April 25, 2012

The Cadborosaurus Wars

Darren Naish has posted the following interesting article on his blog, Tetrapod Zoology.

Two renditions of ‘Cadborosaurus’ (upper one by C. M. Kosemen; one at lower right by Naish) with a pipefish. Not to scale!

As I aim to show here, dealing with cryptozoologists can be a frustrating, even infuriating, business. As most people interested in mystery animal research will know, Michael Woodley, Cameron McCormick and myself recently argued that an alleged ‘baby Cadborosaurus’ was very likely no baby sea-serpent at all, but rather a mangled and half-remembered description of a pipefish (Woodley et al. 2011). We tabulated the various observations reported by the witness (William Hagelund), compared them to lists of characters compiled by examining numerous candidate species, and showed as clearly as possible that the pipefish identification is the one that best matches Hagelund’s observations. In other words, we did our best to examine the identity of the alleged creature in an empirical, critical fashion (Woodley et al. 2011). As I explained last time round, we have to remember that Hagelund wrote up his description of the encounter about two decades after it actually occurred, and that he did not ascribe the various ‘cadborosaur’ traits to his animal that the primary supporters of ‘Cadborosaurus’ (Edward Bousfield and Paul LeBlond) said that he did.Darren Naish

William Hagelund’s ‘baby Cadborosaurus’ compared with a pipefish. Illustration by Cameron McCormick. See Woodley et al. (2011) for explanation.

Read the entire article on Tetrapod Zoology here: The Cadborosaurus Wars

Filed under Bigfoot Report, Cadborosaurus, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Eyewitness Accounts, Lake Monsters, Sea Monsters, Sea Serpents, Skeptical Discussions