I really thought I had heard of and read about all of the major big cryptids that are theorized.

I don’t know how I missed it, but I didn’t know a lick about Orang Pendek until my TiVo did me the service of taping an episode of “National Geographic’s Is It Real?” all about the little fella.

In the remote jungles of Sumatra, there is a legend of a bipedal ape-like creature that has been roaming the area for centuries.

The farmers of the land seem to treat it as if there is no myth whatsoever, but science has yet to capture or otherwise prove its existence.

The locals call it Orang Pendek which reportedly means “short person” in Indonesian.

My first thought when starting the episode was “Oh great, another bigfoot. Woohoo.” It seems like every area has their own bigfoot and all of the stories always seem the same.

Orang Pendek is no bigfoot, though. Orang Pendek is tiny — reportedly never more than 3 or 4 foot tall. He’s covered in fur, and has been known to rummage through and steal the crops of the local farmers.

There have been a number of expeditions to try to recover the creature, but other than a few compelling eye-witness accounts there has been no body or even photographic evidence of the creature.

What has been found, however, is a few tracks and a few hairs. The hairs were sent in for DNA analysis but only returned human DNA.

My first thought was that it was because it was human hair, but the scientist conducting the tests warned that it could be from improper handling of the hairs.

The tracks are odd things, too. The big toe is off to the side of the foot, instead of pointing forward like in humans. This is interesting, since it would be bipedal motion that isn’t quite like our own.

National Geographic is funding a study for which they have placed numerous cameras around the Sumatran jungle that will take pictures of any animals that walk by. Only time will tell if they catch the elusive Orang Pendek on film.

As technology advances, so does our ability to locate things that are otherwise hard to find.

The recent search for Steve Fossett has brought just such a technology to the forefront, known as Mechanical Turk.

This high resolution satellite imagery gathered by the program has allowed people to find numerous plane crashes. With it solving these mysteries, could it be applied to solve others?

Author Benjamin Radford thinks so.

In his article, he describes how this technology could (and should) be used to try to find existence of some of the larger cryptids alleged to roam the globe.

Is Bigfoot too small to show up on camera? Maybe, he posits, but a breeding population shouldn’t be.

With lake monsters being so large, and having to surface for air from time to time, they may make an excellent candidate for satellite discovery.

Although this is an intriguing idea, the article correctly points out that the imagery is unlikely to prove anything.

If nothing is found, then cryptid believers will just argue that the animals in question remain well hidden. If they are found, though, zoology as we know it may change forever.

Sounds intriguing. Let the search begin!

What do you get when you cross X-Files with Harry and the Hendersons?

Give up?

The answer is a new comic by Image Comics called Proof.

Apparently this new comic is going to detail the exploits of a duo of cryptid hunters as they traipse around the globe searching for cryptids for an undisclosed government agency.

The first story arc is reportedly going to be called ‘Goatsucker’ and we can all guess what that’s going to be about.

But wait — there’s a twist. It turns out that one of agents, John “Proof” Prufrock, is a little bit odd.

So odd, in fact, that he’s not even human. He’s Bigfoot himself.

The driving motivator for the main hero is to discover other hairy bipeds out there that may be related to him.

It sounds like the premise for the comic is pretty solid, but the article linked above mentions all of the cryptids they’ll be running into in the first six issues and I seriously worry that they may run out of cryptids way too fast.

There are a lot of alleged cryptids in the world, but if they hit all of the major ones too early, they’ll have to fall back to the really boring, rare, or unlikely ones and that won’t be any fun for anyone.

But if you’re into comics and you’re into cryptids, this is going to be the book for you. I’ve been out of the comics loop for a while, but maybe this is a reason to get back in.

As is and will always be the case with all things cryptid, Cryptomundo has already reported this story.

I gotta post about something on Fridays, though, and I think it’s safe to assume that there isn’t 100% overlap with our respective readerships.

So basically there’s a lady in Texas who has found herself a Chupacabras — as roadkill no less.

Being a smart one, she’s preserved the specimen and it can be viewed in its horrifying detail through a number of photos.

Take a look at the picture on the right here and you’ll see that there is little resemblance.

The creature that Ms. Canion has on her hands looks an awful lot like a dog to me (or at least some member of the family Canidae).

At any rate it seems to be an odd breed of dog. A lot of folks seem to be pointing towards the Mexican Hairless Dog as the culprit, but it is also pointed out that this breed of dog is exceptionally rare and wouldn’t be expected to just be found as roadkill in the middle of Texas.

Stranger things have happened.

It remains to be seen whether DNA testing will be done on the specimen. I hope that it is because it’s always nice to end these things definitively.

Whether it’s a new breed of dog or some coyote with mange, it’s just not freaky enough to be a Chupacabras in my opinion.

I’m gonna hold my breath for a sexier specimen somewhere down the road.

(Look Loren, I learned to spell it right!)

As anyone who reads my blog will have surmised by now, I’m a cat owner. Not only do I own two cats, I’m actually pretty enamored with the whole Felidae family.

The cats are an amazing species of animal. They are the epitome of the natural hunting machine and they’re one of the most adaptable species on the planet.

There are cats that live in mountains, deserts, jungles, tundra, and plains. They range in size from that of the modern house cat to the huge tigers of Siberia.

Yet there are some places that cats don’t live. Or are there?

(Note that the picture below is not a picture of the Beast of Exmoor — it is a stock picture of a black panther)

The Beast of Exmoor is really no beast at all.

Although the name would have you believe it was a hulking monster from the annals of the Brothers Grimm, the Beast of Exmoor is actually more commonly described as a puma or panther.

This fascinating cryptid has been reported since the 1970s in the areas of Somerset and Devon of the United Kingdom where there are no official populations of large cats. Numerous witnesses have claimed to see these cats in the area, with many farmers blaming them for a loss of livestock.

Largely, the UK government maintains that there is no Beast of Exmoor and any sightings are merely exaggerated reports of house cats or dogs.

There have been a few pictures that have shown up over the years but skeptics maintain that these pictures are of common house cats since there are no other objects in the picture to indicate the size of the animal being photgraphed.

Cats have definitely shown their ability to survive almost anywhere, however, so is it possible that a few escaped big cats could lead to a sustainable population in the hills of Exmoor?

Or is it a breeding population of big cats that have escaped human detection for centuries?

Until such an animal is captured or more accurately photographed there is nothing to do but speculate on what exactly the Beast of Exmoor is.