“Large sea animals of over two meters that remain to be discovered”

Dr Charles Paxton’s interest in marine biology has led him to move into what he calls “the dark side” – statistics and statistical ecology. He currently works at the Maths Department of the University of St Andrews, home of the government sea mammal research unit. At St Andrews, Dr Paxton is developing statistical models and curves on graphs to predict sea animals over two meters long yet to be discovered, which was the subject of his talk at the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s Weird Weekend 2007 conference.
“Professional scientists have lost sense their sense of wonder", laments Dr Paxton whose own survey showed that less than 5 per cent of scientists cite “wonder” as a motivation for their career choice.
Dr Paxton says eyewitness reports are unreliable, and that cryptozoologists are wrong to approach the evidence for “sea monsters” on a case-by-case basis. Mainstream biologists aren’t going to be influenced by individual case reports, it’s the clear signals send by the patterns in statistical data sets that will convince them there could still be undiscovered “sea monsters” out there.
To investigate how bad (or how good) eyewitness reports are, Dr Paxton placed a small, deliberately rubbish monster model in Windermere, a 2.33m tall black ‘F’-shaped black monster made of plastic pipes. People get the size and shape right, but they got its distance from them all wrong. Distance is the least reliable thing in eyewitness testimony over water. ‘Newbies’ on well-resourced marine mammal surveys are introduced to buoys at set distances to train them to estimate distances, as it’s so important for marine surveys.
Children in Dr Paxton’s rubbish sea monster model survey turned out to be lousy witnesses, females significantly underestimate sizes, males significantly over-estimate them. Women do more accurate drawings.
Dr Paxton’s statistical model for “large sea animals of over two meters that remain to be discovered” is based on a graph that plots a curve with the dates of discovery of sea animals over time, to see if that tells us anything about what still is to be found. The graph starts from 1758 and goes up to the present, 1758 being the tenth edition of Carolus Linneaus’ Systema Naturae, the book which established today’s classification system for species. Dr Paxton took the years in which species were formally described by scientists. There were 35 large marine mammals in the tenth edition Linneaus, there are 306 now.

Dr Paxton admitted there were some problems with the first version of his ‘large sea animals of over two meters that remain to be discovered’ curve. The first version predicted minus 1 (-1) animals waiting to be discovered. Dr Paxton’s conclusion was, ‘my model is rubbish.’ An earlier model predicted 47 animals waiting to be discovered. The problem with the first model is that it assumed the ‘search effort for monsters’ has been constant since 1758. There are now more professional marine biologists, more universities and more scientific journals than in 1758. Cheap camera traps have also speeded up the discovery of any remaining animals.
Some people say there were a lot more discoveries going on then, because of whaling. But there are a lot of whale surveys going on now, which means there’s about the same level of activity going on as earlier.
There are other variables. Not all monsters are equally easy to detect. Animals found most recently are the less easy to find ones. We can’t measure ‘detectibility.’ We can factor in the level of the ‘search effort’ through looking at the indexes of scientific journals.
There’s also the population size. Animals that turn out to rare are less likely to be discovered sooner than the more common ones.
Taking all these factors into account, Dr Paxton has now adjusted his statistical model and come up with a revised figure of 306 already known sea animals over two meters, and the curve predicts a total of 321 of these, meaning there are 15 of these creatures yet to be discovered, with a margin of error of plus or minus five.
Dr Paxton has made curves based on the rate of discovery so far for different types of sea creatures over two meters, and come up with three remaining sharks yet to be discovered (with a margin of error factored in of plus or minus two), three yet to be discovered whales (plus or minus three, which may mean there aren’t any whales left to be found,) two bony fish species over two meters out there waiting for us to find them, and one invertebrate. The margin of error in each of these last two categories may mean we’ve found all of these already, although recent film of what might be a 7-foot worm in the Pacific may mean we’ll have to adjust the total for yet to be discovered invertebrates upwards. Dr Paxton’s survey of the indexes of marine biology journals suggests we are still finding new large species at regular intervals. He warned that we should treat all these figures for animals awaiting discovery as underestimates, as there are some variables that just can’t be factored in using statistical models.

