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...
Regular visitors to the CFZ will remember a large and slightly bad-tempered-looking terrapin who lived in a bathtub outside the museum. Sadly, Max found her dead in her winter tank the other morning. This is the end of an era because she was one of the last reptiles we had that came up from Holne Court in 2005/6. - the others have been re-homed or have died.
The Tibetan stories go that the larger Yetis are eating yaks preferentially and living up in the highest terrain. There is one name that Ivan Sanderson favoured for the Big Yeti and that was Dzu-Teh. His book says that means 'The Hulking Thing' but an alternative interpretation is that it means 'Yak-Bear', Dzo meaning the domesticated yak-hybrids the Tibetans usually raise. And so it should be spelled Dzo-dred. After some consideration, I still think that must be the Big Yeti for several reasons, a couple of them already noted in captions to the pictures. The main reason is that they can be reported in areas where there are no bears (Sanderson notes that in the book Abominable Snowmen, 1961, p. 323) they behave differently than bears, go to different places than the bears would go and do different things in a different way. They go uphill into the permanent snows when the bears would be going down and they kill yaks by breaking their necks, which is not the way a bear would ordinarily do it. And I have specific native artwork of the type on the triangular stamp from Bhutan, where an example is shown ripping a human victim in half, holding him above his head. Bears do not have human or ape-like shoulder joints and can no more get their arms up over the head and spreading them out any more than giant ground sloths could. Besides which, the creature is depicted as having the limb proportions of a gorilla.
So I still think the Dzu-Teh is the Big Yeti even if the name DOES mean Yak-bear, because in this case the word 'bear' is generic for 'Predator.' The word 'dred' CAN be used as bear in the specific sense, but it can also be 'varmint' in the general sense according to other sources. Furthermore, the usual term Meh-Teh as 'manbear' is the same term used in China and elsewhere, and translated as 'wildman' (but can even be used as 'Bear-MONKEY')
Yeti food - below, what Dale charmingly describes as `hairy little hamburger`..
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