April 10, 2011
AOL News decided to do a bit more on the Chinese reports of a dog being born to a sheep, and published an updated article, “Can a Sheep and a Dog Give Life to a New Kind of Sheep-Dog? Probably Not.”
They interviewed me, and here’s how they came out:
“This is a rural urban legend,” Loren Coleman, owner of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, told AOL News in an email.
“The Chinese sheep herder never saw a birth take place. He merely found the two animals near each other.
“No way is this a possibility, biologically, but it does make for a merely humorous slow news day story,” Coleman said.
There are, indeed, examples of hybrids resulting from some unusual mating practices of the animal kingdom….
But in the case of China’s sheep-dog miracle, “It looks like a normal, fuzzy-furred young canid that was found born near sheep,” cryptozoologist Coleman said.
For more, read here.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Pop Culture, Weird Animal News