One of the many many things I’m thankful to my parents for…

is that they had a book by Bernard Heuvelmans called On the Track of Unknown Animals, which is about cryptids.  Anyway, here’s a link to a picture from his study in Switzerland.  I read the whole thing cover to cover about 100 times when I was a kid.  It permanently set in me the desire to be a person to see a cryptid, which, unless I get to catch a Cadborosaurus, seems highly unlikely.  Anyway, folks, if you want a laugh, check out what it would cost to replace the book these days.  It’s been out of print since the sixties….

I got the link from dailygrail.com, which is part of my blogroll.

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Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

8 thoughts on “One of the many many things I’m thankful to my parents for…”

  1. So, this would include the Loch Ness Monster? I will sick my Mom on this one to see if she can come up with a copy of this book. She’s forever pouring over the used book stores in search of various gems. Oh, and believe me when I tell you, she already has a rather large stash of gems.

  2. I’m pretty sure it does, Debbie.

    I have a horrible feeling I don’t have my copy any more, and that makes me ill – I checked what SOFTCOVER is selling for on Amazon.
    A lot of that book is outdated now, of course, but he had a point, starting off with Cuvier saying in the early 1800s that there were no more large animals to be discovered and then came the okapi in the early 1900s – and quite a few others since.

  3. Apparently we have cougars around here. Horse in a barn got killed the other night just south of Bancroft at Cardiff. Vet said punctures on the horse were consistent with cougar marks. MNR denied such, saying cougars were all hunted out a hundred years ago.
    A couple of years ago the red wolf was ”discovered in Algonquin Park. A summer student thought some of the wolves didn’t look like timber wolves, and so did some research.
    Discovered sort of the same way that Columbus discovered America.
    And I read an item recently in which a cousin of the platypus, a monotreme that had been thought to be extinct for 100s of 1000s of years is alive and well.
    Don’t give up on Nessie yet…

  4. Oh, Chipper! I bust a GUT laughing when I saw your dry comment “Discovered, sort of the same way that Columbus discovered America.” That was RICH.

    Well we shozehell got cougars in this part of the world, and not all at the John B Pub (premier ‘cougar bar’ mmmrrrrAIR) in Coquitlam – where I once saw a cougar WEARING a t-shirt that said ‘COUGAR’.

    The year we moved here Ministry of the Environment officials tranked a cougar blocks from the house – Jim and Jan had a close encounter (less than 10 feet….) with a cougar in Courtenay scant days ago – and cougar prints were up and down their kids’ school yard a few years back.

  5. Well, I was wondering recently if I was being tracked as a cougar meeself, but he got scared when I expected him to actually say something. Did enjoy the rusty nails along the way…had I ever realized I had to look at a man 20 years my junior to get a drink in a bar, I probably would have started at least 10 year ago (before that they weren’t particularly legal) (I’ve heard of taking candy from a baby, but beer?!)

  6. It’s in today’s NGM – I’ll check. Yeah – would it be the long-nosed echidna – Zaglossus attenboroughi? Cousin of the spiny echidna rather than the platypus, but also a monotreme – an egg-laying mammal.

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