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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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Sunday, September 20, 2009

DALE DRINNON: Surviving Megaloceros

Dale started at IUPUI hoping for a degree in Biology before changing to Anthropology and as a result, has a very diverse background in Geology, Zoology, Paleontology, Anatomy, Archaeology, Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Latin, Popular Culture, Film criticism, Mythology and Folklore, and various individual human cultures especially mentioning those of the Pacific and the Americas.

He has a working knowledge of every human fossil find up until his graduation and every important Cryptozoological sighting up to that point. He has been an amateur along on archaeological excavations in Indiana as well as doing some local tracking of Bigfoot there. Now he is on the CFZ bloggo....







Back in the days when the ISC was still publishing CRYPTOZOOLOGY, there was some speculation that the large-antlered Scythian Deer from Classical-age artwork represented a survival of the "Irish Elk", Megaloceros. George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures (2002) has an entry on this and notes that a late survival of the same type in Central Europe was possibly what was called a "Shelch."

While going through a site containing illustrations of petroglyphs from the High Altai mountains of Mongolia, I found some more representations of what look to be the same thing.

It sure looks like an Irish Elk to me.

The petroglyphs are from Neolithic to Sarmatian age, and so if that is what these petroglyphs represent, we have an indication that Megaloceros survived around Mongolia up to the Roman period at least.

2 comments:

Ego Ronanus said...

The German epic poem Nibelungenlied (13th Cent, but dealing with events in the early Middle Ages) mentions an animal called a schelch, which some commentators think may have been the Megaloceros)

Retrieverman said...

According to legend, Irish wolfhounds once coursed a species called a selg or "Irish elk," which may be a cognate with the German word that Ego Ronanus just mentioned.