DALE DRINNON WRITES

As you may have noticed, we have been having a very weird (not to say a mightily peculiar) weekend. Also, for reasons known only to the Gods of cyberspace, Dale Drinnon is finding it hard to log into Google in order to make comments, so we are posting his comments on Friday's bloggo here, as they give much food for thought.

Hi there again

As you and Richard should already know by now, I fully diasgree with him on the zoological identity of some of these crocodiles and I am holding out for possible new species. Furthermore, it seems to me that both the Nile crocodile and Indopacific crocodile are composite categories containing more than one species: the shapes of the skulls of specimens in both categories varies severely.

In the case of the Mediterranean crocodile, its head is supposed to be shaped more like an alligator's head and it is sometimes unusually large. There is also a crocodile river in Turkey and reports from the Tigris-Euphrates, but those might also be Indopacific crocs. In the case of the marine sightings, not only are the sighted crocs bigger than the usual Indopacific crocs, but they are seen much further out to sea and their pattern of swimming in deepsea is different. Also they cannot account for all supposed mosasaur reports mostly due to the difference of texture in the scaly covering. Some of the Mosasaur reports are of huge creatures; a hundred feet long or more. We have discussed these matters in this group before. Oddly whenever I sent you this information on earlier occasions it turned up missing and you never got it.

The thunderbird report is interesting. Some of the reports may be unsuspected California Condor sightings: there are rumours of unconfirmed condor colonies in Norther Mexico (Nordamericano experts discount such reports)

Let me know if you hear of anybody bothered by killer haemorrhoids in the next week. Ta.