, very large ears, and a rather short tail.

And in between all that, a handful of sightings of wolves managed to slip under the radar – or at least was never published in any of the local newspapers. Which is kind of interesting considering the 2012 official recognition of wolves having reestablished themselves in Denmark (although some people in the general western area of Denmark are still convinced that the wolves have been deliberately released by left-wing, radical environmentalists from Copenhagen as an experiment/insult to the locals/attempt to destroy the local way of life/attempt to scare the locals away so their properties will be up for sale cheaply – take your pick).

A wolf doing its best to look like it is up to something.

Anything else? Well, there is a couple of sightings of sea-turtles, and one or two strandings as well. A family of German holidaymakers claimed to have seen a great white shark a few years back – although it was probably a basking shark, as they said the animal kept sticking its nose out of the water. And a bunch of drunken birdwatchers sometime in the 1970’es sent in a description to the Danish Rarities Commitee of a sighting of father Christmas flying past with his reindeer and all the trimmings – for some strange reason it was rejected J Oh yes – and it’s a nice place for a holiday, and you have a good chance of finding a piece of amber.

The strangest sighting of them all though, came from a guy who grew up in the area. When I talked to him sometime in the 1990’s (I was giving a lecture on a school in the town of Esbjerg a bit further south), he described how he had seen something resembling a large crocodile come in to shore very late one evening in the middle of summer sometime in the early 1960’s when he was a boy. The animam, which he thought was about 15 meters in length, dragged its vast bulk up onto the sand, lay there for a few minutes, got up again, walked along the water’s edge for a couple of hundred meters, and then veered off, and disappeared into the water again. He never saw it again, and he never heard of anybody else who had seen it – and 30 years later he was still very clearly marked by his experience. I have no idea what he actually saw, but it sure did scare him.

The moose is back - and this time they mean business!

Inspired by the fact that on November 19th. five young Swedish moose arrived in Denmark, and is now galliwanting, or whatever it is you call the rather peculiar gait of a moose, around in a very big enclosure in Lille Vildmose in Northern Denmark awaiting the day next spring, where they will be set free and become the first officially sanctioned wildliving moose in Denmark for about 5000 years. 

I use the words ”officially sanctioned” very carefully because there has been a number of cases where said large member of the deer tribe, has taken it upon itself to turn up in Denmark under its own steam, thus making a mockery of the 5000 years. Most people have no idea – and if you look a the general build of the thing, who can blame them – that moose are in fact excellent swimmers. The are not exactly sprinters, but they have incredible strenght and stamina, and they can even dive and swim under water for considerable distance and for several minutes on end. In fact I am quite convinced, that a large proportion of lake monster-sightings in the Northern Hemisphere are in fact sightings of swimming moose – but that’s an entirely different story.

Whereas Denmark lost its population of moose several thousand years ago, the Swedish population is big and healthy and has apparently been so for a very long time. So every now and then a moose takes it upon itself to swim from Sweden to Denmark. Nobody really knows why this happens, whether it is deliberate, or whether an animal simply gets disoriented and ends up in swimming in the completely wrong direction. It happens to migrating birds all the time, so why not moose? It doesn’t really matter how or why – it is a monumental feat. The shortest distance between Sweden and Denmark is 4 km, but that is between the towns of Elsinore and Helsingborg, an area with a lot of sailing activity and very powerful currents, and nobody has ever seen a moose in this area. So we are in fact probably talking about a swim of at least 6 or 7 km.

Some never make it of course – in a couple of instances, dead moose have washed ashore in Denmark, but some make it, generally landing on the North coast of the island of Zealand, somewhere west of the town of Elsinore. This in a fairly thinly populated area with a lot af agricultural land, and a fair selection of wooded areas, one of which, Grib Skov, if in fact one of the two biggest forests in Denmark. So it is basically a very suitable area for a moose.

The first and most successful one landed in Denmark in 1933. It managed to live in Denmark for no less than 18 years, most of the time around the village of Nødebo which is located more or less in the centre of the afore mentioned Grib Skov. After some years it was so used to people, that it would turn up in the middle of the village and eat the vegetables from the greengrocers’ boxes and the flowers in people’s gardens. Since then, there have so far been 5 others, and one that was bought by a Danish newspaper and released in the same general area a year after the first one died in 1951, in the hope of recreating the popularity of the first moose, which had turned into quite a tourist attraction.

That one had to be recaptured within a few weeks, because it was making a nuisance of itself. It was sent to a zoo, where it unfortunately died soon after. It didn’t work out to well for the other ones. One of them, a very large bull had to be shot, two of them had a rather messy end following an all to close encounter with respectively a car and a train, one simply vanished, and one was found sick and dying in the forest.

According to Swedish authorities, a few others have actually tried to swim across, but have been stopped before they got more than a few hundred meters away from the Swedish coast, and brought back to the safety of their homeland.

