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The Cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans # 3
🕑 Added 2022-07-15 17:43:49 +0000 UTCAs some of you will know already, my background project on illustrating, discussing and montaging ALL the more-than-100 cryptids accepted as valid by Bernard Heuvelmans continues. I can only complete individual illustrations very occasional, so this project is taking forever. Also, I'm no good at colouring things - my skills with photoshop are poor, and my colour vision is rubbish as well. Nevertheless, I'm still committed to getting through the lot, and I thought I'd share some various recently-completed illustrations here. The animal above are - yup - a Woolly mammoth, a pygmy elephant (Heuvelmans grouped together the Gabonese mussaga, the essala and bakiri of CAR, the Cameroonian messala and the Congolese wakawaka), the Peruvian bear known as the milne (those Winnie the Pooh jokes have already been made), and the giant monster catfish he regarded as the identity behind the lau and jak-anywong of the Upper Nile and lukwata of Lake Victoria.
Here are more finished animals, this time marine forms...
The brown dolphin and pink-bellied dolphin are the Senegal dolphin and Illigan dolphin, both discussed by Willem Mörzer-Bruyns in his 1971 field guide but not accepted as valid by any qualified whale experts. The larger black, two-finned animal is Oxypterus mongitori, the famous 'rhinoceros dolphin' of Rafinesque, and the monkey thing is my attempt to depict the 'mermaid'/'merman' creature he included in his list. He seriously suggested that these animals might be real, and be references to an unknown marine primate -- an idea later developed further by Mark Hall, and then Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe.
And here are two more cetaceans: this time the white-flippered, black beaked whale reported by Philip Gosse, and the tall-fined Antarctic whale of 1902. Remember that my inclusion of an animal in the project is NOT because I'm endorsing its existence, but because Heuvelmans imagined it as a real animal awaiting discovery.
In some months, I will have finished the remainder of the animals, and I'll then begin compiling them for the planned poster. I'm also planning to have the illustrations, and the montage, used in a Twitter megathread. It might take some while to put together but will be quite a fun project.
Finally for now, and also on the subject of cryptozoology: I'm nearly finished on an article about legendary black dogs, destined for TetZoo. An unusual topic, but one I've been planning to cover on the blog for a while.
That's where we'll end for now. All the best and thanks so much for the support!
Comments
Good old Mörzer-Bruyns, I wonder which of his mystery cetacean observations are literally from his childhood self — he started cetological observations at age 10! We know he was under 20 when he observed Illigan Dolphins; incidentally he did not know what Melon-Headed Whales looked like. … And wait a second, is Gosse’s observation the first putative at-sea sighting of a Mesoplodont? Perhaps it shouldn’t quite count because he seemed to mix them up with Steno. … Hall’s development of unknown aquatic primates is priceless — turns out they usually look like Dover Demons until they put on mermaid costumes. I hope Heuvelmans was swayed by this hypothesis.
wait a minute! If that bear is from Peru, it ought to have been called "Paddington"!
