WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

News Brief - a CFZ trawl through the recent news

Graham's your news-hound today, so if you detect any slight Hawkwind overtones in the subject titles, don't be surprised...

The Elements that Gather Here...

Discoveries continue at the La Brea Tar Pits (Los Angeles) and I even like the name of their current news-making endeavour: Project 23. A prosaic name, but it appeals. Perhaps it carries echoes of Area 51 or Hanger 18, or whatever.

"...an endeavor of discovery and research so enormous that it could potentially rewrite the scientific account of the world-famous La Brea Tar Pits and their surrounding area....

"Most rare of all is a well-preserved male Columbian mammoth fossil, about 80% complete, with 10-feet long intact tusks found in an ancient river bed near the other discoveries. This latter fossil is the first complete individual mammoth to have been found in Rancho La Brea. In recognition of the importance of the find, paleontologists at the Page Museum have nicknamed the mammoth 'Zed.' "

Zed? Find out why, at Vast Cache Of Ice-age Fossils Uncovered.

In Here We Are

Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, is calling for new thinking on the search for alien life... right here on Earth. Has life has evolved on Earth more than once, a recent symposium has asked.

"We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life," he says. "It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses."

OK, then: you have been warned. More here.

Every Time I Go Out, I Think I'm Being Checked Out....

It's not only humans that are being computer-logged and monitored by the authorities. Now, it's bacteria too.

"A new website has been launched which allows scientists everywhere to collaborate on the identification of bacterial strains. This new resource ... provides a portal for electronic bacterial taxonomy."

Professor Brian G Spratt of Imperial College, London, says: "Bacteria are currently assigned to species by cumbersome procedures and every unknown bacterial isolate has to be compared to many others to find out what species it is. Our website functions as a kind of taxonomic wikipedia, allowing many hands to make short work of the entire process".

More on this here.

And on the CFZ front, we've just been donated a computer and monitor, so I'll be testing that out, this weekend.

I'll do a blogs news round-up tomorrow. Cheers!

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