And then of course, there are the ones lurking in my files – there has been a few other sightings of moose in the same general area, one as far back as 1897, but they have never been confirmed in the same way as the others, although I do know of a couple who have in their possession a set of massive moose antlers, and they are adamant they are from an animal shot by the lady’s grandfather near the town of Roskilde sometime during the First World War. Oh – and a few years ago a dead moose washed ashore on the North coast of the island of Bornholm, the extreme Easternmost island in Denmark. That one must have tried to swim from the South of Sweden.  but probably drowned from exhaustion – it is after all a swim of at least 50 km.

And then we have the newcomers – who knows, in a few years time we may have a permanent population of moose in Denmark, and I for one am looking forward to it. Meeting a moose in the wild is absolutely magical. I have heard blackbirds making more noise turning over leaves on the forest floor, than a moose silently drifting through the forest.

What is this feline I see before me?

There are times when I wonder what is going on in my tiny little country. Now is one of them – not only has the entire government lost their collective minds (if indeed they have ever had them) – but the nature has lost its as well, even the cryptozoological ones. First there was the wolves, then there was the golden jackal, and now it seems we have to consider the puma as well.

Not that alien big cats are a completely unknown entity in Denmark, far from it, but this new case seems to take the biscuit as it were (cat biscuit perhaps). In the last couple of weeks people in northern Germany, specifically in the area north of the town of Flensburg, have claimed several sightings of a big brownish cat with a small head, a long tail and rather short fat legs, in other words a puma. German police have been out looking for the thing on several occasions, but have as yet not found anything – one do get the impression though, that they are not taking the whole thing to seriously (yes, they do have a sense of humour!).

Nevertheless, seen from the Danish side of the border, it is fairly interesting, not the least because several of the eyewitnesses have seen the animal almost at the border, and in two cases actually coming from Denmark and moving towards Germany.

It is in areas like this in Northern Germany and Southern Denmark, the alleged puma is running around.

An escaped animal no doubt, but from where – and in actual fact, how many – because not long after this story broke in the newspapers, Danish eyewitnesses started coming out of the woodwork or wherever these people are hiding, and telling me about several sightings in the same area in 2014 (and in 2013, 2012, 2010 and 2008 if the stories in my files are anything to go by).

Unfortunately the scaremongers crawled forth as well from whatever rock they usually hide under (one of them sadly the director of one of the biggest zoological gardens in Denmark) and started screaming at the top of their lungs about what a dangerous animal a puma was (try telling that to the millions of people in North- and South America who live quite happily along side pumas, in many cases without ever knowing it). All we need now is some local hick politician wanting to arrange a hunt to protect women and children from the fearsome predator.

I for one would suggest a couple of deep breaths and a calming something. First of all, it can well be a puma, in that case no doubt an escapee from some idiot who has kept it as a pet in his garage, or from some small animal park somewhere, who is afraid to admit that they have lost one of their animals fearing damage responsibility and what have you.

But – it may not be anything at all. People are so easily led to believe things, to see things, to hear things, just because they have read a scary story in a newspaper somewhere. Some years ago I was called in  to have a look at a lion that had been lying out in a field for several days. Everybody in the area had worked themselves up to borderline hysteria, but hadn’t called in the police because they feared ridicule. In hindsight that was a good idea, because it turned out the lion was a very large brown paperbag. But everybody was so convinced it was a lion, that even people with binoculars saw nothing but a lion, when they looked at the thing. Myself, and a friend I brought with me, recognized the paperback at once because we were not as completely worked up as the local people.

As for this new puma, there are no pictures so far, apart from one taken with an old mobilephone from such a long distance it could be anything – and no domesticated animal has been killed, as far as anyone knows. All I need is a hair!!!

There shall be beetles and cockroaches

According to Bernard Heuvelmans cryptozoology is all about unexpected animals - large and small. Is doesn't have to be big scary monsters every time, so with that in mind, I thought I would report on yeat another couple of additions to the Danish fauna, and this time within one of my favourite subjects - microcryptozoology.

http://www.fugleognatur.dk/gallery.asp?mode=ShowLarge&ID=441934

The littlest ant-lover
October 25th. just one months ago, Danish entomologist Poul Ulrik was talking a walk at a place called Dybbølsbro, close to Copenhagen Central trainstation. Noticing a loose paving-slab, he turned it over and saw first of all, a large number of ants, but also in among the ants, a tiny 3 mm long cricket. On closer inspection this turned out to be of a specied called Myrmecophilus acervorum. Myrmecophilus means ant-lover, so the tiny animal was not just a piece of prey for the ants, but a voluntary inhabitant in their nest. M. acervorum has been found in the nests of at least 20 different ant species. It is fairly common and widespread in Europe, but has never been found in Denmark before. Until now, that is...

