OLL LEWIS: 5 Questions on… Cryptozoology

For a new series of articles for the blog I’ve turned question master and I’ve started sending out questions to the great and the good of the CFZ and our friends. I’m sending them out in alphabetically ordered chunks over the next few weeks and I really hope that most people who get the questions emailed to them will take the time to complete them as I’m really looking forward to seeing lots of really interesting and varied replies.

First of all, I’ll kick things off by answering my own questions. If you are picturing this being done in reality, to prevent the need for confusing time paradoxes, bi-location or some other form of jiggery-pokery to have me in two places at once, you can imagine me being interviewed by the ghost of Bob Monkhouse (hey, it’s my imaginary quiz; I can do what I like).

1) How did you first become interested in cryptozoology?

Not long after I had started school - I must have been around 5 years old - I saw a cartoon on children’s BBC called The Family Ness. To my 5-year-old mind this was a thing of wonder and much better than the other television shows I’d seen at this point, which usually consisted of shoddy puppetry (Orm and Cheap) or quite frankly sinister-looking men dressed up as dogs but fooling no-one (The Chuckle Hounds), so naturally I was hooked. I started reading at a very early age so by the age of 6 was a regular in the children’s section of the local library and the books I was most interested in reading usually involved monsters in some way, shape or form. I don’t recall the name of the book that I found one day, but it was one of those ‘unsolved mysteries’ style books aimed at children. Among the stories of UFOs, ghosts, Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer (yes, in a book aimed at the under tens!) the Loch Ness monster made an appearance. From that point on all hope that I would grow up to be a lawyer or an economist was lost, I guess.

2) Have you ever personally seen a cryptid or secondary evidence of a cryptid, if so can you please describe your encounter?

Yes, yes I have. As is the nature of pure dumb luck it didn’t happen when I was on an expedition or scouring the waters of some mountain lake, but when I went for a picnic with my step-grandmother to a local park called Cosmeston Lakes. Cosmeston used to be a quarry and the pit was filled in with water and environs landscaped in the late 1970s to make a pleasant and beautiful country park, but perhaps the last place you would expect to see something extraordinary. But it was there I saw an enormous dragonfly. The creature had a light brown body and a wingspan of around one foot; far larger than any dragonfly that should be around today, least of all in Britain. Being a biology student at university at the time I knew that I would have to be damn sure about this thing’s dimensions before I told any of my lecturers. Luckily the thing had been flying over some water hyacinth so I had been able to count how many of the plants it had covered and get a fairly accurate estimate of the size.

3) Which cryptids do you think are the most likely to be scientifically discovered and described some day, and why?

Afanc; Welsh water monsters that look similar to crocodiles and grow to large sizes. They are likely not crocodiles but rather giant pike. One lake reputedly home to these beasts since the dark ages is Llangorse Lake near Brecon in South Wales, where I obtained a photograph of an 18-inch pike skull. The pike would have been over 6 foot long.

4) Which cryptids do you think are the least likely to exist?

The water leaper or Llamhigyn Y Dwr is paticularly unlikely to exist due to the fact that it was a creative folklore creation invented by a chap called Han Owen.

5) If you had to pick your favourite cryptozoological book (not including books you may have written yourself) what would you choose?

It’s a tough choice between Karl Shuker’s Extraordinary Animals Revisited and Jon’s book Monster of the Mere. I’ll probably go for Monster of the Mere… If you’ve not read it I suggest you give it a try.

SCOTTIE WESTFALL (Retrieverman) TAKES A LOOK AT JON'S THEORIES RE. THE CHUPACABRA

http://wildlifemysteries.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/what-is-the-chupacabra-here-is-the-most-rational-explanation/



In what is rapidly becoming our favourite new blog, Scottie takes a long, hard, and sometimes critical look at the theories that Jon includes in his latest book Island of Paradise. Never let it be said that we don't post opposing viewpoints. It has to be said that his slightly different theory to Jon's has a heck of a lot going for it...

In a totally cynical attempt at raising a few more quid during the midst of the recession, you can buy a copy of the book at the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Paradise-Chupacabra-Retrievals-Accelerated/dp/1905723326/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242423022&sr=8-1

A Horny Rabbit

It was certainly one of the CFZ new girls who sparked this post. Dear of them..

