THE MUSEUM OF LOST BONES - THE MOST CREDIBLE CRYPTIDS
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THE MUSEUM OF LOST BONES
In the 20th century scientists were not expecting to find recent remains of non-human primates in the New World. Considering the resistance to the current reports of hairy giants, many of them are still not expecting to see the bones or fossils of such primates. When bones did turn up, most of the scientists thought they just had to be a case of disease, the result of an inbred population, or any other explanation that would permit the finds to be seen as isolated and unimportant. The bones have been neglected and most of them are now lost.
When people ask "Where is the hard evidence for living fossils like the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest or the Trolls of Canada?" you can direct them to the Museum of Lost Bones.
Here are displays dedicated to the bone and fossil finds that are a matter of record. They were located in the 20th century and fell into the hands of professional men who did not know what they had. Now the finds are useless to us. In all but one case the bones have been lost. In that one case, the bones have been mislabeled as a case of disease. They remain concealed from scrutiny and modern testing while nay-sayers get away with claiming there are no bones or fossils to support the presence of large, hairy, unrecognized primates in North America.
Rather than being properly studied and serving to explain the mysteries of the living fossils, the finds of the (1) Minaret Calvarium, (2) the bones exhumed at Gardar in Greenland (Homo gardardensis), (3) the bones from a bog in Minnesota, and (4) the Boundary Waters Canoe Area fossils of 1968 have been allowed to become mysteries themselves. Here the known history of the finds is summarized.
There has been loose talk recently, such as saying the find of the Minaret Calvarium is without merit. We would like to hear how that has been determined. Since the bone has been lost to further examination, what is the basis for a dismissal? We already know that the two anthropologists who examined the find years ago could not imagine it would be anything other than the remains of an American Indian because it was found in California. The bone was turned over to them after being found by a medical doctor and passing through the hands of a coroner. Both of those men thought it was unusual. If there is a case to be made for its dismissal, by all means let us be to told what that case is and what new evidence there is to support it.
Some people tell about how museums are presented with all manner of objects, oddly shaped rocks and stones, by ordinary citizens who think they are wonderful artifacts. None of these cases fall into that category.
Two of the finds went directly into the hands of scientific teams. The Greenland find of 1926 was the result of a Danish archaeological dig. The finds in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in 1968 were acquired and examined by the University of Minnesota at Duluth. The Minaret Calvarium was studied by men with medical training. The fourth case is one of bones found by a museum curator. He did not catalog the bones. They were kept in his private collection until such time as its contents were either dispersed or thrown out. Grover Krantz once speculated that such museum caches might exist and he was correct.
This portion of a skull was found in California by a retired doctor, Robert Denton. He passed it along to a pathologist, Gerald Ridge, who also thought it was remarkable. Then the bone was turned over to Herman Bleibtreu and Jack Prost at the University of California at LA. There it was lost, probably by being stored amid many other crates in a UCLA warehouse.
The cranial vault, the jawbone, and a leg bone of a unique individual were exhumed from a grave in Greenland in 1926. The graveyard contained Norse burials from the 12th century. The bones were recognized as remarkable by Prof F C C Hansen. He thought they could be the remains of a Troll. He gave them the type name of Homo gardarensis. When he died, others stored the bones away labeling them as a case of acromegaly. That was the view of Sir Arthur Keith. That conclusion has not been revisited to this day. The bones remain in the Panum Institute in Copenhagen.
Sam Eddy was a curator at the James Ford Bell Museum in Minneapolis. He found some large, human-like bones in a bog in northern Minnesota. The bones remained unlabeled in his private collection until all those bones were either tossed out or distributed among the faculty of the University of Minnesota.
These bones were dug out of an island in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota in 1968. By the time the find was made public in 1972, the bones had been sent by the University of Minnesota to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian cannot find any record of them.
Dr. Richard Adams, identified as an anthropologist and leader of the university team that examined the bones, was quoted in 1972: "The skulls. . .may well represent a pre-Indian type of man that is more closely related to Neanderthal Man than any previously found. Their discovery tends to push the occupation of the Western Hemisphere by human beings way back." He said further that they could "represent a remnant population of a primitive type of man who inhabited the North American continent long ago and somehow survived until comparatively recent times by living in isolated refuge areas."
THE MOST CREDIBLE CRYPTIDS
Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo.com as challenged us all to come up with our own lists of the most credible cryptids, i.e., the unknown animals of our time. Here is my list of the 10 most credible in 2006.
1. Little People – A few years ago the case for Little People looked weak. Now they have been vaulted to the top of the list as the most credible among unknown animals. In 2004 the find of "hobbits" in Indonesia was announced. The bones of several individuals were found in a cave on the island of Flores. These specimens date back as recently 12,000 years ago. The living descendants of these dwarfish upright people are called the Ebu Gogo by the local people. They have said the living Ebu Gogo are still seen. One was even reported captured a couple of years ago, but it escaped. We have mixed feelings about this report. We all want to see the best proof. But the wish of the Ebu Gogo not to be treated as a specimen to be bound, tormented, and deprived of its life deserves our respect.