http://www.fugleognatur.dk/gallery.asp?mode=ShowLarge&ID=441888

150 years in the dark
And then we have this gorgeous thing. This is a tortoise beetle called Pilemostoma fastuosa, and in my humble opinion it could easily have come from a tropical forest somewhere. This individual was actually found on a beach in Southeastern Denmark on November 23rd. in the various plantmatter and other debris that had washed ashore following a stormy couple of days with water levels more than 1 meter above normal. This is not just a rare animal, this is a VERY rare animal. In actual fact this is the first time it has been seen in Denmark for more than 150 years. Just goes to show hos careful you have to be, when you deem an animal (especially a small one) extinct. It was found by naturalist Klaus Bek Nielsen, and it is far from the first time he has found super-rarities like this, but then again he spends most of his time sifting through as much leaf-litter, plant-debris, mouldy pine-needles and abandoned ants-nest as he can lay his hands on.

The days of the jackal

The first day of the jackal was the 6th. of June 2015, when a driver passing the town of Karup in Western Denmark noticed what he thought was a strange looking dog lying at the edge of the road. Intrigued the man stopped for a closer look only to ascertain two things – the animal was dead, but only recently so, and it was indeed a very strange looking dog, about fox-like in stature, but a bit bigger. The man considered leaving the animal to the crows, but on a whin decided to put it in the boot of his car and take it away with him.

So off he went, to the home of a friend who is an experienced hunter. He couldn’t identify the animal either, but he did have a large freezer, into which the animal was put. Next stage was the showing of said weird animal to various interested parties, none of which was able to identify it with any degree of certainty. It was clear that closer examination was called for. 3 months and various DNA-analysis and tests later came…

The second day of the jackal on Sep. 10th, when the people of Denmark was informed, that yet another large carnivorous mammal had entered the country. To some people it was a bit much, coming so soon after the official reappearance of the wolf in Denmark in 2012 after an absence of a couple of centuries. Anyway – as it turned out, the animal was a golden jackal (Canis aureus), and although its presence was quite a surprise, it was not totally unexpected. The jackals normal distribution range is quite a bit to the southeast of Denmark, but the jackal population in Central and Southeastern Europe has been growing in recent years, and as jackals are great wanderers, some animals had already been sighted far away from their normal ranges. Some has been seen in Germany, and a few brave individuals has even gotten as far north as Eastern Finland.

Strangeley enough I have received a couple of sightings of ”large golden brownish/grey foxes” from southern Denmark within the last coulpe of yeatrs, which I haven’t been able to explain. Well-  maybe I can now.

An then things got a little bit weird.

Because although it was fairly clear the animal was equipped in such a way as to be deemed male, it didn’t seem to have any testicles. Under these circumstances it could conceivably be a former castrated captive that somehow had escaped from somewhere.

So, time for a detailed dissection/autopsy to set the scene for:

(Pictures of the dead animal and the actual autopsy can be found at: http://www.vet.dtu.dk/Nyheder/2015/10/Guldsjakal-er-blevet-obduceret-paa-DTU-Veterinaerinstituttet?id=587cafad-8880-4570-9932-84f2a113066c)

The third day of the jackal, in fact October 20th, when it was finally announced, that the animal did indeed have testicles – they had just been knocked into the abdomen when the animal was hit by the car that killed it.

So in other words – yet another large mammal joins the official list of Danish species! Not bad.

The tales of two sets of tusks - and a little bit of unicorn lore

The unicorn must be one of the most wellknown, and dare I say legendary lengendary beasts. Much has been written about these creatures, and about how the stories of them originated, so I shall refrain from doing so again. Instead I will tell a little story or two about the narwal - this strange small arctic whale who has supplied one of the key ingredients of the story of the unicorn - the horn. Actually the tooth - the fronttooth of the narwal. This is long - sometimes very long - twisted and made of very hard and dense ivory.

What the whales actually use them for is a matter of debate. Some say they are the whale equivalent of antlers. Some say they are used to root around in the bottom of the sea for the various prey animals of the narwals. And some say they are simply weapons - or perhaps a combination of all three. What ever their use, they have been highly valued an indeed prized through the ages. Even today, where the superstition have been stripped away, a good size narwaltusk is worth a fortune.

So what am I actually getting at - well, the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen opened a new exhibition a couple of months ago. There is no zoological or biological theme to this exhibition. It is simply those specimens and objects that the people of the various departments of the museum thought extraordinary - and this is where the narwal comes in again. You see one of the exhibits is a narwal - incidently the strange name narwal comes from old norse, and it means corpse whale, which is not as bad a name as one might think, as a narwal does have a colour not unlike a corpse that has been in the water for at bit too long - an exhibit of an animal with two mighty tusks. Had this animal been caught in medieval times, its tusks could probably have paid for a mediumsized kingdom with all the trimmings.

