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.
Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...
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2 comments:
Hi Richard and CFZers,
Black foxes are no fantasy! I have seen one with my own eyes in Victoria, Australia, and we detailed their existence in our book Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers as a possible source of panther sightings.
The University of WA's Fox DNA Project was sent the same photograph that we used in our book of a jet black fox here: http://www.foxdna.animals.uwa.edu.au/
So as you can see, truth is once again stranger than fiction :-)
Funnily enough, we have a very dark fox in the North Wales village I live in (Gwernaffield, Flintshire) - I'd say it's brindle, though, rather than melanistic. A genuine black fox sounds cool, and I know their fur was sought after in the days when women wore fur - perhaps they were specially bred? What I'd really like to know is whether the fox-that-hides-in-your-shadow is genuine British folklore, since it is certainly new to me.
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