Cryptozoology museum update

Emile, a Swedish death metaller who came with his dad, and Steve Jones, Britain’s only openly pagan magistrate, were among the punters at the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s Weird Weekend 2007. Mr Jones made an appeal for any information on sightings of monk-like hooded entities and animal ghosts. He’d already heard of the ghost of Francis Bacon’s frozen chicken in Highgate.
Sunday’s Weird Weekend session (19 August) included a report by Greham Inglis, one of the ever-expanding cryptozoologist colony that live in Mrytle Cottage, Wolfordishworthy on the CFZ Museum, which he is now building in an old chicken shed at the bottom of the cottage’s garden. The museum, with big tanks for marine life, an aviary and greenhouses with ‘habitats’, has been delayed by bad weather, but should be opening in late 2008.

Rendlesham revisited, sea serpents, whale penises and alleged living dinosaurs of the Congo

Peter Roberts and Larry Warren, were both US servicemen serving at the RAF Rendlesham air base in Suffolk on that fateful Boxing Day 1980 night when something descended and fired ‘pencil beams’ into the sheds containing the nukes they were guarding. In their talk at Centre for Fortean Zoology’s Weird Weekend 2007, they described how samples of soil taken in the area of Rendlesham Forest where whatever-it-was landed showed that the sand in the sandy earth had been turned to glass. Peter Roberts then went on the deliver a workshop on UFOs especially for kids, with 15 attendees as part of the first Weird Weekend that has its own child-friendly events on the programme. There was also the now traditional mad hatter’s tea party – Richard Freeman in his everyday top hat, joined by Corrina Downes as the Red Queen, resplendent in a red Renaissance-style dress.
Child-friendly though Weird Weekend may be, parental advisory was in force for Dr Charles Paxton’s ‘cetacean porn’ half hour, in which he demonstrated how an eighteenth century sea serpent sighting off Greenland, and some other such sightings, could be explained as misidentified whale penises. ‘We first told our IT support people we were going to do a Google search on “whale penises”,’ explained Dr Paxton, before demonstrating with several slides of sinuous, serpentine whale willies from pilot whales and grey whales.
Adam Davies went looking for ‘mokele-mbembe’, the cut-down sauropod (diplodicus-type long necked dinosaur) that allegedly lives in Lake Tele, a spectacularly remote and inaccessible part of Congo Brazzaville in Central Africa. Reports from the local pygmies go back to the early days of colonial exploration.
Davies’ first expedition was ill-fated. He arrived in Kinshasa in the neighbouring Zaire, just as it was becoming the hilariously-named Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the rebellion that brought President Laurent Kabila to power breaking out in the capital just as Davies landed. He was shot at, and even had an rocket launcher pointed at his stomach at the airport. It took him an extra £1000 of his own money to fly him the hell out of there, from which he learnt that ‘you can’t wing it,’ you have to do your homework for expeditions.
Davies also learnt that you can get stuck in Brazzaville for a month getting a permit. But with its civil war over, Brazzaville is becoming safer. Child soldiers have pretty much disappeared, and you can wander round Brazzaville at night. Davies met Marcel Magnana, Minister of Forests, who told him he’d seen a brontosaurus-like creature in a hunter’s camp just south of Lake Tele. He also met pygmy lady with her teeth filed into points in the traditional manner. She smiled all the time, except when he wanted to take a picture.
There followed a trip by pick up, with a monkey on Davie’s lap, to the pygmy town of Infondo, where pygmies who spoke the Barka language told him, through a translator, that mokele-mbembe could shoot lightning from its eyes. He then went to the Boa villages, 20 km from Lake Tele. The Boa, regarded as the gatekeepers to Lake Tele, have a bad reputation locally but turned out to be friendly and hospitable. Theirs is a stratified society, with hereditary ‘notables’, (heads of the families) and chiefs elected every five years. The notables carried spears to hunt crocodiles. For them, seeing the mokele-mbembe is almost a rite of passage. They said the male mokele-mbembe has a horn on its head.
After a monkey for his Christmas dinner, and termites making a nest on his boxer shorts, Davies finally arrived at Lake Tele. ‘God, it’s so beautiful!’ he said, showing us some of the very few photos ever taken of the lake, which looks likes it’s been pretty much unchanged in the last 20 million years.
Davies didn’t see mokele-mbembe. ‘I have no definite evidence, but I’m a believer,’ he says. He’s an interrogator for the Home Office in his day job, which he says makes him ‘good on credibility.’ Locals nearer the lake told him that the creature bonds for life with a mate and goes around in pairs, and spends most of the time in the forest, and occasionally swims across the lake, which is only 8km by 5km and is shallow, ‘up to your waist’ in most places. While palaeontologists first thought that sauropods lived in lakes, their great bulk buoyed up by water, we have since discovered they were more forest and flood plain dwelling animals, so the reported lifestyle of mokele-mbembe fits the fossil record better.
Following local tip offs, Davies intends to come back, but to the nearby Lake Macule, about the size of Swtizerland and apparently a better place to see mokele-mbembe.