Impressive looking beast if you ask me. But closer examination of the other narwal exhibits revealed something even more impressive, as the following picture shows. It doesn't look like much, but it is in fact no less than two different narwal tusks with the tip of two other narwal tusks embedded in them! How on earth that has happened, I have no idea. It must be the cetological equivalent of Robin Hoods famous arrow splitting. 

A bridge too far, or too little, or something... (A non cryptozoological interlude)

This has absolutely nothing to do with cryptozoology, but the story is too good not to be told. In the spring of this year, Danish authorities started to do a bit of refurbishing and general maintenance along the Gudenaa River - the biggest river in Denmark - north of the town of Horsens in western Denmark. The main purpose was to make it easier for the local population of trout and salmon to pass through this particular section of the river. One of the things that had to be done, was to remove an earthen dam that had almost completely blocked the river valley for more than 80 years. Nothing to strange about that, but then they diggers started...

The dam was not just a dam - inside it the workmen found a bridge, and not just any bridge. They found a 50 meter long and 14 meter high bridge, that "disappeared" 85 years ago. Until this year, it had officially been demolished, but no further details were known. Well, you know hos easy it is to misplace things...

A picture of the bridge, which has now been restored and is to be used by bikers and walkers in the future, can be seen here:

http://nst.dk/nyheder/2014/dec/golden-gate-rejser-sig-over-gudenaaen/

The official (re) opening of the bridge is next week, and it will from now on be known as "The Red Bridge".

Nice little Christmas surprise!!

No wolves, no trolls, only dogs!!!

As my last blogpost states, a dead headless young deer was found on Friday in a very popular deerpark/forest just north of Copenhagen. It created quite a stir, as it wasn't just killed. It's entire head and neck had been ripped off. Since wolves were officially added to the danish fauna in 2012, everybody has been a little jittery, so of course the newspapers went beserk with stories about whether it could actually be a wolf. And the conspiracy theorists started coming out of the woodwork suggesting that a wolf had been deliberately released (it is after all a deerpark which is completely fenced in) or that somebody had brought the dead deer from somewhere else to get things going a little. And by the way, it was not as I stated in my earlier post a young roe deer, but a young fallow deer. Anyhow - DNA-samples were collected, and the results are now in. The attacker was a dog, not a wolf. This of course has in no way deminished the attack from the anti-wolf lobby, who for some reason thinks a small handful of wolves are far more dangerous than any number of dogs. I am certain we haven't heard the last of this. 

And now for no particular reason - here is a crown photographed very close to where the deer was found :-)

Yikes!! There are predators on the loose just outside of Copenhagen!!!

Danish media are in a state of mild panic today following the find of a very dead roe deer in Dyrehaven, a very popular danish deerpark/woodland - in fact the most visited forest in Denmark. It is located just north of Copenhagen, and is used by hundreds, if not thousands of people on a daily basis - especially in summer. It is also home to a large deer-population that are strictly controlled by the authorities. You can find red deer, fallow deer, sika deer and roe deer in quantities. Although today it is in quantities -1, as a big roe deer calf was found killed.

http://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/samfund/farligt-dyr-frygtes-loes-i-dyrehaven/5350890

As the picture on the link shows, someone or something had basically ripped the deer's head off. The authorities are at the moment working from the assumption that the culprit is a large dog, although the actual kill does not confirm with a standard dog kill, nor for that matter with a wolf kill. DNA-samples has been taken, but the results will probably not be in until after the weekend. Until further notice people are being adviced to be careful should they meet a big stray dog in the area. The Danish anti-wolf lobby is of course already up in arms, wanting every Danish wolf shot, just in case it is one of them - nevermind the fact that the closest sighting of a wolf is some 300 km west of Copenhagen.

The loneliest spider

To most members of the general public, as well as newspaper reporters and other lower life forms, cryptozoology is all about hunting for monsters – and the bigger and more scary, the better. Every now and then, an alien big cat can be included, especially if somebody has been scared out of their wits, their dog has disappeared, or they are now to frightened to go outside. In a pinch, a supposedly extinct animal can be included, but there has to be something special about it, and of course dinosaurs are the best. This is all well and good, but they are also missing out of a considerable part of the action. Cryptozoology is about animals that are unexpected in some fashion. There is no size criteria involved. This is why I have become increasingly interested in what I have dubbed microcryptozoology, i.e. hunting for unexpected invertebrates and other forms of small fry. And the best thing is, anybody can do it. You could f.inst. do worse than spend part of your spare time hunting for a companion to the world’s loneliest spider (or maybe not the world’s, but then at least Denmark’s loneliest spider).