Maybe it was Jan Edwards and her musings on the Horne'd bunny of Woolsery, or maybe it was Naomi and her wonderful reportage on jackalopes the other day, but I suddenly remembered that I had these two photographs in my collection.

They were taken in a funny bar cum museum in downtown San Antonio at the end of 2004, during my hunt for the blue dogs of Texas. Unless they are a fake, and I don't think that they are they show real jackalopes - a rabbit suffering from the effects of the papillomavirus .

This is a condition that has been much writen about in Fortean circles but seldom seen, and I am feeling mildly embarrassed for having taken over four years to actually make these pictures public.

This is a particularly grotesque museum exhibit, and I was particularly pleased to see it, because - again - I had only ever heard descriptions of the condition and never actually seen it for myself...

Enjoy.

HOW I GOT ARRESTED LOOKING FOR A BUSTARD

As regular readers will be aware, I am a fan of Sharon Stiteler over on the Birdchick blog. A few weeks ago she had a competition for guest blogger, and I entered the following piece culled from my 2004 book Monster Hunter. It didn't win, but I thought you guys might enjoy it...

When I was a little boy, in about 1964, my Grandfather used to take me to Salisbury Museum, to see the animals. In the foyer was a stuffed family of great bustards - enormous game birds the size of a turkey which had once lived on Salisbury Plain, but which had been hunted to extinction by the early 20th century. Grandad told me how a charitable trust had been formed to try and reintroduce these magnificent birds to the area. Sadly, this remarkable project had been a signal failure. However, at the time when I visited the museum first during the cold winter of 1963, the project looked as if it was going to be able to succeed, and I remember putting my pocket money, eagerly, into a collecting box for the project and daydreaming happily about the day when these glorious fowl would once again flying over the chalky downs and grassy hummocks of Salisbury Plain. Over 20 years later I am fairly sure that my childhood dream came true.

On this particular occasion, during the early summer of 1997, at the utter end of my mis-spent youth, my friend Richard Dawe and I was driving home to Exeter after selling a boxful of Led Zeppelin bootlegs at a Record Fair in Salisbury. and were driving back along the A303 past Stonehenge with nearly 200 quid nestling in my denim jacket pocket. In 1987 200 quid was quite a lot of money and we were feeling quite pleased with ourselves. I was mentally spending our profits when Richard suddenly grabbed my arm and shouted "What the heck was that??". He was pointing at the sky in front of us where a huge bird could be seen flapping along in an ungainly manner. To this day I am convinced that it was a great bustard. But how did it get there? The only successful breeding project had finally petered out many years before, and the birds had been sent off to a zoo. Conveniently ignoring the fact that I had promised to get back to Exeter in time to collect my wife from work, I explained to Richard how exciting this sighting could turn out to be and we determined to try and follow the bird to wherever it was going.

This was not such a daft endeavour as it might sound. The bird was very large, and was flying very slowly. Just to the west of Stonehenge there is a small coppice. Suddenly the great bird flew off towards the right hand side off the road and flew over the little wood. Just beyond the wood there is a little roundabout. Doing my best to emulate one of the heroes of Starsky and Hutch, I threw the little car up at the right hand exit and careered up the bumpy road in pursuit of the giant bird. We drove for miles, aghast at the stamina of the great fowl which fluttered in an ungraceful and unlovely manner but never seemed either to tire or to make any attempt at a landing. By this time we were so engrossed in our chase that we didn't realise how far we had strayed from our original route. Salisbury Plain is criss-crossed with trackways which lead for miles across the chalky terrain. Many of them are reasonably easy to drive along, and so when it was no longer possible to follow our quarry along the Orthodox roads, we left the road and drove as fast as we could along one of the chalk track ways. I have always thought that Salisbury Plain is one of the most beautiful parts of Britain. Brown hares ran across the path in front of us as we careered along. The little chalk track was fringed by foxgloves and yellow toadflax. Wild orchids grew along the verge, and every few miles, wherever there was a slight hillock, it was surmounted by a small green wig of tatty undergrowth from which, occasionally, a fallow deer could be seen furtively peeking out from between the bushes.

Still the great bird flew on. Still we drove on after it, quite oblivious of the Red Flag which designated an army firing range. It was only when we drove round a particularly steep bend in the track and found ourselves confronted by two armoured cars and a bevy of men wearing battle dress and brandishing machine-guns that I realised quite how much trouble we were in. "Oh crap", I said.

