Are there any other undiscovered mythical creatures?

These are vague creatures, it is often said to be nothing more than a legend, but are there any mythical creatures, other than more common species such as extinct dinosaurs, that have not been recognized by humans? ? Let's find out through this article.

For this rather "mysterious" purpose, the researchers looked at the real-life potential of unexplored creatures from myth. That excludes some cryptids - creatures that are rumored to exist - that are known to science but have been declared extinct, such as the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). 

This "unmasking" is the task of pointing out the fake, if any. Mythical creatures aren't necessarily fake just because they don't exist exactly as described, and it's almost impossible to prove with 100% certainty that any creatures don't exist, because we don't. capable of observing such a broad scope.

Mythical beings are often said to be confined to a particular location or range. For example, the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland is said to live in its eponymous homeland - Loch Ness. This allows scientists to use what they know about the lake to make a reasonable judgment as to whether it is inhabited by a mythical beast.  

This famous 1934 photo of the Loch Ness Monster turned out to be a hoax. 

Loch Ness is an autotrophic lake, which means it has few nutrients and is unlikely to support an unknown large predator at the top of the food chain. Charles Paxton, a statistician and aquatic ecologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, focused on the available evidence, rather than looking at the organisms themselves. Based on his observations, he thinks the Loch Ness Monster exists. 

Paxton said, "The question for me as a scientist is, what can account for the misreported phenomena. It can be explained in terms of human psychology, which is a misconception. about known species or it can be explained by an unknown species".

Scientists have not recorded all the species on Earth, but only estimated them. A study published in 2013 suggested that we have discovered about 1.5 million living species out of about 5 million species on Earth, adding about 3 million more. However, that could be a conservative estimate. A 2011 paper published in the journal PLOS Biology predicts that there are about 8.7 million species alive today, and a 2016 study published in the journal Nature estimates that microorganisms alone have more than a trillion species.

As for aquatic animals, Paxton thinks we've "exploited" nearly all of the large unknown animals near the surface, with the exception of a few undiscovered beaked whales. Currently, because this is a difficult whale to detect, it is rare to see a deep-diving whale that can hold its breath for more than 3 hours. To be more precise, almost all the large animals that humans can see underwater to inspire myths are known. 

A most recent 2021 study investigated the potential of undiscovered land animals. The study's lead author, Mario Moura, professor of ecology at the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, said: "The chances of them being discovered and described are unequal across species. Large animals live in or are much less likely to slip through scientific nets than smaller animals living in remote, hard-to-reach environments, such as tropical rainforests." According to research, reptiles are the least explored group of animals and have the highest potential to discover new species worldwide. 

Dragons are the most famous reptiles in mythology, but scholars associate their legendary ability to breathe fire with medieval depictions of the mouth of hell, often presented as the mouth of a dragon. monsters and there is little physical evidence that dragons are real.

Dragons, like mythical creatures, have similarities in nature. Fossil remains of dinosaurs and other extinct animals help strengthen the dragon story. For example, the skull of the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), now extinct from the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), kept in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt resembles a skull of a "dragon". " is said to have been killed. 

The Map of Life website has an interactive map of Moura's 2021 research findings, where you can search the world for potentially unknown animals. The map also shows that the US is considered a land to exploit new animal species, but it has been studied extensively and has less species diversity than the tropics. A closer look, however, reveals: two of the states with the best potential for unexplored mammals, Washington and Oregon, are considered Bigfoot habitats.

Stories of Bigfoot depicting a giant ape-like creature are most commonly "seen" in the Pacific Northwest. However, Moura notes that there is little chance of finding new mammals in the area, and misconceptions about sightings may be due to the presence of rodents, shrews, and shrews. or a bat, not a hairy great ape. 

However, that doesn't mean that there aren't any undiscovered primates in the world. Moura thinks the best chance for undiscovered large animals will be with primates, with species like Plecturocebus parecis, a titi monkey from Brazil, discovered in recent decades. 

A still image believed to be Bigfoot taken northeast of Eureka in 1967.

The researchers also identified four potential hotspots for unexplored life: Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar and Colombia. These countries are very rich in species and have yet to be thoroughly studied by researchers.

There are many stories of large, mysterious primates in folklore, but the most promising is said to live in Indonesia. A mythical creature known as the Orang Pendek is a bipedal ape, rumored to roam the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Locals, guides, settlers and Western researchers all confirm this. 

Orang Pendek - meaning "dwarf" in Indonesian will be the object with the best chance of discovery among all the mysterious primates, it is also the large creature that researchers want to find the most. .

Sumatra has been home to orangutans - the group of known great apes. These red primates are arboreal and their range in northern Sumatra is unlikely to coincide with that of the Orang Pendek in central Sumatra.  

Serge Wich, professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who has surveyed orangutans in Sumatra, thinks it's possible Orang Pendek's stories are about orangutans that lived further south before when their range is limited to the north. It is worth noting that no one has ever found the Orang Pendek if it existed, as the forests believed to be their habitat have been tracked with photographic traps. "This, to me, indicates that they may not be there." 

Mysterious footprints.

Jeremy Holden, a freelance wildlife photographer, claimed to have seen the creature on the island of Sumatra in October 1994. This encounter took place right inside a forest in Kerinci Seblat National Park, where it has been confirmed by many people to have seen Orang Pendek. "The animal probably passed about seven meters from me. It was walking on two legs. Its head was turned away from me as if it were listening to my instructions from behind."

Holden said the "remarkable creature" was about 1.5m tall, it had a shriveled yellow coat, but unfortunately he had no photographic evidence as he didn't want the creature to be heard. camera sound and see yourself. "I kept quiet because there were a lot of emotions running through my mind at the time, but one of them was really fear." He also insisted that he did not mistake it for a smaller ape.  

In 1995, he began looking for evidence of Orang Pendek during a 3-year research project funded by Fauna & Flora International (FFI), a UK-based conservation charity. He teamed up with conservationist Deborah Martyr, who also claims to have seen Orang Pendek, to document evidence from eyewitnesses and attempt to photograph the creature with camera traps. However, "The project did not obtain convincing evidence beyond a number of footprints that do not appear to match any known primates".

National Geographic funded a separate Orang Pendek project from 2005 to 2009. This project also used camera traps but also failed to capture any creature images. Alex Schlegel, who worked on the project and is now an artificial intelligence researcher in the Bay Area, isn't sure if Orang Pendek even exists. "I would say that it would be more bizarre and mysterious if it didn't exist, or if it were still alive and unrecorded by Western science in the rainforests of Sumatra, empiric," he said. you're easily shocked to learn that it's just stories." 

An endangered Tapanuli orangutan.

And photographer Holden said, has continued and persistently searched for Orang Pandek since the end of the FFI research project. Although there are still no pictures of Orang Pendek, he found species previously unknown to science, including Nepenthes holdenii, a carnivorous Cambodian plant named after him. He also led groups of camera traps that photographed new species, including other primates, for the first time.

In fact, Holden has captured many other animals that have never been seen, aside from the target Orang Pendek. Holden cited a Sumatran cuckoo (Carpococcyx viridis) to justify his belief - why Orang Pendek was able to escape science for so many years.

The critically endangered ground cuckoo went unnoticed for more than 90 years until one was discovered in 1997. "It's been decades since 1995, when the traps started. camera until 2015 to get the first picture of a cuckoo on the ground of Sumatra So it's understandable for those who don't believe me, as I don't have any proof other than a sentence story".