In 1904 Danish zoologist William Sørensen published a description of a new species of spider. It was called Lycosa danica (today Pardosa danica) and the description was based on the type-specimen, a female collected in 1883 in a place called ”Mols Bjerge”, which today is one of Denmark’s national parks, and one of the most species-rich places in the country. The animal Sørensen described was found ”at the foot of a sunny hillside with a dense growth of heather”. It is not a particularly small spider. Like many other species of the family Lycosidae it is a powerful and fast running hunter some 15 mm in length. There are 38 other species of Lycosaidae known from Denmark, and most of these are fairly easy to find and study. But not so danica. Apart from the specimen found in 1883, not a single other specimen has ever been found – anywhere. The original locality for danica is completely overgrown with juniperbushes and broom today, which might explain why it has never been found here again, but on the other hand, other parts of the national park are still heather-covered hills. But despite the fact that Mols Bjerge is one of the most intensely studied areas in Denmark – still no second spider.

I find it a bit hard to swallow, that the specimen Sørensen found in 1883 was the last of its kind, but it definitely seems so. But, small animals are good at hiding themselves, so it still may be out there and in fact living in completely different surroundings – the first one found was perhaps lost – who knows? The only certain thing is that a live specimen hasn’t been seen for 131 years. So what are you waiting for?

Goodness, gracious, great balls of... hair?

In the beginning of September I was contacted by a biologist from Skørping, a town in Northern Denmark, and she had a problem. She herself had been contacted by locals, who had found a number of rather strange flimsy balls of what at first looked like some sort of plant-fibres. All of them had been found in hay-bales when people had broken them apart to put in their stables and on, and now they were quite anxious to know what they were dealing with. There was in fact no lack of suggestions as to the actual nature of these weird balls: mouse nests, some sort of insect nests, algal balls, you name it. The only thing lacking was somebody suggesting they were of extraterrestrial origin. But none of the suggestions really fitted the bill, or indeed the ball. The balls were between 5 and 10 centimetres in length, too big for insects and too small for rodents of any kind, and besides that they had no defined internal hollow, as one would expect for any kind of nest, so what on earth??

After a little bit of mail correspondence the Skørping biologist agreed to send me one of the fibrous balls (no jokes or snide remarks please!), so that I could take a closer look.

When I opened the envelope, I found a flattened and slightly elongated disc of light brown or cream-coloured fibres that looked very much like hair, and indeed so they turned out to be, when I put them under the microscope. The hairs were quite short, rather stiff, only about 2-2½ centimetres in length, but very uniform in size, colour and shape. It took a fair while to tease the hairs apart and sort them, but it turned out that the hairballs consisted of horsehairs and cowhairs in roughly equal proportions with a smaller amount of doghairs, probably Labrador, thrown in for good measure. All of which, when I talked to the good people of Skørping, turned out to be consistent with the kinds of animals that had been romping in the fields, where the hay to make the hay-bales had been grown.

The only question was how on earth they had been formed, as they were clearly not made by animals. My only suggestion is that they were formed by the hairs of various animals that had been shedding their coat, and instead of catching on barbed wire and fence posts as one so often sees, when one is out and about. The hairs had blown back and forth across the fields until they had formed these weird looking balls, and where they had caught in the grass growing in the field, they had ended up in the hay-bales. Apparently some of the other hairballs did in fact have plant material caught in the, which would indicate, that my explanation is at least on the right track. But I would still be very interested to hear from anybody with a better idea, or with previous experience of the same phenomenon.

A lot of bull...

Since the wolf was officially entered onto the list of Danish mammals in 2012 after an absence of almost 200 years, there has been a lot of debate and discussions between people who see the wolf as something, vicisous, snarling and bloodthirsty that should be eradicated from Denmark as quickly as possible and other people who welcomes the wolves as a magnificent addition to the Danish fauna.

There have already been cases of farmers, especially sheepfarmers experiencing attacks on their livestock by wolves (they have all been compensated for their losses), and a couple of possible attacks on domestic dogs, but now there has been an attack that will probably get the anti-wolf lobby up in arms yet again. This time a 200 kg bull-calf has been attacked an partially eaten by a large or several large predators. A picture can be found here:

http://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/samfund/article5231702.ece

The general idea is of course, that wolves (or possibly dogs) are responsible for the attack, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you can't completely exclude a big cat. The rather neat way of killing smacks of feline methods. Dogs or wolves are a bit more messy when it comes to killing. But we shall know soon enough. Various samples taken from the dead bull calf has been sent away for DNA-analysis, and we just have to wait and see.

A nice bit of art

Cryptozoological art is not a subject I study on a daily basis, but recently a rather famous piece of crypto-art has come my way. I was contacted by a friend who works in Danish television who had been clearing out his office. These things happen every now and then - I even do something similar once every decade or so - and unusual things can be brought into the light on such occasion. And so it happened, that I was asked whether I would like to grace one of my walls with "a coulpe of sea-serpents". I didn't really know what to expect, but apparantly it was a picture that Danish television had bought many years ago, and now had written off completely - so it was either me or the skip. I agreed to give whatever it was a caring home, and sat back and awaited the next postal delivery.

