Tales from the Crypt
There’s a name for the study of animals that may or may not exist. Cryptozoology. You can even study cryptozoology as part of a university degree in biology or zoology, so it’s serious.
It includes animals like the Loch Ness Monster but as Felicity points out in the book, if it was real it wouldn’t be a monster at all but a normal animal not so different from every other, except it’s not seen very often.
https://www.lochnesssightings.com/
Those who don’t believe in it say a million people visit every Loch Ness every year and every one of them looks for Nessie. To say nothing of all the official and scientific expeditions who’ve looked for it. (Or, as Felicity says in the book, Nessie’s not an ‘it’, but a ‘he’ or a ‘she’, and probably a ‘he’ and a ‘she’.)
But as they say on that website, more than a thousand people say they’ve seen Nessie. If only one of them was right …
It’s the same with the yeti, and yetis live in the highest mountains in the world, where hardly anyone goes.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/yeti-sightings
Even David Attenborough once said it’s possible the yeti exists.
No one knows exactly what these animals are, except the yeti is probably some kind of ape or gorilla, and the Loch Ness Monster is a fish or an amphibian, maybe even a mammal like a whale. But until someone finds one, we don’t know for sure.
And then there’s another group – animals that were definitely once alive, and died out, and then someone says they saw one.
The Tasmanian tiger is a good one of these. The last known one died in 1936 and it was declared extinct in 1986 but people still think they see them today.
There’s even photographs and film of the Tasmanian tiger, so it was definitely there once.
Every now again, an animal that was declared extinct is suddenly found alive and well!
Some of these are really small, insects and all that, but there’s a tortoise and a chevrotain, which is like a deer but only the size of a cat.
https://www.rewild.org/lost-species/lost-species-found
And get this. There was an animal, called a coelocanth (that’s pronounced seal-o-canth) that was thought to have died out around 60 million years ago, give or take the odd million years. It lived at the time of the dinosaurs and there were fossils and all that.
And then someone found one alive!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth
So if an animal can last all that time without anyone seeing him or her, the yeti, Nessie and the Tasmanian tiger have really only been missing for not very long at all.
Come back to this page because we’re going to be putting links to all this sort of stuff when it appears in the news.