A 2013 book by Speculative Biology authors Tetrapod Zoology's Darren Naish, John Conway and C.M. Koseman, hot on the heels of their game-changing paleontology book All Yesterdays, The Cryptozoologicon takes their earlier work's premise of challenging the public's preconceptions of various enigmatic creatures that have captured the imaginations of generations of people with new speculative visions crafted with a strong grounding in biology, and turns it from extinct dinosaurs to the weird and wonderful world of cryptids: those elusive mystery animals, the Bigfootsnote , Nessies and many others unknown to modern science, sought after by a handful of intrepid seekers.
Each chapter of the book is divided into four sections: Firstly, some historical background on the supposed sightings of the cryptid in question. Secondly, what the cryptid is thought to be by the true believers. Thirdly, what people who know what they're talking about think it actually is. And finally, the part we all came to see: what the creature might be like if it actually existed. Explications of its behavior, biology, and how it may have come to be through a long process of evolution.
Naish and his collaborators make no secret of the fact they don't take most of the cryptozoological lore very seriously, but it is still a fascinating subject and a fun opportunity for some evolutionary biology thought experiments that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Volume 1 of a planned series is now available in both E-book and dead tree formats, with more volumes planned for the future, although Volume 2 is in Development Hell.
The mysterious and elusive tropes featured in this book include:
- Adaptation Species Change: Many cryptids are changed into different kinds of animals from what they're typically said to be; for example, the Beast of Gevaudan, typically claimed to have been a wolf, is said to have actually been a specimen of some undescribed form of gigantic mustelid.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Fookin' prawns the size of whales, mun! While living in the water would allow it to dodge the Square-Cube Law, the book is oddly silent about how an arthropod's notoriously inefficient breathing system would cope with the increase in size (despite mentioning this very problem earlier in the chapter). Then again, considering their own diagram points out how big it is, it's very likely they were taking the piss at that point, as if to say that the entire concept is so absurd that a whale-sized prawn is no more or less absurd than the "official" suggestions.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Both Bigfoot and Yeti get their own segments, as do a few other mystery primates. Interestingly, one creature that isn't a primate in the original legends (at least... not entirely) also gets re-imagined as one.
- Chupacabra: Depicted as a carnivorous opossum that hops like a kangaroo.
- Composite Character: The book makes a case that most cryptids are to a certain degree. One of the major criticisms of cryptozoology is that investigators often take numerous different (and often contradictory) eyewitness accounts, local legends and other anecdotes and try to combine them into a definitive conception of a single creature, often picking and choosing what they think makes the most sense.
- Demythification: Despite basically being the premise of the book, it also contains an odd inversion. Related to the above, Naish argues that many cryptids shouldn't be seen as real animals like many cryptozoologists expect them to be, but rather part of the mythology of various cultures. Perhaps Bigfoot isn't a primate, but a Jungian archetype representing the gulf between man and nature? Kelpies aren't carnivorous horses, they're ways for parents to impress the danger of deep waters and strange animals on their children. Still, it's fun to imagine what they'd be like if they were real.
- Expy: An odd example, but the reimagining of the Row cryptid, said to be a Mix-and-Match Critter of various Stock Dinosaurs, is instead speculated to be a giant, long-necked tortoise. This makes it an Expy of the Toraton, a gigantic sauropod-esque tortoise from the TV Series The Future is Wild.
- The Great Serpent: The South American cryptid known as the Minhocao is speculated to be an extremely large snake, rather than the Sand Worm it's usually depicted as.
- Green Aesop: A slightly tongue in cheek one, where the speculative sections often mention that maybe the reason nobody can find these animals is because humans keep driving them to extinction.
- Hellish Horse: The Kelpie (more a mythical beast than a cryptid, but why split hairs?) makes an appearance. Averted here as it's not actually a horse, it just looks like one from a distance.
- Hive Queen: The Megarods produce countless tiny "worker" Rods, whose only job is to feed them. They accomplish this by absorbing nutrients through their skin, in the form of various useful chemical particles and microorganism floating in the air, then being re-absorbed by their mother.
- Lemony Narrator: The speculative sections can get like this. The various headers as well, most notably: "Are Kelpies real? No, stupid!"
- Living Gas Bag: The aforementioned Megarods are gigantic, zeppelin-like arthropod relatives that live their entire lives in the clouds.
