Wednesday 16 March 2016

Holiday's Theory about Nessie may be invalid

Fishy origin of bizarre fossil 'monster'

By Helen Briggs BBC News

Scientists say a worm-like fossil with mysterious origins is actually the ancestor of living fish.
The 300 million-year-old animal was found at an Illinois mine in 1958 by fossil collector Francis Tully.
The "Tully monster" has been a puzzle to scientists ever since, and has been likened to worms and molluscs.
US researchers say the fossil is a backboned animal rather than an invertebrate as once thought, based on an analysis of 1,000 museum specimens.
Their findings, published in Nature, place it firmly on the tree of life of vertebrates and related to fish such as lamprey and hagfish.
It has a rudimentary backbone, which has been misinterpreted in the past as a trace of gut, said Victoria McCoy of Yale University.
"The Tully Monster is very weird looking but we found it is related to modern lamprey," she told BBC News.

see rest here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35821829

It rather puts paid to Holiday's theory of the Loch Ness creature being a giant tully monster as he said it was invertebrate.A bit about his theory here:
http://cryptozoo-oscity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/great-orm-of-loch-ness.html








Tuesday 15 March 2016

apologies

I apologise for the lack of posts recently. Its due to severe ill health and my eyesight being badly affected by illness. There has not been a great deal of news in the Cryptozoological world the last couple of months but maybe the arrival of spring will bring forth more sightings as people venture out into the countryside. If I have to give up the blog I will leave it online for people to read.Other sites have borrowed stuff from it ,many without citing where they took it from, so I think it will still be useful to some,long after I have gone. Keep searching everyone and who knows what may be sighted this year xx

The beast of Tazewell County

Did a hairy monster stalk Tazewell County?

I came across this on my daily meander through the internet. So what do you think- was it collective hysteria or did people really see something? Anyone knows anything about this please post a comment. It takes a lot to get 100 armed men together and into the woods to search , if that is true!
Did a hairy monster stalk Tazewell County?[Illinois] | 06 Nov 2006 | AP Posted on 07 November 2006 02:47:56 by FLOutdoorsman
Thirty-four years ago in Tazewell County, 100 armed men walked the woods around East Peoria's Cole Hollow Road in search of a monster. The search was called off about 7:45 p.m. when one of the men accidentally shot himself in the foot. The creature was never found. The monster hunters were looking for was dubbed the Cohomo Monster, a beast thought to be lurking in Tazewell County in the summer of 1972. James Donahue, Tazewell County Sheriff in 1972, still remembers the infectious hysteria of that summer." At the time it was a very big deal," Donahue recently told the Pekin Daily Times. "Several people indicated they'd seen a monster up in that area. It was described as something like Bigfoot. All the neighbors showed up. We spent a lot of time up there. We never found anything to substantiate the claims. We were up there for a week or two weeks. A lot of volunteer people came out looking for this monster." On Tuesday, July 25, 1972, Creve Coeur authorities reported that a witness saw something big swimming in the Illinois River. The following evening, the Tazewell County Sheriffs Department received a call from a Eureka man who said he and his family were having a birthday party in Fondulac Park in East Peoria. The witness said he and his party saw strange lights come in a vertical position and go down behind some trees. The light allegedly left a vapor or smoke trail. That same night, more than 200 phone calls about monster sightings jammed the switchboard at the East Peoria Police Department. On July 28, a rural Pekin woman reported that she saw Cohomo while picking berries by an old coal mine. The woman told the Tazewell County Sheriff's office she was so scared she ran off, leaving her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police said two reliable citizens claimed they saw Cohomo. It was described as 10 feet tall. The creature's face had long, gray U-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. The reliable citizens said the creature possessed thumbs with long second joints and looked like a cross between an ape and a cave man. Newspaper articles of the time suggest that Cohomo had a horrible smell, sometimes compared to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs, or as sulphur-like. The Cohomo craze swept over Tazewell County. It's hard to pin down exactly when and where all the excitement over the Cohomo monster started. Old articles found in the Daily Times archives blame a monster called Momo who was first spotted in rural northeastern Missouri a year before the Tazewell County sightings. One of the first Illinois reports came from Randy Emert, then 18, of Peoria, who claimed he spotted some type of hairy creature in the woods near Cole Hollow Road in Tazewell County. Emert said he didn't report seeing the monster at first because he feared people would think him crazy. In 1991, the Peoria Journal Star received a phone call from Emert, who said that he made the whole thing up. Emert told the newspaper that he and his friends made the story up to scare another friend who worked late nights at a gas station. But one remains. If Cohomo was the product of mass hallucination, caused by the sightings of a Missouri monster called Momo, why did only the citizens of Tazewell County invent the elusive beast? And although he has no idea what it may have been, Donahue says he thinks somebody may have seen something.
source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1733712/post

Lake Temiskaming Mugwump

Lake Temiskaming Mugwump- fish or something else?