With regret I stopped the car and watched our quarry flap a way out of sight. As the soldiers glared at us I got out of the car to apologise. A fierce looking military policeman came up to us and demanded to know who we were and what we were doing. As I started to try and explain about the great bustard I realised how unlikely it sounded. The military policeman demanded to look in the boot of the car. As I opened it I remembered that not only did it contain nearly 1000 illegal cassette tapes but it was also that temporary home for two plastic machine guns - from a fancy dress party that we had attended a few weeks before - and a human skull wrapped in a plastic bin bag. I had found the skull in a pile of remnants from the days when the hospital where I worked had been used for teaching purposes. It had no doubt once belonged to a pauper who had died intestate in the old poorhouse and who, having no goods or chatels to repossess had ended up having his or her very body taken over by an uncaring state. A century after the long-forgotten pauper had died, his or her skull had found itself in a skip awaiting removal to the incinerator. After checking with that the powers that be I had taken possession of the skull, meaning to keep it as a memento morii, put it into the boot of my car, and promptly forgot about it. I gasped, and half-a-dozen soldiers raised their weapons and pointed them at Richard and me. I continued to bluster on about great bustards, until the grim looking military policeman threatened to arrest us if I didn't shut up.

Britain is probably the only country in the world where I could have got away with anything as stupid as this. Anywhere else in the world I would have certainly been arrested, charged, tried for treason and probably ended up in a secure mental hospital somewhere far beyond the reach of Amnesty International, and where I would probably have spent the rest of my days, and furthermore I would have been the only person there who wasn't sane. As it was, even at the height of the Cold War, British justice and common sense prevailed, and after confiscating the plastic machine guns, and giving us the worst dressing-down I have ever received, they accepted my story about the great bustard and let us go.

Sadly, the identity of the great bird that we had been following and which had nearly got us shot, remains a mystery. However, over the last decade and a half I have been collecting material about the great bustard project. Because, even now, people still occasionally see these birds, it is tempting to theorise that the ill-fated project was more successful than those in charge of it had thought. Because so much of Salisbury Plain is set over for use by the military, if there are indeed small numbers of these magnificent fowl still living there, it is the British Army who has provided a mechanism for their survival. It would be sad if a by-product of the downscaling of the British military in the wake of the end of the Cold War was the final, ignominious extinction of these beautiful and exotic creatures.

Jon at Uncon...

Last November we went to the Fortean Times Unconvention where much fun was had by all. We videoed several of the talks with the permission of both the FT posse and the speakers, and then because we were overtaken by events we completely forgot to post them up.

So here is the first one, and being an egotistical so and so, it is me, shamelessly plugging my new book, Island of paradise which you can buy HERE

THE MADNESS OF BUTTERFLIES IN ACTION

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/23/charles-rothschild-butterfly-auction

As regular readers will know, Richard Muirhead and I are working on a book called A Madness of Butterflies which is a psychotically environmental piece of historiography in which the two main themes are entomology and mental illness. It sounds awful, but I have to admit that the bits that we have finished so far are amongst the best things that I have written, and I am really rather pleased with it. I feel a little bit like Pete Townshend, though, trying to explain the plot of his (probably) never to be completed masterpiece Lifehouse to people when he had no idea what it was about either. This book is growing organically, and although we both knew some of the themes are we wanted to cover when we started the book, it has already turned into something completely different, and will no doubt metamorphise further in the months to come. It is only about a quarter finished, and with the amount of work on both of our plates at the moment, and also taking into consideration both his, and my, health problems, I sincerely doubt whether it will be finished this year.