There are other categories of Little People around the world that make sense as survivals of this same line of primate evolution now known as Homo floresiensis. In those locations the Little People have largely kept out of sight into modern times. They have the same background in local history as the dwarf people of Flores had before the bone discoveries demonstrated a physical reality.
2. Trolls – The case for living Trolls is backed up by the bones of one that were preserved by having been given a formal burial in a Norse graveyard in Greenland in the 12th century.You can view some of those very bones by going to the Living Fossils page and looking under Homo gardarensis.The existence of living Trolls is attested to by much more than one skeleton, while that is the best evidence. There are centuries of reports, beginning with the Norsemen who told of seeing them in Greenland and Labrador. The Eskimos of those regions knew them as well. They called them the Tornit (also Tunnit). Their archaeological remains are identified as the Dorset Culture. There are modern reports of these same Trolls. Their living descendants were not confined to Greenland and Labrador. An early record happened to made there. They have been reported across North America. There were some especially good accounts from Michigan in the 1800s and 1900s.
The bones and world-wide records of their activities indicate they are the survivors of the line of hominids known as Homo heidelbergensis. They are known in Asia and Europe where the fossil record is long and the modern reports extend over recent centuries to the present.
3. Thunderbirds. The incident at Lawndale, Illinois, in 1977 established a modern milestone in the record of living teratorns. Multiple witnesses observed the activities of two birds, one of them picking up a 10-year-old boy. The official response was to insist it just couldn’t have happened. In other words, the only explanation for the event is the existence of the Thunderbirds that have been reported over Illinois going back to 1886 when another boy, Washburn Wright, was similarly menaced by a giant bird along the same migration route through the state of Illinois. The birds were seen moving across Illinois in 1977, and a film of them was made when they passed over Lake Shelbyville.There are fossil birds to back up their existence. There are numerous reports around North America, especially in Pennsylvania where the birds have been investigated. They are known in the lore of American Indians from the same locations where the birds are still being seen.
4. Neo-Giants. The hairy giant in the Patterson-Gimlin film is a female Neo-Giant. The film, the tracks that go with it, and a set of other sightings and track finds point to the validity of this primate in the Pacific Northwest.
5. Bighoot, the Giant Owl. The case for owls of enormous size has many parallels to the case for Thunderbirds There is a fossil bird, Ornimegalonyx oteroi, to account for its origin. The birds have been described in American Indian lore. They have been reported in those same parts of the country in the 20th century.
6. Orang Pendek. The status of the Orang Pendek is testimony to the value of concerted efforts made over recent years to investigate a historically established cryptid. The long record has been extended with more evidence, including better descriptions and casts of tracks associated with the presence of the creatures. When the day comes that the Orang Pendek is classified, its likely place among the primates will be a diminutive form of the Satyr-like apes. Its physical appearance and prints as seen in casts indicate such an origin.
7. Panthera atrox. The most common report of these animals is a large cat labeled a "black panther." The female of this cat species has been often photographed and videotaped in recent years. The cases are too numerous to cite. Most lack a clear scale, so the size of the cat can be questioned. However, a recent video made in Michigan showed a cat leaping out of a tree, leaving no doubt about its large size. Biologists have refused to consider the survival of these cats known from Pleistocene fossils. Instead they have relied upon the "escaped exotic pet myth" because the local audience does not know how foolish this sounds in the face of the continent-wide record of large black cats going back over one hundred years. The males of species are seen much less often. They are brown with an obvious ruff around the neck.
8. Homo erectus. The best evidence is a dead body. One turned up in 1969. The worst case scenario is that someone has possession of the body and doesn't want to answer questions about how they came to have it. That is what happened also. So the "Minnesota Iceman" was observed and photographed. Then it disappeared, probably forever gone as it was already rotting away at the time. It appears to have been the latest in a series of cases of Homo erectus captured and killed in Asia. They are identified as Almas, Banmanus, and other local names where these primates hold out in remote locations.
9. True Giants. The case for the survival of these genuine giants, the descendants of Gigantopithecus, is rising as they are being studied in Malaysia. People are making an effort to learn more about them in the jungles of Johor. They have been reported elsewhere in the world but without a similar response.
10. There are many aquatic creatures reported around the world in lakes, rivers, and in the oceans. They are credible cryptids, but they are also very difficult to view and study. We have never devised a means to capture any of them. For this reason they are being surpassed by other cryptids that are less difficult to deal with.As a current lesson in the elusiveness of water creatures, consider the hunt for the Memphis manatee. It was verified with photographs. Then it became very difficult to find despite the many resources called upon to get even a glimpse of it again.
TO READ MORE ABOUT CREDIBLE CRYPTIDS
ORDER AT AMAZON - RELEASE APRIL 24, 2007
FOR INTRODUCTIONS TO CRYPTOZOOLOGY SEE THESE REFERENCE BOOKS AT YOUR LIBRARY:
MYSTERIOUS CREATURES VOLS. 1 & 2 by George M. Eberhart (2002)
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CRYPTOZOOLOGY by Michael Newton (2005)
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