‘Almasti’, mystery hominid of the Caucuses

Some Hollywood types from Universal Studios had come to the village of Wolfordisworthy, North Devon, to meet the Centre for Fortean Zoology people during their Weird Weekend 2007 conference. Nick Redfern’s book Three Men Seeking Monsters had been ‘optioned’ by Universal. As it was about Redfern and his CFZ colleagues Jonathan Downes and Richard Freeman (see below), Universal wanted to meet the three men, just in case the script ‘option’ ever got as far as having a film treatment that needed to be written. Downes said of his previous TV appearances, “Thank God for Harry Potter - everyone thinks I’m Hagrid.’
The Saturday session of Weird Weekend is always a twelve-hour endurance marathon, and this year’s (Saturday 18 August) was no exception, with an overwhelming parade of speakers.
Dr Karl Shuker, a shining star in cryptozoology’s firmament, showed up to launch Extraordinary Animals Revisited, an update of his classic book on mystery animals. ‘Crypto-books have a habit of becoming as elusive as the animals in them,’ said Dr Shuker of the tendency of cryptozoology books to go out of print. When I got back to London later, there was an email from Amazon telling me about Extraordinary Animals Revisited, which it wrongly attributed to Downes not Dr Shuker.
Despite being held at Zurich Airport in the belief that his ‘hand exercisers’ were some kind of weapons of mass destruction, star speaker Grigory Panchenko was on next, the first Weird Weekend speaker from outside the English-speaking world.
Mr Panchenko works as a recruiter of Russian science personnel in Hanover, although his background is genetics. Science in his native Ukraine, he says, “is dead.” In his spare time he is the president of a Ukrainian cryptozoological organisation. His talk was advertised as The Russian Snowman, but the Russian snowman he is hunting is, in fact, neither Russian, nor a snowman. It lives in the Caucuses, mostly in Georgia, and is known locally as ‘almasti.’
Unlike the ‘almas’ hairy man reported in Mongolia, or the apparently similar ‘aubasti’ reported in Central Asia, which are supposed to be like yetis, the almasti mystery humanoid that Mr Panchenko is pursuing is ‘more advanced…. Like Home Erectus, of the genus Homo, but not Homo Sapiens.’ It uses tools and makes basic clothes, like belts, out of natural materials, and has been known to steal clothes of washing lines or from rubbish dumps, and to wear them. Mr Panchenko described reports of almasti wearing a pair of trousers, holding the waist with one hand and stuffing potatoes it was digging up down the waist with the other hand, using the trousers as a sort of sack to carry off potatoes. He ever heard of an almasti seen around for several years that was wearing a discarded military hat.
Unlike the vast forests of the Pacific Northwestern USA, that are supposed to hide Bigfoot, or the empty snowfields of the Himalayas, allegedly home to the Yeti, the almasti are ‘forced to live next to humans’ in the Caucuses mountain chain that stretches between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea for 1200km, an area populated by modern humans for a very long time. ‘How can it (the almasti) eat in such an unusual environment?’ asks Mr Panchenko. It occupies the ‘same niche as a bear, it’s omnivorous, plants are the leading part of its food.’ Almastis often ‘borrow food from human neighbours.’ As well as neatly digging out potatoes, they eat nuts, almonds, horse manure (for its vitamins) and sometimes steal newborn foals and cows. They sometimes milk cows or mares into their mouths, although there are fewer horses that are left to graze freely in the region now. Frogs, lizards, toads, rats, hares, salt left out by shepherds for sheep to lick, and eggs stolen from chicken coops are also part of the almasti diet. Apart from foals and calves, it doesn’t seem to hunt much.