However, we both work on it, as and when we can, and, therefore, I was not typically surprised, to receive the URL of a particularly interesting news story from Richard via e-mail. Charles Rothschild (1877-1923) was a deeply unhappy man. Not as well known as his elder brother Walter, the younger Rothschild was also an excessive naturalist, and natural history collector. The story in the Guardian sneered at how Walter "almost ruined himself financially by spending the Rothschild family fortune on his natural history obsessions", and went on to quote his great-granddaughter Hannah:

`She describes her great-great uncle as a "huge stuttering bear of a man" who kept the whole house - and it was a big house - awake with his thunderous snoring. His private life was evidently complicated. "He never married, though he did have two mistresses, one of whom bore him an illegitimate daughter, while the other blackmailed him for most of his life."`

The article goes on to admit that: "The scale of Walter's collecting is eye-boggling and now forms a significant chunk of the Natural History Museum's collection." However, even this, is said in a mealy-mouthed sort of way, interspersed with digs at Rothschild's sexual morals, and over spending. Indeed, the entire article is horribly reminiscent of a famous court case that took place in 1716 when the will of one Eleanor Glanville was challenged in the courts because - in the words of Moses Harris, usually described as the father of British entomology - "Some relations that was disappointed by her Will, attempted to let it aside by Acts of Lunacy, for they suggested that none but those who were deprived of their senses, would go in Pursuit of butterflies".

Obviously, or so the implication is that being overweight, having a less than conventional sex life, and snoring are somehow linked with his ridiculous aberration of natural history collecting. The silly buggers miss the entire point. Yes, the Rothschilds were capitalists right at the top of the capitalist food chain. They were also Zionists, bankers and all sorts of other things, but the pursuit of money was not the main focus of activities for either of the brothers. The main driving force in their lives was the obsessive study of the world around them, and through their years of toil and collection, they did far more for humanity than they ever did through their activities as capitalists.

However, not everybody sees it like this.

Charles Rothschild suffered from mental health problems about his life, and eventually took his own life in his mid-40s. Although the argument of nature versus nurture has been going on for millennia, and sees no real chance of being resolved, it seems likely that Charles's unhappy schooldays at the prestigious British boarding school Harrow were partly to blame. In later life he wrote: "If I ever have a son he will be instructed in boxing and jiujitsu before he enters school, as Jew hunts such as I experienced are a very one-sided amusement and there is apt to be a lack of sympathy between the hunters and the hunted."

Whilst at school both he and his brother started their lifelong interest in natural history collecting with a huge collection of butterflies. Charles even wrote a book called `Butterflies of Harrow`, and when he left he donated the huge butterfly collection to the school, in order to provide comfort and interest to lonely and unhappy boys. Just over a century later Harrow are selling it. The Guardian article seems to think that this is a perfectly sensible thing to do, after all "the butterflies aren't being studied at Harrow and it costs a lot to look after them." For a significant periopd of time (it does not state how long) the collection has been stored, and ignored, in a room in the IT department used to store computer equipment, and now, in the face of apathy from the school, one of the most significant butterfly collections left in private hands is to be sold.

Hitoshi Takano, a Harrow old boy and consultant for the sale, hopes the butterflies will be bought as a job lot - the estimate for the 27 May sale is £60,000 to £80,000 - and by someone who can keep them together and allow public access and study. But we all know that is very unlikely to happen. Like the sale of Walter Potter's amazing museum of curiosities a few years ago, it will be divided up in the name of finance, and flogged piecemeal to all and sundry. The wishes of the desperately unhappy schoolboy who eventually took his own life are nothing compared with the need to get a few more quid in the bank, and a bit more room in which to store computers.

In these pages, over the last few months, you have heard me and others bemoan the fact that children are actively discouraged from becoming interested in natural history pursuits. Surely, Harrow - one of our greatest public schools - and the alma mater of a large chunk of the British establishment should lead by example. Perhaps it is. Maybe the people who seem to have become the British establishment over the past 20 years know perfectly well what they are doing, and that this act of cultural and historic vandalism, whereby a butterfly collection of immense scientific and historical interest is being deliberately discarded in favour of more IT equipment which can be used to train the next generation of venture capitalists, so that through unfettered capitalistic greed they can cause the next cycle of boom and bust economics which has resulted in the current financial depression, is a deliberate and cynical act.

Harrow, being the training ground of many of society's leaders have missed out on a great opportunity. They have missed out on the chance to use one of the world's most significant collections of insects to foster environmental activism, and promote a world where the pursuit of money is tempered by a love of, and respect for the natural world, like that of Walter and Charles Rothschild, who's activities are described in one of my favourite books Living with Butterflies by the late L.H.Newman. They have missed out on an opportunity to repromote one of the traditional concepts of the ruling classes; that with power and privelige comes responsibility and duty, not just to people but to the environment. But these seem to be alien concepts in today's Britain.