- Maniac Monkeys: The Goatman of Maryland is recast as a man-sized, possibly carnivorous monkey that has evolved goat-like, digitigrade legs for sprinting.
- Mythology Gag: One suspects that the authors only included the Californian giant salamanders (a very obscure cryptid that is almost certainly just an escaped or feral imported Asian giant salamander) so that they could make another reference to the infamous Homo diluvii testis
, a salamander fossil that was originally interpreted as the remains of a human who died in the biblical Flood. - Non-Indicative Name: Goatman is neither a goat, nor a man, he's a very big monkey. The Real Life Basilosaurus, a fossil initially believed to be a gigantic sea snake which later turned out to be an early species of whale, also gets a mention.
- Not So Extinct: Some cryptids said to be surviving specimens of prehistoric animals are examined. However, in most cases they get decidedly non-prehistoric origins, like the Row and Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu respectively being a tortoise and an amphibious fish rather than dinosaurs. The only true example is the Waitoreke, in this case speculated to be a descendant of the Saint Bathans mammal.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Deconstructed; the book speculates about how cryptids might be less mysterious, if conceived of as actual animals.
- Our Kelpies Are Different: Not carnivorous aquatic horses, but giant relatives of the water chevrotain. note
- Our Monsters Are Weird: Sea platypuses. Man-eating amphibious ungulates. Prawns as big as sperm whales. Invisible living zeppelins that use their disposable young as mobile mouths. Giant vampire possums. Aquatic sabertooth cats. "Real" cryptozoologists are positively sedate compared to Naish and co.
- Playing Possum: The Zuiyo Maru creature, widely believed to be the rotting carcass of a basking shark mistaken for a plesiosaur, is somewhat cheekily re-imagined as a plesiosaur that pretends to be the rotting carcass of a basking shark so that it can eat any scavengers that come its way.
- Pokémon Speak: Some of the cryptids, such as the Buru and Ahool, are said to be named for the sound they make.
- Prehistoric Monster: Mostly defied. Naish is not a fan of the ever-present trope of various sea monsters being plesiosaurs that somehow survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, because unlike most people he knows enough about paleontology and evolutionary biology to know how implausible it is. The speculative Zuiyo Maru creature does appear to be some kind of sea reptile, but that's mostly for the sake of the joke.
- Savage Wolves: Subverted with the Beast of Gevaudan, which is said to have actually been a gigantic mustelid mistaken for a wolf by terrified, ignorant eyewitnesses.
- Science Is Wrong: Frequently suggested in the sections from the perspective of cryptozoologists.
- Science Marches On: Discussed. Another big criticism of the "living dinosaur" paradigm is that the various stories about such creatures usually describe outdated, movie-inspired images of prehistoric animals rather than anything like what modern scientists have been able to reconstruct about what they really looked like. Cryptozoologists in general have an odd tendency to cling to discredited theories long after they've been proven false, notably Bernard Heuvelmans' assertions that the armor-plated Con Rit was a prehistoric whale, working off an outdated reconstruction of one that had already been debunked for decades.
- Speculative Biology: The book tries to re-interpret cryptid reports as plausible animals, sometimes resulting in creatures with very odd life habits and appearances in order to account for the odd and often inconsistent details of the original stories.
- Spoof Aesop: Quite frequently, the narrator declares that the fact that cryptids are now vanishing is proof that we need to support conservation to save them.
- Stock Ness Monster: Nessie itself is conspicuously absent from volume 1, though many other sea monsters are covered. A surprising number turn out to be mammals.
- Take That!: Since the speculative sections are written from the POV of stereotypical cryptozoologists, the authors don't pass up the chance to satirize some common attitudes in that community.
- They Called Me Mad!: The speculative sections often go into diatribes against "ivory-tower intellectuals" who derided the in-universe author's theories in an effort to stay true to the style of real-life cryptozoological literature.
- Threatening Shark: Alleged sightings of surviving megalodon are said to be the result of megalodon evolving to spend most of its time in deep water. Though they also suggest that it may have changed enough to warrant being classified as a different species, with the proposed scientific name Carcharocles modernicus.
- Values Dissonance: The rather terrifying De Loys' Ape is believed to have been the product of a now-discredited racial theory about Native Americans. The fact that one of the people responsible for the hoax later became a Nazi collaborator lends some pretty decent weight to this theory.
- Wicked Weasel: The Beast of Gevaudan is reimagined as a mustelid resembling a gigantic pine marten, with people merely mistaking it for a wolf.