The almasti don’t seem to need much food to stay alive either. A pilfered loaf of bread will last an adult almasti three days, and it drinks rarely and little. It can live of cornfields for two or three days at a time. The almasti are ‘much more mobile than chimpanzees’ and ‘wander seasonally’ – they disappear from some territories for the winter months, reappearing around harvest time. They are ‘mainly evening, night creatures’ and Mr Panchenko says that ‘if you saw an almasti yesterday, you won’t see them for a year.’ It hides from humans and moves ‘slowly, not in a hurry.’ The almasti seem to smell human scents, and then stay away from it. ‘You hear them a lot, females and juveniles avoid you a lot… Forceful adult males sometimes throw stones if you approach them.’ The almasti is ‘very shy despite its great strength’ and sometimes ‘treats humans friendly.’ The almasti makes a noise like a male chimpanzee, and it also whistles. Mr Panchenko has heard its screams and whistles four times on three expeditions, and says that, when afraid, the almasti has a high-pitched scream that ‘sounds like a woman who saw a mouse.’ Several witnesses have ‘heard them murmuring.’
Mr Panchenko and his team have found almasti remains, mostly in caves, including a shin bone and ‘a very large, very strange collar bone’, and he has talked to locals who told him they found a ‘very strange skull with picanthropus characteristics.’ The shin bone is currently at the University of Paris for DNA analysis. Some locals have promised him they will give him some alleged almasti teeth for investigation, but Mr Panchenko feels these may turn out to be bear’s teeth. He’s come within 10 ft of a teenage almasti, who didn’t know he was there, but says his camera was out of batteries at the time. He first started hearing about the almasti on his military service in 1986, when he met Georgians who had seen it.
Mr Panchenko’s team have heard over 2,000 stories of almasti sightings, but the animals are rare. Even in the thinly-populated Caucus mountains, there is ‘one almasti to 100 or 1000 people.’
Post-Soviet Georgia has many abandoned collective farms, and encounters with almasti often happen in these, and other, abandoned building in the Caucuses, as almasti shelter in them. There’s a report of a farmer who left his horse alone in a big stable, and next morning he found that his horse had moved to the other side of the stable, and a great pile of hay near where the horse had stood had been beaten down. Some people in remote communities have come home and found that jewellry and other items have been picked up and put back again, apparently by almasti.
Young almasti look ‘almost like human children’. Around the late 1990s, there were only reports of older almasti, and there were fears that the species was nearing extinction, but this threat appears to have been averted, with reports starting up again of ‘children and teenage’ almasti. A recent German expedition by Marojan Kaufman heard almasti stories which they realized were about almasti children seen earlier who had now grown up, and heard reports of new almasti children having being born.
The almasti also share the Caucuses with three cryptid reptiles, much to the fascination of the CFZ’s reptile specialist Richard Freeman, who is a former chief keeper for reptiles at Twycross Zoo. There’s a giant 30ft-long Caucasian snake like a boa constrictor that mostly lives near water. With disastrous Soviet agricultural policies in Central Asia, this may be dying out. Mr Pachenko feels this creature may have given rise to Central Asian lake monster stories. There are also stories of a crocodile-like monitor lizard – smaller than a Komodo dragon – and a hairy snake with hairy scales.
Mr Pachenko emphasized that, even though an adult male almasti could be as tall as a ‘medium-sized Bigfoot’, it was ‘more progressive’ than such Yeti-like animals, and had ‘burials without rituals – like chimpanzees with grass and stone’, although it often died alone, leaving its bones in caves. He’s convinced that the Yeti-like almas in Mongolia also exist, with a population of about 200, but equally convinced that ‘in our lifetime they will all be gone.’