A few days went by - and lo and behold - this arrived:

This is the rather famous courtship in Loch Ness, painted by sir Peter Scott, round about the time that he and some ofter researchers decided to give the Loch Ness monster a scientific name - Nessiteras rhombopteryx - which some clever clogs quickly pointed out was also an anagram for "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Never mind, it is a nice picture, and it now hangs on the wall in my living room. And in cause you should wonder, it is not the original, that sold as far as I know a couple of years ago at auction for a princely sum. But this is a numbered print, signed by the great man himself. I am quite pleased with that. Drop by some day, and I will show it to you.

Red hairs in the morning - and in a small glass vial

Those who were present at this year’s Weird Weekend in Hartland in North Devon in August, saw me on several occasions brandishing a small glass vial containing a tuft of long red hairs that I was going to analyse at the earliest possible moment – or so I kept promising everybody. Unfortunately other matters, such as making a living, kept elbowing their way to the front of the line, and pushing the vial and other small matters towards the back, so it has taken me close to two months getting around to it.

So first of all, what are these hairs, and how come they are now in my possession? It is a fairly long story, but I shall try to make it short. In 1991 I was working as a tour guide in New Zealand, and on one of the trips I worked with a driver a few years younger than myself. We became friends and have stayed in touch ever since. Last year he came in to a serious amount of money and decided to spend them on the trip to end all trips. Until then he had never been outside of New Zealand. So off he went, and in March this year he was in Borneo where some locals gave him a tuft of hair, telling him it was from an upright manlike ape that lived in the jungle. And he should have it because it would bring him luck, and they think he needed it, as he had told them he was planning to go around the world. Luckily he remembered my interest in all matters cryptozoological, so he sent me a sample of the hairs to have a look at – and those are the hairs I have been waving about.

The next part of the story is of course, what are they? The hairs are fairly coarse and stiff, with a deep reddish brown colour. In a microscope they look slightly faded, and I have a sneaking suspicion they are quite old. If you study the surface pattern of protein scales, quite a lot of them have been rubbed off, which is typical of old hairs. They are clearly primate, with hollows in the central part of the hairs and a fairly narrow cortex, and because of the colour there are very few species they can be.

Unfortunately there is nothing strange or mysterious about them – they are not from an orang pendek. It would of course be especially interesting if they where, as they are from Borneo, where the number of orang pendek sightings is considerably lower than in Sumatra where several expeditions, including a handful of CFZ-organized efforts have been looking for the thing.

Alas - when I looked closer of the distribution of the melanin and the various internal structures of the hairs it became quite clear that they are from an orang-utan. I can only speculate as to whether my friend was tricked and some orang-utan hairs was passed off as something more than that, or whether those friendly locals really thought it was something special. Since he didn’t pay anything, I think they really thought they gave him something special. 

The tale of the mouse in the bedroom

If you think this looks like a dead mouse in a jar, you would be perfectly correct. It is in fact a dead mouse in a jar, but it is not just any old dead mouse. It is in fact a dead spiny mouse of the genus Acomys, and once, not that many years ago, this spiny mouse was merrily skipping about along with a bunch of colleagues in a tank in the spare bedroom at the headquarters of the Centre for Fortean Zoology in North Devon. But – and this is where the plot thickens – as in so many others cases when it comes to animals in the pet trade, nobody knew for sure what species of spiny mouse this was. There are 21 different species you see, so it is not entirely irrelevant. As a matter of fact there are quite a number of species of animals in the pet trade, which have been known and bred for years, but still await formal scientific description and recognition.

Anyway, I digress, and we must get back to the mouse in hand… case in hand. Mouse – whatever! Once during a visit to the CFZ HQ, the spiny mouse became a subject of discussion, and I was given a hair-sample which I would study in an attempt to identify the exact species. This I tried to do on and off for several years, bit with absolutely no luck. I could not match the hairs of the CFZ mouse to any known species of which I could get comparative hair-samples. In the end I told the CFZ people, that if we should ever have any chance of a proper ID, I would need a complete animal.

So, more time went by, and one day, one of said mice keeled over and died, and a thorough examination was now possible. But it turned out to be much easier said than done. Some of the recognized species of spiny mice are so similar it is not always possible to separate them. A DNA-examination would of course solve the problem, but scientific grade DNA-tests cost money, lots of money, and we dearly hoped it would be possible to establish the identity of the mice without having to fork out large amounts of cash.

