TONY LUCAS: How do you prove a Negative?

I've got to be honest: how often do you hear witnesses say, when reporting their finds, "it maybe it's the last of its kind"?


Now, in New Zealand this phrase could quite possibly never be truer. Each year reports become fewer and fewer, and a lot of of the older generation clutch these memories with dread and fear as if admitting they had witnessed something that would cast derision on their validity as a man. It's all very well to prove something exists if it is already there: sightings, physical evidence, photos etc.

• But what if it is not?


• What if it is already dead and extinct?


• Is there such a thing as a Paleo-cryptozoologist?
  
  

To date there are no photographs of any of New Zealands cryptids unless you count Mr Freaneys moa (?) photo; no plaster casts or other physical evidence. So what do we have? Often third-hand accounts, reluctant witnesses, suspicious indigenous people who know tales but refuse to pass them on. Well, you say, look further afield. Well, my reasons for my research were not for money, personal power or anything like that; it was for national pride - our people need to know this hidden part of their heritage, a part very much extinct I fear and will be lost to the mists of time as just another rumour.