Loren Coleman, founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum, and his crew put together a terrific lineup of speakers. I wanted to hear every presentation, which works out great since the conference runs as a single-track schedule, allowing attendees to go to all of the talks without missing any of them.
This post will run down the first day of the weekend's worth of speakers, and my photos will give you a glimpse of the folks involved, if you weren't able to be there. Click on any of the photos below to see a larger version of it.
Loren kicked off the conference by announcing this year's Cryptozoologist of the Year, reminding everyone that cryptozoology is an active field pursuit for scientists around the globe.
|Cryptozoologist of the Year, Dr. Anna Nekaris - BBC photo|
A short film about her work, "The Jungle Gremlins of Java," aired on the BBC recently:
Maybe in some future year, the CzCon can get permission to screen this film at the conference!
First on the speakers schedule was the team-up of Vermonsters Joe Citro and Stephen Bissette, author and artist respectively of The Vermont Monster Guide and many other works.
|Author Joseph Citro|
He also discussed his decades of work researching local legends and rumors, and how some of them do turn out to be wild goose chases, while others turn out to be even stranger than expected. In short order we were brought up to date on all sorts of anomalous sightings, including human-faced bats, man-swallowing stones, giant buried bullfrogs, Old Slipperyskin, and the giant birds of Butternut Hill.
Anyone interested in a good read should check out Citro's books, especially my favorite, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors.
|Artist Stephen Bissette - Art on the right is his, for Champ DVD|
Fans of Bissette will be pleased to note that he is working on the second volume of his Cryptid Cinema book series, which will focus on The Legend of Boggy Creek (if I heard correctly)!
Next on the roster was a preview of clips from the upcoming film The Cryptozoologist (2019), and a screening of Swan Song of the Skunk Ape (2015).
Following this was Hayley Eldridge's presentation "La Bête du Gévaudan."
|image from Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons|
The talk that followed next featured a person I had never heard of, but she made a profound impact on me, even in such a small amount of time. Dawn Prince-Hughes is a primatologist, and author of Songs of the Gorilla Nation, among other books. Her discussion of gorilla ways was eye-opening and encouraging. Following in the footsteps of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, she focuses more on the natural behavior of gorillas and less on how we want them to behave. When she works with them, she prefers to match her gestures and communication to their own innate methods as a means of creating rapport.
While her breakthrough work focuses on gorilla ethnography, she has also explored other sideroads in her own research, including observations on some very interesting relationships between habitual snow monkey movement patterns and the roots of Muay Thai martial art techniques, and more.
His graduates are active in the field, and have identified new subspecies of gorillas and chimpanzees, and at least 3 new species of monkeys, including the elusive Lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (more info: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044271)
His talk focused on the potential for researchers to utilize the recent advances in DNA technology to accomplish species surveys. Using environmental DNA drawn from topsoil, local bodies of water, etc, labs can now determine what species are in a given area, and how long ago they were there in the case of past or transient populations. This is huge news!
We leave traces of our DNA everywhere we go, and so does every other species on earth. This new methodology, environmental DNA metabarcoding, is transforming how we survey animal and plant communities. With this and other tools, Disotell urges us: "Those of us in the cryptozoology field need to do way better than we have done up to now." Up until now, he states, he has seen zero data to convince him of the existence of legendary cryptids, but he is hopeful that access to new DNA technology will advance efforts, especially as the cost has plummeted now.
In other words -- work hard, learn well, and use new tools -- and always keep in mind that DNA is the keystone of species identification.
UP NEXT: Day Two of CzCon 2018! Stay tuned...!