Truth, Belief and Necropostism

Sorry, I was thinking North-West, wrote North-East. Point is it's said to inhabit forest, and forest isn't exactly dense around the Sahara. However, as for minor details, sure they might be what identifies different species, but they're not what is used to claim the existence of a never-before-seen specie. Minor details are exactly the thing that one-off sightings are likely to get wrong.

You don't have to assume all sightings are wrong, but you can't automatically assume they got it right. If you don't buy the Bonobo explanation, it sounds like you're not really willing to accept anything less that an actual new specie.

As for the platypus, what if I said it had black fur? New specie?

 

Its not that I don't accept the bonobo explanation, nor do I assume all sightings are right. I am just not ready to dismiss the existence of these sighted creatures based on the present evidence. I am not saying they exist, nor am I saying they don't exist. I am saying that based on the present evidence, there is a chance that an animal species, like the one sighted, exists or has existed in that particular area, and more research is necessary before we can dismiss the existence of that species.

Also, the mauritania sighting was of the adjule, not the agogwe, sorry for the confusion.

If you said it had black fur, there could be a chance of it being a new species, and I'd be interested in more sightings.
If there were more sightings, there should be an attempt to actually find one of these creatures in the wild.
Until that very last step, this creature is just a sighting, one that has evidence, but no proof, to support its existence.

 

Then if rusty fur or a height dispute is enough of a difference to warrant the Agogwe sightings as being evidence to support its existence, what's the reasoning for thinking the Adjule is a different creature?

 

Different behavior, since adjule hunt in packs.

And apparently I was wrong before about living in the same area. These are the living areas of the african wild dog . If they really are african wild dogs, we'd need to update that picture quite a bit.

 

African Wild Dogs hunt in packs, jiff. And their territory still borders Mauritania and surrounds the Sahara, just as you said the Adjule does.

 

mauritania is the third country from above on the left(well, actually second country, but it looks like the third). I don't see any red there.


and I quote the wiki

The pack would need to be about a 100 km more to the north than they'd usually be.


Granted, I must admit that the chances are a tad lower than I first thought, but it is still a distinct possibility.

 

An unconfirmed sighting? They don't even know they saw a dog? What about, say, Striped Hyenas, which have also been known to hunt in packs, and inhabit the exact same area we're talking about? They're also exactly the same size and look like African Wild Dogs.

And you think the existence of an undiscovered large canine is a more likely scenario than an African Wild Dog being found slightly out of its range? What if someone saw a Wild Dog in Uganda? New specie again? Especially when you consider that...

Not only does its range include two countries that border Mauritania, anything could have brought it out of its range. We don't even know how accurate that range is. They could have even escaped from captivity.

And that's assuming it even was an African Wild Dog. Between them and hyenas, I think we've got this one covered.

 

actually, thats fair enough.


So, for the first four

Adjule: hyena or african wild dog.
Agogwe: possibly a bonobo, although the length seems to be abnormal
Ahool: not a friggin clue
akkorokamui: impossible

Almas: Furry human. Witnesses mostly unreliable. There seems to be a very wide area of sightings, so its either a large number of small populations or simply a genetic abnormality among h. sapiens. The medicinal book is interesting, but not good evidence. All in all, not impossible, but very unlikely due to the population size needed to cover that wide an area (although mountains+mostly rural make up a bit for that)
Altamaha-ha: Fish that looks like a sturgeon with a crocodile fang-shaped fang. Area ain't very rural, so bit lower on the existence likelyhood chart for that. The news article the wiki page links to seems to have been removed, so all guesses from me are highly uneducated.
De'loys ape: And the first actual photograph http://www.bigfootencounters.com/images/drfrancois.jpg . One photograph which the original maker apparently didn't think was enough proof. Even before we start thinking about how (un)likely it is that such a creature could exist, there is the interesting story where De'loys had to be convinced by someone else to talk about the picture, yet many still attribute it as a hoax on De'loys part. I can't find any reports of sightings besides this one, which although it is from a more reliable source than many, still makes it far more unlikely such a creature would exist. Final verdict: even more unlikely than the Almas, although not as unlikely as the giant japanese squid

 

Jiff, you really have to start being less trusting of alleged sightings. The amount of effort I had to put in to convince you that the Adjule and Agogwe were native animals, when there was no actual evidence to suggest they were actually a never before seen creature, was bordering on the ridiculous, and you're still not even convinced that the small, black or red furred, pink skinned cryptid ape with long arms, a receded brow and opposable toes that gracefully walked on two legs and lives in the forests of East Africa was actually the small, black furred, pink skinned ape with long arms, a receded brow and opposable toes that can gracefully walk on two legs and lives in the forests of East Africa known as the Bonobo.

Sight is flawed. Richard Dawkins even talks about it in his book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

He also discusses Professor Daniel J. Simons' famous Selective Attention Test video, which I'm sure you're familiar with. In addition to the original topic of pareidolia, there needs to be more than a sighting to deem the thought of a potentially undiscovered creature credible.