And this would presuppose that the current British establishment know what they're doing, which in the light of events, on the home and world stage over the past two or three decades would seem highly unlikely.

OI FOUR EYES

The Anableps, known to aquarists as the four-eyed fish, is a small creature of the streams,rivers and estuaries from southern Mexico to northern South America. There are actually three closely related species of four eyed fish. Anableps dowi is found as far north as Mexico, while A. anableps and A. microlepis are found further south. These are not only one of my personal favourite fish but unusually for the fish I will be describing in this column it is one that can sometimes be seen for sale to private hobbyists.

Its name is sadly misleading – it doesn`t actually have four eyes, but the two it does have are so specially modified as to be unique within the animal kingdom. Each eye is divided in half horizontally with two separate optical systems, each with its own focal length. The top half is for seeing in the air; the bottom half is for underwater.

This fish swims at the top of the water with its eyes projecting partway into the air. The upper half of each eye can see threatening birds of prey in the air. The lower half, different in structure, can see underwater and enables the fish to find food.

Anableps are mostly found in brackish water where there is heavy algal growth and detritus, and they can withstand wide fluctuations in salinity. In recent years it has been noted that occasionally, Anableps will climb out on land and sit on the mud flats of tidal estuaries where it fulfills many of the same ecological roles as the mudskippers do in the mangrove swamps of Africa and Asia. They eat pretty well anything that moves and quite a lot of stuff that doesn`t, but if you are intending to keep these fascinating creatures as pets you should note that they are primarily surface feeders and will usually ignore food that has fallen to the bottom.

Although most of the emphasis upon anableps is on its peculiar eyes, these are not the only strange things about these singular creatures. Their breeding habits are, if anything, even more extraordinary. Anableps are internally fertilizing and viviparous. In other words, they give birth to live young and provide the embryos with nutrition throughout gestation However the cloaca of a female A. anableps is covered by a single large scale that is unattached on either the right or the left side. The rays of the anal fin of a male Anableps are modified into a tubular gonopodium that can only be bent to the left or the right. Thus, only a “right-handed” male can mate with a “left-handed female” and vice versa. Luckily for the survival of these gloriously peculiar fish the proportion of left-handed males in a population seems to be equal to the proportion of right-handed females . However, surprisingly, it has been reported that right-handed males (60%) are more common than left-handed males (40%)

Anableps are wonderful fish and apparently make charming pets. I have only ever seen them once, when Corinna and I were in Enfield following our near fatal car crash about 18 months ago. I had no way of getting them home so I didn't buy them, although I have been kicking myself ever since. I have often thought that they should be more widely kept and if this article of mine has done something in a small way to further interest in these delightful creatures then I shall have done something very useful for once in my life!

ITS IN OUR NATURE

Through the good offices of our old friend Dr Darren Naish, we have applied for, and been accepted onto the somewhat prestigious Nature Blog Network which is, as the name implies, a netweork of nature blogs. In one way I am very grateful to Darren for his kindness in thinking of us, but in another I am furious. This is just what I needed NOT!! Another distraction to take my mind off work!

This evening I have been supposed to be writing a piece about Charles Darwin to mark the bicentenary of his birth. Geoff Ward at the Western Daily Press who is a terribly nice guy, and who - incidentally - has a podcast of his own called Mysterious West which is never less than entertaining, always informative, and quite often features CFZ bods like me and Max Blake, commissioned it off me weeks ago.

But now, due to Dr Daz, I have found myself distracted by The Birdchick a blonde girl called Sharon, who has a mission to show the world that you can be a birdwatcher without being a geek. The fact that she is wearing a t-shirt proclaiming her as a `birding slut` was something that I found rather amusing.

Feral Thoughts is particularly interesting (note to self: remember to pass this one on to Maxy for reference in our alien animals project) because it is about the problem of feral animals in Australia. Any blog which tells of the adventures of Timmy the scat detecting Labrador has got to win my vote.

But there are dozens of others. Even as I sit here, late at night typing up a complaint about how much time I waste on the Nature Blogs Network I have found myself wandering through a whole swathe of fascinating blogs on a whole string of different subjects that interest me. Grrrrrrrrrr Darren. I may never do any work again.....