Welsh Lake Monsters - Giant pike

Up and coming cryptozoology researcher Oll Lewis spoke at the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s eighth Weird Weekend conference of cryptozoology Saturday session (18 August) on lake monsters in his native Wales.
There are Welsh water monsters in folklore and fact, and some of them have attacked people in the last ten years. Garbled mistranslating from the Welsh doesn’t clarify the picture.
Wyverns (dragon-like winged snakes) used to attack sheep a lot in the Penllyn region, an area so isolated from the rest of the world that farmers wiped them out, thinking they were fairly common, and only then realized they were anything unusual.

The avanq, also spelled ufanc and with five other spellings, was some kind of crocodile thing. Stories about it are confused by the fact that the word is the same or very similar to the word for ‘beaver’ and ‘dwarf’ in Welsh, with its many non-standard old spellings. The local kings around Llangorse Lake, also called Brecknock Meer are supposed to have worn a tartan which represents the avanq. There are records of something in the lake going back to Roman times.
Huge 68lb pikes have been fished out of the lake. In 1987 a local, Mike Tunnicliffe, met the ufance when out shooting on the lake. One of his three labradors attacked a ‘basking pike’ in shallow waters, which darted off. Witnesses have seen wildfowl ‘taken’ by something under the water on the lake. A 5-6ft long pike attacked a man in 1997, and he was hospitalized with bites to his foot. Large pikes can look crocodilian in appearance.
Tuncliffe found the rotting mask (skull) of a dead pike in Llangorse Lake. It was 18 inches long, which would mean a pike of an estimated 70lb, 6-8ft long. Olly is going to Llangorse Lake in October. I’m down to help with archive research of Brecon and Powys newspapers in the Newspaper Library, and possibly down for ‘stake out’ duty on the shore during toe October expedition.
Two years ago the ‘Welsh water wolf,’ whatever that is, attacked sheep and killed them with two puncture marks around Newport.
Jonathan Downes announced The CFZ is involved in the defence of Marshall Farm, a local beauty spot near their village of Wolfordisworthy, North Devon, threatened by a Center Parcs-style development of 94 chalets planned for the area. Discovering dormice, rare moths, rare vegetation or – possibly – great crested newts not normally native to Devon, but reported locally, could save the site. The CFZ will do a survey.

Introduction to cryptozoology

The Centre for Fortean Zoology’s eighth Weird Weekend conference of cryptozoology began its Saturday session (18 August) with ‘parish announcements’ and then an introduction to cryptozoology, the science of 'hidden' animals. This was mainly for the benefit of the citizens of Woolfordishworthy, North Devon, who while they had thrown themselves into helping out with WW with great enthusiasm, aren’t cryptzoological insiders.
Goth zoologist and former zookeeper Richard Freeman pointed out that ‘gorrillas were ogres from native folklore until about 1904.’ Before then, it was believed they ‘carried off women to rape them, and used clubs to battle elephants.’
The giant squid has been known since 1861, but only sick ones and dying ones have been filmed. They were mixed up with the Scandinavian folklore of the Kraken. There’s now known to be an even bigger version in the Southern Ocean – the Colossal Squid. Which, says Freeman, “begs the question – what else is down there?”
Prehistoric Australia had some very bizarre animals, including Nototherium – the fossil marsupial rhino, and a gaint flightless predatory duck. The early European settlers encountered the thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf. This dog-like marsupial was seen as a mythical vampire creature by early European settlers, because it ripped into sheep and drank their blood. It was demonized as a vampiric entity, which helped speed up its extinction. The last one died in a zoo in the 1930s. The mystery animal known locally as ‘dob senga,’ reported in New Guinea fits the thylacine’s description, and there have been recent thylacine sightings in mainland Australia and Tasmania. There could well be surviving thylacines.
An CFZ expedition to Guyana is planned for November, in search of the giant bull eating anaconda ‘manatora’ (literally ‘eater of bulls’) and the Dee Dee, an upright clawed creature that could be a ground sloth.
Alien Big Cat (ABC) sightings in Britain have been up in the last 30 years. Wolves, brown bears, lynxes, wild boars and wolverines were hunted to extinction, and the ABCs are filling these empty niches in the environment. There was a 1980s fad for wild boar sausages, followed by a 1987 hurricane that flattened the fences of the wild boar enclosures. There’s now a population on Dartmoor. Big black cats have been seen in woods two miles from Wolfordisworthy village.
There are cave paintings and ancient Babylonian sculptures of sea serpents. CFZ director Jonathan Downes says of the CFZ’s work, “we have good humour, we have funs while we’re doing it, but we do it in a scientific way.”

