25/06/2024
A must watch for all those interested in cryptozoology and biology tonight on ABC TV Tuesday 25 June @ 8:00 pm and online, a two-part series, Megafauna: What Killed Australia’s Giants? "Australia was once home to extraordinary animals known as Megafauna. These giants lived here for millions of years - but what became of them? A team of scientists re-open this paleolithic cold case."
Rex and Heather Gilroy, beginning in the early 1970s, documented and published encounter reports of what appeared to them to be a few surviving species of megafauna, that were related to them from visitors to their natural history museum in the Blue Mountains. Thus began the modern history of Australian cryptozoology, a quest to determine whether there was any factual basis to these reports.
Cryptozoological research parallels research in any other investigative field. Similar to the activity within law courts without the generally strong emotional attachments, witnesses come forth to describe what they have observed and the jury, in our case those interested members of the general public, weigh up the evidence. As in a court of law, many individuals will have a very strong bias based on their cultural history and cannot bring themselves to believe the witness or the research, especially if the case has little direct evidence beyond anecdotal.
Highly educated, usually city-based experts are generally relied upon, and rural-dwelling experts are often dismissed. City-dwellers generally know that nobody would want to live in rural localities where there is often a lack of service and entertainment and the only things of importance are money and status, more easily obtained in the city. Rural environments have no value beyond the plundering of resources to enrich the city-dwellers since it is well known that all food and anything else of value originates in factories and supermarkets. Protection of the climate and the natural environment that makes food production possible is generally ignored, particularly by big business and their pet politicians. They all know that money is more important and that environmental and climate scientists, not involved in enriching them, can be dismissed. Rural dwellers must be ignored!
An example of this was when Lindy Chamberlain reported that “a dingo took my baby!” Highly educated, city-based experts dismissed her evidence because they knew that dingoes don’t eat babies and the grief-stricken mother was gaoled for years for murdering her daughter. Local first nation people who have lived with dingoes for thousands of years stated that dingoes are opportunistic and will eat babies, unable to understand that people are God-like and should not be preyed upon, but their evidence was ignored because educated, city-based experts know better. Eventually the baby’s clothing was found providing evidence, including DNA, that a dingo was responsible.
DNA evidence is now of primary importance to prove that an individual was present at a crime scene where no body or other evidence is available. DNA evidence is of importance in attempting to determine whether there is any factual basis to cryptozoological reports. There is no evidence for giant kangaroos and giant tortoises surviving out there in the bushland, though there have been a very few reports of giant flightless birds and diprotodons, also highly unlikely to have survived. However, there are many reports of thylacine-like animals, thylacoleo-like animals, gorilla-like animals, perhaps related to the marsupial bear / gorilla Hulitherium thomasettii or the giant Asian ape, animals that naturally occur in low numbers and generally inhabit inaccessible forested escarpments. Perhaps they are just misidentifications of mangy dogs and foxes, giant feral cats and hairy people gone bush. Interesting none the less.