PS: Only joking

The Great Speciator

I have been keeping exotic species of animal all my life. At the age of six, as a small boy living in what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, I had my first zoological collection - a large praying mantis, (Tenodera sp) and some caterpillars which eventually hatched out into a small hawkmoth species, most probably (Macroglossum stellatarum) the hummingbird hawkmoth.

My zoo resided in two large glass pickle jars on the bathroom windowsill, and over the next few years it expanded dramatically.

Eventually I had quite a sizeable collection of birds of the air and beasts of the field, and by the time I was nine my tastes in wildlife had been solidified, and my animal collection would have seemed quite familiar to anyone who frequents the CFZ forty years later, in the first decade of the 21st Century.

Amongster the animal groups which I started keeping (and which I still keep today) were various softbills - “birds with relatively soft bills, which feed upon invertebrates and soft plant material and whose young are helpless at birth”. Amongst these were various babblers (see my post of a few days back) and a pair of white eyes.

These are small khaki-ish green birds with white feathers around their eyes. About the size of a robin, they are wonderful little creatures with great personalities (unusual in a flocking bird), but it was only today that I learned something particularly unique about them. form new species faster than any other known bird, according to a University of Kansas (KU) researcher who used modern genetic techniques to answer an 80-year-old question about how fast new bird species can form.

Some island-dwelling white-eyes have long been dubbed "great speciators" for their apparent ability to rapidly form new species across geographies where other birds show little or no diversification, said Rob Moyle, ornithology curator at KU's Biodiversity Institute and an author of a study of white-eyes.Moyle, along with Chris Filardi of the American Museum of Natural History; Catherine Smith of the University of Washington; and Jared Diamond of the University of California-Los Angeles, has been able to reconstruct key aspects of these birds' evolutionary history using genetic analyses.

The authors used DNA sequences and a variety of analytical methods to determine that most of the family speciated at rates among the fastest of any known vertebrate.More than 100 species in the familyMore than 100 species in the family have spread across vast regions from Asia to Africa and to far-flung islands. Despite this ability to disperse over long distances, some species remain separated by water gaps as narrow as 2.2 kilometres and yet show no inclination to cross. "As we started to compile the data, we were shocked," said Moyle. "White-eye species from across the family's range had strikingly similar gene sequences, indicating a recent origin and incredibly rapid diversification".

The authors of the study, published in the prominent journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assert that traits of white-eyes may have helped them diversify. These include sociability and the ability to survive in a variety of habitats. Some species also may have become more sedentary and unwilling to cross narrow water gaps.

A CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL READING LIST

We are often being asked by aspiring cryptofolk what books we think that they ought to read. This is only a brief overview (and is a couple of years out of date) but I am passing it over to you. What do you think? Is there anything we have left off? Is there anything on here that you think is a real stinker. Email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk

GENERAL CRYPTOZOOLOGY

On The Track of Unkown Animals Bernard Heuvelmans
In Search of Prehistoric Survivors Dr Karl Shuker
Beasts That Hide From Man Dr Karl Shuker
Searching for Hidden Animals Professor Roy P Mackal
Alien Animals Janet and Colin Bord
Mystery Animals of Great Britain and Ireland Graham J McEwan
Monsters John Michael Greer
Mysterious America Loren Coleman
Mysterious Australia Rex Gilroy
Modern Mysteries of Britain Janet and Colin Bord
Modern Mysteries of the World Janet and Colin Bord
Ancient Mysteries of Britain Janet and Colin Bord
Arthur C Clark's Mysterious World Simon Welfare and John Fairly
The Goblin Universe Ted Holiday
Creatures of the Outer Edge Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman
Strange Creatures from Time and Space John Keel
Monsters Among Us John Lee and Barabara Moore
The Mysterious Monsters Robert and Frances Guenette
Monster Hunter Jonathan Downes
Cryptozoology and the investigation of lesser known mystery animals Chad Arment
The Magic Zoo Peter Costello

BIG CATS ETC

Smaller Mystery Carnivores of the Westcountry Jonathan Downes
Cat Country Di Francis
My Highland Kellas Cats Di Francis
Big Cats loose in Britain Marcus Matthews
The King Cheetah Lena Godsall Bottriell
Mystery cats of the world Dr Karl Shuker
Extraordinary Animals revisited Dr Karl Shuker