Alas it wasn’t – not completely anyway, although some very nice people at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen did their very best to help me. The mouse is either Acomys cahirinus or Acomys cilicicus, and that’s about as close as we are going to get, unless I can persuade a DNA-researcher that the mouse is of sufficient scientific interest to do a DNA-test for free. I happen to think that the mouse is in fact a hybrid of the two mentioned species, as I have never been able to match the hairs completely to either of the two species, although there are similarities in both directions. And hybrids are always interesting, although if the mouse had been wild caught, it would have been even more interesting. Under the artificial conditions of captivity, almost anything in possible.

The cows that didn't come home

The mystery of the dead cows (14 altogether) that have washed ashore in Denmark and Sweden during the last couple of weeks now seems to have been solved. There has been a lot of speculation about the case in the media, as the cows had their back legs tied together, the abdomen cut open, and their ears cut off. 

Closer examination of some of the dead animals only served to deepen the mystery, as they seemed to be very high quality animals, and at least two of them seemed to have been killed with a bolt gun.

A few days ago, an eye-witness came up with the crucial information that cracked the case. This man is the nautical equivalent of a trainspotter, and a couple of days after Christmas he had been out for a walk along the Kiel Channel in Germany. That day he saw a Lebanese ship loaded with cattle sailing through the channel. 

Police have later been able to track the ship to a Russian harbor where the ship was refused permission to land because they had about a dozen dead animals on board. The ship had been through some rough weather, and it is possible the animals were killed by the ship tossing in the waves or had to be put down, because they panicked and possibly hurt themselves in the process.

The theory is that the ship sailed back into the Baltic, and simply dumped the cows. The back legs were tied together to allow a crane to pick them up, the abdomen was cut open probably because the crew on the ship thought it would make them sink, and the ears (eartags) were cut off for the captain to be able to prove he had had the animals on board.

Unfortunately for him, dumping anything in the Baltic is illegal, so the authorities in Denmark, Sweden and Germany are now waiting for the ship to try and leave the Baltic again. And then it will probably be stopped, and the crew and captain prosecuted.

Here is a link to a danish tv-report on the cows.

http://lokalavisen.dk/section/xweb-tv/&id=7524

Cthulhu awakes! - or perhaps not...

During the last few days, this rather impressive photograph have started doing the rounds on the internet. It was sent to me by FB friend Margit From, who had found it on the website of The Lightly Braised Turnip, which we all know is a bastion of truth. They basically claim, that an enormous squid has beached itself on the coast of California, and that it was a result of radioactive pollution from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.

Impressive picture one must say, although the shadow under the creatures looks a bit iffy to say the least. Maybe because this squid had already beached itself in october 2013 in Spain. On that occasion it was considerably smaller, although the photographer by creative use of forced perspective did his best to make it look monstrous. This picture can be seen on the www.live.science.com.

All in all, a nice piece of photoshop work - but thanks to eagly-eyed FB contact Martin Relsted, I can also show you the original picture the squid was superimposed upon. In this case a picture from a whale-stranding in Chile in November 2011. This can be found, on among others the website of english.cntv.cn. This shows the roped off carcass of a dead whale and a large group of spectators, corresponding exactly to what we see around the monstrous squid.

So, a fake if ever there was one. And although I can only agree with the underlying sentiment, that the radioactive pollution from the Fukushima plant in an environmental disaster, this is not the way to highlight the problem!!

COW MADNESS

Strange things are a-foot (or should that be a-hoof) in little old Denmark (and in neighbouring Sweden for that matter) at the moment. 2014 have started out with a bona-fide mystery. It is not strictly cryptozoological as such, but it is rater weird.

Within the last week or so 11 dead cows have washed ashore in Denmark (3 animals) and in southern Sweden (8 animals). This is strange enough in itself, but upon closer examination of said cows, things started to take a rather sinister turn. All the cows had their back legs tied together, the abdomen had been cut open, and in case of the Swedish cows, their ears had been cut off.

People of a more paranoid persuasion have of course started muttering dark sentiments about secret government experiments, elements of the more extreme fringes of the UFO-fraternity have already started insisting on sightings of strange lights in the sky around the time of the cow findings, whereas Danish and Swedish authorities are considering whether it is a case of somebody, perhaps a ship in the Baltic, getting rid of sick or diseased cows and trying to cover their tracks by removing ears tags and so forth. They haven’t been completely thorough – one of the cows found in Denmark still had its ears – and a tag, so work is now being done trying to trace this tag. It is a kind not known in Denmark, so the theory is, it is Russian, or perhaps from some of the Baltic countries.

The Danish cows are to be examined closely at the Agricultural University in Copenhagen, where the experts hope to be able to ascertain the couse of death, and determine whether the cows had some kind of disease that would make it for example illegal to export or import them. 

