firecat

Seemed appropriate to infect Livejournal with this as well...

if by some chance I got on Jeopardy & was facing the screens, if these were the categories that appeared, I would be grinning b/c I would know that I was about to ace the game. So what would they be? -- L1

1. Indie Punk Bands of 1982
2. Group Dynamics of Eclectic/Dianic Covens
3. Care and Feeding of Non-Tenured Scholarly Book Authors and the Correct Use of Commas
4. Product Team T-shirts of Apple Computer
5. Polyamory: Theory and Practice on the Internet
6. Cat Photography Tips
7. Homeowning on Fifty Cents a Day

Current Mood: mischievous
Current Music: Something by the Buzzcocks, I suspect

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jenett

Depends.

It's theoretically the zoology (study of living things) of 'hidden' beasties or unusual ones.

That *can* be stuff like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Or Champ, who happens to be my favorite lake monster. (Lake Champlain, between NY State, Vermont, and Canada.)

Or it can be animals which are out of place in the environment they're in. (The Beast of Bodmin Moor, for example, Bodmin Moor being, I seem to remember, in the north of England, and the Beast in this case likely being a panther or similar sized cat that escaped from somewhere. No one's completely sure, though)

Or it can be animals thought extinct, but then sighted, like the coecelanth, until they figured out there's actually several populations of them, and that the locals knew they were there all along. No one had told *them* the things were supposed to be extinct, after all.

Or, it can be animals that local legend or discussion say are there, but which haven't been scientifically proven by 'Western' scientific standards.

What got me hooked on the subject was the last one. The Giant Panda was originally considered cryptozoological, because no one but the local population had ever seen one, and no one had ever brought back even a dead carcass.

It took something like sixty five years between people saying "Hey, there might be something in these stories" and actually capturing one live (and the bulk of those years before they got a carcass, if I remember correctly. The book's at home.)

It's just a cool subject that allows one to collect random bits of trivia about obscure subjects, which is probably why I like it so much. (I feel the same way about archaeology, but that's a much broader subject, in a lot of ways.)

And, um, yes, I'm a little effusive about it. It's a subject that reminds me just how *little* we sometimes know about our world.