Lake Temiskaming in Quebec is a deep lake around 720 feet at it’s deepest point . A lake monster known as "Mugwump."is said to inhabit the lake.
The first published story of it appears to be by the then mayor of New Liskeard Jack Dent. In an April 20, 1979 he wrote an article in The North Bay Nugget newspaper in which he discussed the creature. According to Mayor Dent:
“… the Indian word, “mugwump” means fearless sturgeon and is all part of a very old Indian legend from an old Indian…”a direct descendant of Chief Wabi” who told him the mugwump was reputed to be the length of four Indian braves. Putting the average height of a brave at about five feet… concluded the mugwump was probably over 20 feet long…”Mayor Dent said he had only heard of the animal in 1969
Then in February 2, 1982 an article appeared by Alice Peeper in The Temiskaming Speaker, a Mrs. Kate Ardtree recalled her father telling stories about the animal as a child. Mrs Ardtree was elderly at the time so the story must have been from 1920’s or 1930’s. Mrs. Ardtree had never seen the animal herself. “…Sure I know about it, or should I say them?” she smiled. “I well remember my daddy talking about the monster.” Mrs. Ardtree also remembers her Dad bringing home one of its scales when she was just a girl. The scale was as big as a saucer and the family had it around the house for years….”
Dariene Wroe then wrote in the August 9, 1995 issue of The Temiskaming Speaker about the story of John Cobb. Cobb , then 83 years old, recalled an event from the early 1940’s when he worked on the tugboats moving logs along the lake.
“…One night I was coming up just about dark and I seen the darn thing in the lake.” He describes a creature about 20 feet long with a round head and nose like an animal’s. “I didn’t know what it was. When we come up close it disappeared…”
Then Chuck Coull outlined his encounter with a strange beast in the lake to journalist Mike Pearson in 1979. He claimed it happened in the early 1960’s:
“…We were cruising around in the boat, about a third of the way back from Burnt Island, when we saw what looked like a deadhead. We pulled up to it. It rolled over and swam away…. It was the biggest sturgeon you’ve ever seen… I’d been hearing about the thing all my life….”Chuck Coull was with his father at the time and estimates the animal sighted was around 8 feet long.
The Temiskaming Speaker also had reported that in 1978, Ernie Chartrand and his wife, who lived in the town of Haileybury, were seated at a table in The Matabanick, a local Hotel, where they had a good view of the lake. Their attention was drawn to "something" that was moving shoreward at a very fast pace. As it was nearing the shore, it did a sudden and complete turnabout and headed out back to deep water. Both Mr. and Mrs. Chartrand had noticed that this "thing" had a large humped back, and they noticed that it had no fins along its side or back, as itswam away. According to The Speaker, Ernie stated that it must have been 15 feet long. He further stated that he will go on record anytime as to his sighting of the Lake Temiskaming monster” (The Temiskaming Speaker February 3, 1982)
Another article by Alice Peeper of the The Temiskaming Speaker appeared February 17, 1982. This time it was the story of Roger Lapointe and Dan Arney who were ice fishing at the time in a borrowed hut.
According to Roger Lapointe and Dan Arney of Cobalt,the two men decided to try their luck at ice-fishing so they managed to borrow a friend's ice-fishing hut for a night.They had just settled in, when their tip-ups started to agitate in an alarming manner. Hauling the lines in, they discovered their bait and lines were missing. It looked like they were sheared right off, the men had reported later. Resetting the line, they settled back with a brew and were wondering what was stirring in the depths below the fish-hut, when in about 20 minutes, or perhaps half an hour, their tackle flew right up in the air and then vanished down the hole. The men were dumb-founded! "To hell with this," Lapointe relates, "Let's pack it in", and Arney agreed. They were donning their parkas, when Arney said he could feel the small hairs on the back of his neck stiffen (this sixth sense had served him well in the RCMP back a dozen years). Arney said he just knew that something was watching them as he reached out and put a silencing grip on his partner's arm and they began to survey the half-dark interior of the hut. Looking downwards at the fishing hole, they saw a black, glistening head with protruding eyeballs, and one of these eyes was staring fixedly at the men "like it was sizing us up for a snack", Lapointe remarked. When Arney shouted, "Let's get the hell out of here", he lost no time in following him out the door. They leaped aboard their snow machine and raced for shore. When contacted about their experience, both men agreed there was "something" out there in the lake, alright.
Another sighting of the Lake Timiskaming monster has been made by John Sheur of New Liskeard, who claims he saw the monster quite recently. Mr. Sheur says he was locking up his ice-fishing hut for the night, when he heard a crunching noise. Knowing he was the only fisherman still out on the lake, he decided to see what it was about. Thinking it was probably a dog, he almost walked into a long, dark animal, that seemed to be wrapped about several of the ice-fishing huts and was chewing something, said Sheur. What did its head look like? the reporter asked. Something like a dinosaur, said Sheur, "but I didn't stay for a second look." Sheur had dashed for shore on his snow machine and, rushing into a local hotel, tried to get several men to go out and investigate. Two men finally decided to go take a look, but all they found was a rather snake-like trail in the snow. They also noticed that one of the fish-hut doors was wide open. Someone had forgotten to secure it, so the men closed it against the drifting snow. Mr. Harmon of Haileybury, who has an ice-fishing hut near where the incident occurred, said it was the darndest thing that he had been losing line and fish left out in the snow. He presumed it was stray dogs, but now he's not so sure!
So what is it? Well a sturgeon would not come ashore on the ice so could it be our old standby a giant eel? Or could it be more than one creature lives in the lake? It is deep enough to hold more than one large predator, so perhaps there is a large sturgeon and something else in the deep waters.