DRAGONS

Dragons More Than a Myth? Richard Freeman
Explore Dragons Richard Freeman
Here Be Dragons Ralph Whitlock
The Flight of Dragons Peter Dickenson
Hill of the Dragon Paul Newman
The Dragon and the Disc Ted Holiday
Mythical Monsters Charles Gould
British Dragons Jaqueline Simpson
Dragons of the West Nigel Pennick
Book of the Dragon Allen Griffiths and Judy Jeanne
The Dragon Charles Gould
The Lambton Worm and other Northumbrian Dragon Legends Paul Screeton

SEA MONSTERS

In The Wake of the Sea Serpents Bernard Heuvelmans
The Kraken and the Colossal Octopus Bernard Huvelmans
Caborosaurus a Survivor from the Deep Dr Ed Bousfield and Paul LeBlond
There are Giants in the Sea Michael Bright
Sea Serpents Sailors and Sceptics Grahan J McEwan
The Leviathans Tim Dinsdale
The Search for the Giant Squid Richard Ellis

LAKE MONSTERS

The Monsters of Loch Ness Professor Roy P Mackal
The Loch Ness Story Nicholas Witchell
The Loch Ness Monster Tim Dinsdale
In Search of Ogopogo Arlene Gaal
Ogopogo the $1000,000 Monster Arlene Gaal
A Living Dinosaur? Professor Roy P Mackal
Hunting the Buru Ralph Izzard
Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters of the British Isles Paul Harrison
The Encyclopedia of the Loch Ness Monster Paul Harrison
Project Waterhorse Tim Dinsdale
In Search of Lake Monsters Peter Costello
Monstrum Tony “Doc” Shiels

The Monster of the Mere Jon Downes

MONSTER MARSUPIALS

Tiger Tales : Stories of the Tasmanian Tiger Col Bailey
Out of the Shadows: the Mystery Animals of Australia Tony Healy and Paul Cropper
The Tasmanian Tiger David Owen
Search for the Tasmanian Tiger Quinten Beresford
Thylacine:Tragedy of the Tasmanian Tiger Eric Guiler

MONSTER APES

Abominable Snowmen; A Legend Come To Life Ivan T Sanderson
Wildmen; The Yeti, Almas and Neanderthal Enigma Myra Shackley
In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman Dimitri Bayanov
Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti Loren Coleman
Bhutanese Tales of the Yeti Kunzang Choden
The Abominable Snowman Adventure Ralph Izzard
Folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti Shiva Dhakal
Lore and Legend of the Yeti Kesar Lall
Sasquatch; The Apes Among us John Green
The Bigfoot Case Book Janet and Colin Bord
Bigfootprints Professor Grover Krantz
Sasquatch Apparitions Barbara Wasson
Bigfoot ! The True Story of Apes in America Loren Colman
Sasquatch Bigfoot the Continuing Mystery Thomas N Steenburg
The Evidence for Bigfot and other Man-Beasts Janet and Colin Bord
The Search for Bigfoot Peter Byrne

WINGED MONSTERS

The Owlman and Others Jon Downes
The Mothman Prophecies John Keel
Mothman The Facts Behind the Legend Donnie Sergent Jr
Thunderbirds:America's Living Legend of Giant Birds Mark A Hall
The Jersey Devil James F McLoy and Ray Miller
Phantom of the Pines: More Tales of the Jersey Devil James F McLoy and Ray Miller

WEREWOLVES AND VAMPIRES

The Chupacabras and other Mysteries Scott Corrales

Flashpoint - High Strangeness in Puerto Rico Scott Corrales
Only Fools and Goatsuckers Jon Downes

The Island of Paradise Jon Downes
Beyond the Highgate Vampire David Farrant
Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality Paul Barber
The Vampire in Lore and Legend Montague Summers
The Vampire; A Casebook Alan Dundes
The Science of Vampires Katherine Ramsland
The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vamprism Jan L Perkowski
Vampires and Vampirism: Legends from around the World Dudley Wright
The Beast of Bray Road Linda S Godfrey
Hunting the American Werewolf Linda S Godfrey
The Werewolf Book Brad Stiger
A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture Charlotte F Otten
The Werewolf in Lore and Legend Montague Summers
Werewolves Elliot O'Donnell
The Book of Werewolves Reverend Sabine Baring Gould