A Fascination with Monsters

Our world is one of vanishing mystery. It's like what the teacher said to the young Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when he explained he wanted to explore the world. "There's nothing really left to explore!" Aside from the uninhabitable cliffs of certain areas out and about Australia like New Guinea and other "if-you-have-a-camera-you're-stealing-my-soul-so-here's-a-spear-to-the-chest" places, mankind has set foot on a lot of places and seen a lot of peculiarly interesting things. Just opening up an issue of National Geographic will attest to that. The issue not too long ago with the birds of paradise was fascinating - the colors that nature puts on some of their plumage is ridiculously flashy.

However, in the deep depths of the sea or in the most remote part of the barren desert, there may lurk an elusive beast. Unseen by man, but speculated by many, these creatures are the prey of the cryptozoologist. The cyptozoologist is a strange creature in itself. They earn their titles by searching or researching the obscure and strange. For all of those mythical creatures out there, you can be sure there's one crazy cryptozoologist chasing after it. Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Chupacabra are all examples of things that a cryptozoologist searches for. Not all of them are whacked out of their gourd either, as some cryptozoologists have doctorates in Zoology and are just merely curious as to what else the world still has to show them.

The most recent (as to when this article was written) article in National Geographic explains how only about 10% of the caves on Earth have been discovered or explored. Think about that for a moment. 90% of the world's caves have yet to be documented or even discovered. There was that story in which amateur explorers stumbled upon the massive cave Ursa Minor in California. The insides of the cave are massive and the discovery was a called a major advancement for research. Inside the yet-to-be-discovered caves crawl yet-to-be-discovered organisms. That particular issue displayed pictures of spiders that had no pigment and had evolved beyond the use for eyes since they were in perpetual darkness. While there were scattered bones throughout the cave, it was usually due to the fact that the animals had wandered into the cave, gotten lost or stuck, and perished within. However, like the depths of the ocean, the caves enchant people with their mystique. Within a single cave, there may be handfuls of new species scuttling about on the walls.

Stories like those of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Chupacabra are all things we've heard about, but what else is there? While we may not all wholeheartedly believe the accounts of sightings of said cryptids, there was one that was particularly interesting. The Mongolian Death Worm is a fabled creature that slithers around the remotest parts of the Gobi Desert spitting yellow saliva that's as corrosive as acid and can emit electric currents that can kill. What? After reading some accounts to what the Mongolian Death Worm actually could be, I resolved that it was, like Nessy, Bigfoot, and the Chupacabra, just a story. That, though, doesn't mean that something of such a nasty repertoire doesn't exist, right? Say, if a spitting cobra and an electric eel mated...that could be a Mongolian Death Worm, right? Well, maybe not, but it's still entertaining to hear about extraordinary things like the Mongolian Death Worm.

While most of the animals that have yet to be documented or discovered are probably no larger than our thumbnails, the human mind cannot help but conjure up some fantastic beast that can breathe fire and terrorizes the locals. In the mean time, we may have to just make due with frogs, rodents, and a spider here and there. Keep your hopes up, though, as there are still some people willing to spark up some cryptid news. Even if it is just to sell t-shirts based off of the "chupacabra" roadkill she found.

news.mongabay.com/2007/0904-chupacabra.html

Is it a hairless dog or a the fabled blood-sucking beast!? You decide.