Basically, if someone claims to have seen an Almas in central Asia, chances are it was a wild person. If someone claims to have seen a Altamaha-ha in the South East of the USA, chances are it was a sturgeon. If someone tries to claim they discovered a new primate and conveniently unburdened themselves of all forms of physical evidence apart from one ambiguous photo, which might not have even been taken where they claim it was, chances are it's a hoax.

 

Its because of sheer chances.

About 6 and a half billion people on this world have eyeballs, and the chance that one of them might run into an unknown creature is a lot bigger than the chance that someone with a DNA kit and the expertise to recognize the DNA of a new species is around for such a sighting. Sure, the 6 billion people are wrong more often, but its only with the sightings of these guys that the guys with DNA kits actually start looking. If you start ignoring the 6 billion, bird-watching books would get a lot thinner.

And yeah, even from a distance you should be able to see the difference between 75 cm of height and 100 to 170 cm of height.

 

Sorry about the delay. First week back at uni which included moving into a new place.

Six and a half billion people isn't a point in your favour. It means more mistaken sightings and a lesser chance of such large species having not already been found and discovered. On average, people are largely uneducated in these areas. Not many people are aware of how untrustworthy eyesight can be and take everything they see as fact, and again, not many people are familiar with the range of animals that already exist, which is something that's been made perfectly clear with almost every cryptid mentioned from the list so far.

I believe I've said this before, but we're able to find polar bears in the Arctic Circle. Endangered, white bears in a white environment, that span across a huge, uninhabited area with an extremely low population density. A quick search showed:

So that's, at most, one bear every thirty-seven square kilometres, and as little as one bear every hundred and thirty-nine square kilometres. And that's thirty years ago, when their numbers have been in decline. So let me ask. How is it that we're able to find polar bears with relative easy, but unable to find these cryptids, which not only inhabit a much smaller area, but an area much more heavily populated by humans too?

And a metre discrepency is nothing from a distance, especially when presented as a range. Furthermore, one thing I remember from the Bigfoot discussion was that the height was embellished several times from the same witness, and considering that the Agogwe-sighters didn't even know what they were looking at, it'd be pretty remarkable for them to have guessed the actual height of it.

 

Some examples of recent discoveries of ape-sized animals that we have not discovered yet

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/s...key-species-caqueta-titi-amazon-colombia.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/10/27/sneezin-rain-new-monkey-stand-bad-weather/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/07/us-brazil-monkey-idUSTRE5665Y820090707

A new kind of ape-sized animal, discovered after locals told scientists about them.



The world is big. And covered in stuff. Sure, the polar bear has got a nice color that makes him hard to see, but there ain't much else standing in the way of observing him. New species related to old ones that are in a forest, are however much harder to find, let alone see long enough to observe them as a new species. You can't properly see them from far away using helicopters, like with polar bears, because there is a jungle in the way.

 

A couple of things...

First, and this really is just a minor issue, but none of those are "ape-sized". The largest of the three, the snub-nosed monkey, is fifty-five centimetres tall, the titi monkey is "cat-sized" and the tamarin is twenty-four centimetres tall. They are not ape-sized.

Secondly, these are examples of new species, one of them being a sub-specie, of a particular genus. While that may sound impressive on its own, there are five other species, as well as a further three sub-species, of the snub-nosed monkey, twenty-nine other species of the titi monkeys, and seventeen other species of tamarin, with a further seventeen sub-species, eleven of which are in the new tamarin subspecies's specie group.

And polar bears live in a flat environment, yet, but they aren't the only example. If I may remind you...

 

Yup, we found a lot of cool stuff. But that doesn't begin to prove that we already discovered all animals living in any forest. It would be like
"Hey, I discovered a new cave in the hymalayas"
"nope you haven't, we have been to the moon"

And you're right about the ape-sized thing, sorry about that.

What does the number of related species have to do with this argument? If they existed, the agogwe would be related to the bonobo and the adjule would be related to the wild dogs. The fact that there are already animals like that would actually make it more likely that such creatures exist.

 

The point is that finding a new specie is hardly ground breaking, especially when so much speciation has occurred in that genus. Most of the time people don't even recognise the specie of an animal they're referring to. If they see a kangaroo, or a hyena, or a squirrel, they'll just say that. They won't say they saw an Eastern grey kangaroo, an American red squirrel or a stripped hyena. So it's not so much undiscovered territory as it is undocumented territory. Another titi monkey is hardly proof of the existence of cryptids.

As for finding an undiscovered cave, that's more akin to finding an untagged monkey. We've found them before, just not this one specifically. And back to the flat environments again, it seems as though the outskirts of the Sahara are pretty flat and clear, and have a drastically higher human population over a much smaller area. So again, if we can find polar bears, we can find any large animal there.

Also I thought you'd claimed the Adjule wasn't a wild dog, and was actually a type of hyena. As for the Agogwe, you're absolutely right that it's probably related to the Pan genus. I've even gone to the effort of naming it for you. Pan paniscus. Thought it had a nice symmetry to it.