Danish crocodiles

A couple of days ago Swedish and Danish newspapers were full of a story about how a raid by the Swedish police on a house in the outskirts of the city of Malmö in southern Sweden had yielded among other things a 2 meter long Nile crocodile stomping around in a greenhouse, and a similar sized, although dead reptile in a freezer in the basement. When asked about the crocodiles, the wife of a man suspected of running a major rencing operation, commented rather wistfully, that the crocodiles had been a gift to her husband, and that she was mighty tired of them, as she had hoped to use the greenhouse for other purposes. Having searched the premises, the police left with a number of suspected stolen items, but left the crocodile in the greenhouse for the time being. When asked about it, local police admitted they were at a loss, as to what should be done with the reptile. 

This rather charming story had me delving into my files, as mysterious crocodiles and other large reptiles have been seen from time to time, in and around Denmark and southern Sweden - rather surprisingly, as the reptilian fauna of the Nordic countries is small - the number of species is very low, and said species are definitely on the small side. Nevertheless - in the 1930's stories were being told of a crocodile in Ringkøbing Fjord, are large shallow bay in western Denmark. No trace of the animal was ever found, but some very large pikes have been caught in the same area, and they may be responsible for the sightings. 

During WW2 several large snakes were making themselves known to the general public in several parts of Denmark. To day I would without hesitation have suggested they were escapees, but in the 1940's keeping large boas or pythons as pets, were hardly the thing. So what were they? 

In the early 1960's a crocodile was sighted several times in Roskilde Fjord, a very long and narrow fiord stretching some 30 km northwards from form the city of Roskilde in eastern Denmark. And about 10 years later, a dead crocodile was actually found in the central section of the fiord. In 1976 yet another crocodile was found in roughly the same neck of the woods, so to speak, but in this case it was stuffed!!

The 1980's saw stories about an alligator emerging from Lake Vomb in southern Sweden, a lake also connected with several sightings of lake monsters. But, and this is most important, several of the sightings described a deep rumbling roar emanating from the lake, and in one case directly from the animal - the eyewitness even claimed the water around the alligator was boiling when it was roaring. Alligators are indeed very noisy animals, and the water around a roaring alligator does foam and fizz, so I wouldn't entirely rule out, that some idiot had put an alligator in the lake. In the 1980's more and more people were becoming interested in keeping strange and exotic pets, so it wouldn't be totally impossible. 

Round about this time more and more stories about large snakes started surfacing as well, but this was almost certainly escaped or released pets, none of which presumably were capable of surviving a Danish or Swedish winter, so they were never able to establish themselves in the wild.

The search for the truth - and a giant monitor lizard

I think it was Jon Downes, the illustrious leader of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, that once said something along the lines of "Cryptozoology is not the search for monsters, but the search for the truth" - a sentiment in which I totally agree, but since so much of cryptozoology, especially on the internet, is about people almost having the evidence for Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster of similar creatures, one could easily assume that was all there is to cryptozoology. And of the things that turn out to be quite ordinaryt, one hears almost nothing, so here is the cautionary tale of a giant monitor lizard that wasn't.

For many years stories about extremely large lizards have been coming out of the australian outback. And we are talking very large lizards, bigger even than the Komodo dragon which is supposed to be the biggest living species of lizard. There are quite a few stories about animals the size of a small truck, and sometimes even bigger. Australien cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy has been suggesting for years that these sightings are evidence of the continued survival of Megalania prisca, a lizard one could easily have mistaken for a small dinosaur. So imagine my surprise and excitement, when about ten days ago, I received the following picture.

This picture was taken in 1986 by a danish couple visiting Kakadu National Park. According to them, they were looking across a grassy plain, when what they thought were a fallen tree trunk suddenly stood up and walked away. To say they were surprised, would be putting it mildly. "I am quite sure the animal was at least one meter longer than our car (a Holden stationcar)." Now that is a seriously big lizard, and as one can readily see from the picture, it is a rather massive and powerful animal. So what are we dealing with here? 

Although I have been to Australia several times, and have seen various monitor lizards, or goannas, as they prefer to call them Down Under, I felt far from qualified to identify this animal with any kind of certainty. Instead I contacted the Australian branch of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, and asked them if they perhaps had a herpetologist contact that could do the deed.

They had indeed, and within very few answers an answer came back. As far as the herp man could see, bearing in mind the picture is not of the best quality, this was in fact a yellowspotted monitor lizard (Varanus panoptes), a rather well fed, and perhaps old individual - hence the rather dull colour, and as such nothing special. It is in fact a very common species in and around Kakadu. I myself have seen several of them, but all of them rather small individuals with far more prominent spots than this one. 

As for the large size? Well, my correspondents described that they were not just surprised, they were absolutely terrified, and in such a state, and when seeing an animal walking across a rather featureless plain, where you can't relly judge how close it is - it is extremely easy to exaggerate the size.

One day someone ought to do some research into how often and how much people misjudge the size of animals. 

Anyway - this is also cryptozoology!!!