Britain’s secret wildlife – two new species of lizard, Alien Big Cats

Weird Weekend's Friday evening session (Friday 17 August, see below) was kicked off by Jon McGowan, who says he has seen puma cubs playing in a deserted quarry in Wales – twice. He’s also been on the trail of two new types of lizard on the Bournemouth cliff tops. Whether or not they are native is not clear. Britain officially has four species of lizard - the common lizard, the sand lizard, the wall lizard and a legless lizard - the slowworm. The wall lizard is found in the Isle of Wight, Sussex and Dorset, and has a more boring brown colour than continental variants.
In the 1970s, there was the discovery in Bournemouth of brighter wall lizards. They could have bred with the brighter coloured ‘races’ (variants) of continental wall lizards, that may have been introduced. These wall lizards live in the unusual environment of the cliff heathlands of Bournemouth.
The Bournemouth wall lizards have a black head, like a Northern Italian variant. This type is now common on the Bournemouth cliff. There are also a yellowish Bournemouth variant that doesn’t match any of the 30 or so races and 20 recognised species of continental wall lizard. McGowan thinks these yellowish version must have originated from pet lizards that had been released. Female lizards in all their varieties are generally not colourful, but in Bournemouth they are.
Another species not generally accepted to live in England is the Western green lizard, is also seen in the tiny area around Bournemouth. It’s very large, typically 35-45cm, with one example found at 49cm. They are much larger than sand lizards. Western green lizards were first described 120 years ago. They are green, unlike other UK lizards.
Some of the ones seen at Bournemouth could be of another species, the Eastern green lizard. They were seen for a couple of years, then they disappeared in a very cold winter. The contemporary Western green lizards have probably been reintroduced into the area sometime in the last 120 years.
On the subjects of Alien Big Cats (ABCs) in Britain, McGowan says that there definitely seem to be some ‘mega-sized’ domestic cats out there that have gone feral and evolved to a giant size, as they are known to have done in Australia. There are some footprints in Britain that are almost the size of a leopard’s, but with domestic-cat footprint characteristics.
McGowan has himself seen a Scottish wildcat in Dorset. ‘Small zoos keep them and they breed prolifically,’ some of them are clearly being released, as there are more and more sightings of them over a bigger and bigger geographical range in England.
McGowan’s own study of (known) big cats on heathland in India shows that several different species of big cats share the heathland, and they all find their own niches in it.
Cats could easily survive in a cool climate like England’s. They like cool climates. They suffer in climates of over 80 degrees in Asia and Africa. Ocelots live in mountains in the wild, where they grow longer fur. Several ocelots have been shot in the UK, with photographs of the shot carcasses taken.
‘Cats are masters of disguise, cats can keep themselves hidden,’ says McGowan. In Johannesburg, something was coming down from the mountains and killing dogs – they put out six traps in a night and caught six leopards.
Chris Moiser, of the group Big Cats in Britain, turned up late for his Alien Big Cats talk but by way of apology explained he’d been buying a zoo – Tropiquaria in Minehead. Mr Moiser has been acclimatizing to ‘First Gibbon,’ a rescued young gibbon whose loud whoops he suspects are not actually the usual gibbon calls, but his impression of the sirens of the ambulances that frequently speed past the main road next to the zoo on their way to Minehead Hospital.
When he eventually got to give his report on behalf of Big Cats in Britain, Mr Moiser revealed there have been several Alien Big Cat (ABC) reports from Cornwall over the past year, and that near Lyton, a big ram, with a reputation for chasing away dogs, had been savaged by something and received ‘horrendous’ wounds. South of Bodmin, a Shetland pony was killed by long vertical slash down its side, which seems to have been done by ‘human agency’ not an ABC. There are plans for a Beast of Bodmin theme park, which will feature a live black leopard. In Lodiswell, there has been a sighting of a black cat, which bared its ‘small, sharp teeth.’ In Leicester there have been raccoon sightings, with raccoon sounds recorded. At the Biblical-themed Noah’s Ark Zoo near Bristol, ‘the only zoo closed on a Sunday,’ two sheep were lost from the petting zoo despite a five-meter high fence around the property.‘ Paw mark slashes’ were found on a slashed horse in a field next door to Exmouth Zoo.
Moiser commented on the recent series of five or six photos of the mystery Beast of Dartmoor, some of which appeared in The Sun and Fortean Times. It was variously interpreted as a bear, a wolverine, a pony, or even a shape-shifting animal that changed from one animal to another from one shot to another. The CFZ outed it as a fairly obvious Newfoundland dog, ‘like the one in the old Dulux paint adverts’, according to Mr Downes. Moiser noted that ‘slightly eased quarantine regulations mean we’re beginning to see unfamiliar ‘giant’ European (continental) dog breeds’ that could be mistaken for something else. The Beast of Dartmoor was shot with a camera-phone designed for close ups, and we may be seeing weird distortions on out of focus camera phones of a sort that we’re not yet used to interpreting as just that, because camera phones are still quite new.
Moiser also reported the release of data following Paul Lyons’ Freedom of Information Act request on how much ‘licensed keeping of exotic cats’ has been granted permission, which revealed that number to be an alarming high, around 800 in the UK.