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...Bob Skinner kindly drew my attention to the following story, from the Mail Online web site a few days ago. The original story (follow the link below) includes a video and photographs. `It looked like a snake!` Chinese man finds 19-inch long EARTHWORM in his backyard (and now plans to raise it himself)
An earthworm measuring half a metre in length has stunned neighbours after being found in the gutter outside a house. Li Zhiwei, a worker from the Forestry Bureau of Binchuan County, was putting some dates out to dry in his backyard when he spotted the massive invertebrate.
`It looked like a snake. I looked carefully and found it was actualy a huge earthworm.` he said He plans to raise the worm at his house.
According to www.kplctv.com biologists intend to study the soil-dweller to determine its classification and understand why it has been able to grow so long in a built up area. An earthworm`s size is closely related to its environment. They tend to grow longer during humid seasons if they absorb the right nutrition and have no natural enemies. Depending on the species, an adult earthworm grow to anything grow to anything from 10mm long and 1mm wide to 3m long and more than 25mm across. (1)
The second story was passed onto me by Nick Sucik in an e-mail to me way back on 27th December 2009 and is about an extract from the book Pictures in prose of nature, wild sport and humble life (1894), by the stupendously named Aubyn Bernard Rochfort Trevor-Battye who lived in Kent during the early part of his life. [Have you noticed how all the bad rulers in the world have short names, e.g. Adolf Hitler, Mao-Tse tung, Joe Stalin,etc,etc, however I digress!!] Here it is:
“The country folk in certain parts are firmly persuaded that the adder as it grows old develops a pair of wings and flies about. They quite believe that they have seen it flying. This diabolical accomplishment intensifies the terrors of the “death-arder”. Everything that creeps and looks like a snake is a death adder. The idea arose in the church, by mistake for “deaf adder,” long years before the School Board came (2)
Flying Snake issue 2 pp 30-36 has an article ` The Weird Weird Weird World of Worm Anomalies ` which mentions that the record British earthworm was 13 feet long,which seems ridiculously long in comparision to our Chinese chum. Talking of Flying Snake, the cover price will increase to £3.99 from £3 (because of the recent increase in the postage costs) when issue 4 comes out this October/November. But if you are a serious cryptozoologist you`ll be prepared to pay a serious price for a serious magazine
Richy
If you are a manager or boss, you’ve probably heard every excuse in the book from an employee on why they’re running late to work. But I’ll bet you’ve never heard this one before…
Redditor mard86 writes:
My co-worker sent an email saying he would be late because he was trying to untie a squirrel tail knot. I asked for a picture, and he delivered.
Here’s the email that was sent:
I was pressed into squirrel rescue this morning on my way out. 5 young squirrels got tangled in Christmas lights in my neighbor’s yard. We got the lights off, but now their tails are one big knot, so I have to bring them into a rescue place to untie them, as I am unequipped to untie squirrel tail knots. I should be in this afternoon.
I’m totally going to steal this one. I’m going to keep this pic handy too.
Click here to see larger image.
Via reddit
Happy 76th Thylacine day from the Grant Museum
By Jack Ashby
Another year has passed since the last known thylacine – one of the greatest icons of extinction – died of exposure. That makes 76 years today.
We have celebrated the thylacine here at the Grant Museum for some time. We have some fantastic specimens – including one of the only fluid preserved adults (with the added bonus of having been dissected by Victorian evolutionary giant Thomas Henry Huxley), and skeleton from the early 1900s, which belonged to Grant himself. The only recent thylacine-based activity that happened at the Museum was for all our thylacine-geek colleagues to watch The Hunter together, a film about a bounty-hunter hired to collect the last individual for an evil bio-tech company. It was brilliant.
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