A researcher has commented that this past Wednesday his team has discovered that a local freshwater salmon species classified as extinct by the government about seven decades ago, still lives on in Lake Saiko.

Tetsuji Nakabo, Kyoto University professor, commented that he took a look at nine fish from the lake and discovered that they were strikingly similar – in fact the same as – the “kunimasu” or “black kokanee” species of salmon.

If this find is confirmed, it will be the very first time a fish species in Japan which has been classified as extinct has been found living still, the Environment Ministry explained. The ministry has commented it is going to do its best to verify the claims of Nakabo and review its classification of the salmon.

The salmon, a landlocked sockeye, had been seen earlier on only in Lake Tazwa, and was believed to have died off due to an inflow of toxic water sometime in the 1940’s.

However, Nakabo explained there are records which show the salmon’s eggs were taken to other lakes, including Lake Saiko and Lake Biwa, to help improve stocks about half a decade earlier than when they supposedly went extinct.

The species “likely propagated from the eggs from that time,” Nakabo explained.

This discovery came in February, after Nakabo asked fish expert Sakana-kun to show a likeness of the extinct fish.

Sakana-kun requested samples of “himemasu” – a fish similar to that of the “kunimasu” – and discovered they were very similar, and just possibly the same!

Residents of the Daluo village in China’s Guangxi province have caught several weird looking yellow fishes in a cave lake located 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) below ground.

Experts working at the Bama County and Guangxi provincial aquatics institutes have been unable to indentify the fish, which sports a flat mouth shaped almost like the bill of a duck and eye-catching red lips. The mysterious creature is also adorned with a long, slim “moustache”.

According to Li Zuneng, head of the village, members of his community have heard stories about this outlandish fish told by the oldest villagers, but many had assumed that it was some type of fairytale creature. Up until now, no one from the younger generations had actually seen the deep dweller.

The cave where the fish lives is named Fu Yuan Dong, which means Cave of Fortune.

78-year-old Florida resident Russ Sittlow has spotted something big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach at the coast of Pinellas County in western Florida.

The retired engineer first spotted the creature in April, and has now seen two of them – one bigger and one smaller. He estimates the largest to be at least 30 feet long.

“His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge,” he said of that first sighting.

Sittlow think it might be a sea serpent and has nicknamed it Normandy Nessie since he lives on Normandy Road.

“This is a snake I guarantee you, or a serpent like thing that looks like a snake,” he explained, adding that it might be an anaconda or a python or “a mutation there of.” He believes the creature to be dangerous and doesn’t recommend anyone swimming in the canal until the thing has been positively identified.

In order to capture the creature on film, Sittlow set up a surveillance camera and has now recorded “Normandy Nessie” three times. (see the video here) The video shows a dark form that appears to be 30 feet long swimming close to the surface. There is also a sequence where the creature is splashing in the water.

Sittlow’s neighbour Maria VanAiken and her husband have also encountered the elongated animal in the canal.

“I looked up and I saw this like huge-looking creature,” VanAiken said, adding that it wasn’t a manatee or dolphin.

She spotted the creature from her back porch which overlooks the canal. “This huge thing just came out of the water,” she said.

State wildlife officials that have seen the video do not give much for the sea serpent theory; they believe the animal is a manatee.

The remains of a 15 meter[1] long sea living predator has been found in Svalbard, an archipelago located about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The animal, a species of pliosaur dubbed Predator X by the group of scientists who discovered it, lived in the ocean 147 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

Predator X hunting (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

The skull of Predator X is twice as big as the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and researchers believe the jaws of this hunter could exert a pressure of 15 tonnes[2]. The weight of the live animal is estimated to be around 45 tonnes[3].

“It is the largest sea dwelling animal ever found and as far as we know it is an entirely new species”, says palaeontologist Espen Madsen Knutsen[4] from the Olso University in Norway to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Knutsen is a part of the research team who dug out the skull and backbone of the creature during a two week long research expedition to Svalbard in June 2008. The remains were first discovered by Professor Jörn Hurum[5] from the Natural History Museum at Oslo University in 2007. Hurum noticed a piece of bone sticking up from the permafrost, but since it was the last day of the 2007 expedition the group was forced to leave the bone behind without any further investigation after having jotted down its GPS position.

Parts of the head and backbone was dug out during the abovementioned June 2008 expedition and together with an earlier find of a smaller specimen of the same species located just a few kilometres away, scientists have now managed to map together a good picture of what the live animal once looked like.

“We haven’t unearthed a high number of parts yet, but the parts that we do have are important ones and this has made it possible for us to create an image of what Predator X once looked like”, says Knutsen.

The digg site (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

In the excavated area, palaeontologist have found roughly 20,000 bone fragments – the remains of at least 40 different sea dwelling Jurassic animals. Once you’ve started digging in this region, it is fairly easy to spot the bones since their pale colour contrasts sharply against the black earth of the Svalbard tundra. The main difficulty is instead the short dig period and the fact that much time is spent restoring the excavated area after each dig.

“Each time we leave a dig site we have to restore the area. There can be no traces of our activities. This forces us to use half of our time digging up the same spot all over again when we return”, Kutsen explains.

Svalbard lies far north of the Arctic Circle and the average summer temperature is no more than 5°C (41°F), while the average winter temperature is a freezing −12 °C (10 °F). In Longyearbyen, the largest Svalbard settlement, the polar night lasts from October 26 to February 15. From November 12 to the end of January there is civil polar night, a continuous period without any twilight bright enough to permit outdoor activities without artificial light.

The team plans to return to Svalbard this summer to carry out more digging. They hope to find another specimen in order to make the skeleton more complete, and they also wish to unearth the remains of other animals that inhabited Svalbard at the same time as Predator X.

If you wish to learn more, you can look forward to the documentary shot by Atlantic Productions during the Svalbard excavations. The name of the documentary will be Predator X and the animal is actually named after the film, not the other way around. The film will be screened on History in the USA in May, Britain, Norway and across Europe later this year and distributed by BBC Worldwide.

Pliosaur crushing down on Plesiosaur with 33,000lb bite force (Ill.: Atlantic Productions)

All the scientific results will be published in a full scientific paper later this year.

You can find more Predator X information (in English) at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo: http://www.nhm.uio.no/pliosaurus/english/

For many years, residents living along the Great Kali River at the border between India and Nepal have claimed that a mysterious underwater creature is catching and devouring humans who dare to venture into the river. The rumours have now been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade, who says the perpetrator might be a Goonch catfish (Bagarius yarrelli).

Local residents says that the creature probably changed its diet to include freshly caught human flesh after getting used to eating the remains of partly burned corpses. In Hinduism, corpses are traditionally cremated in pyres as a as part of the funeral rite and the remains are often placed in a river.

“The locals have told me of a theory that this monster has grown extra large on a diet of partially burnt corpses,” says Wade. “It has perhaps got this taste for flesh by feasting on remains of funeral pyres. There will be a few freak individuals that grow bigger than the other ones and if you throw in extra food, they will grow even bigger.”

Last year, and 18-year-old Nepali was dragged into the river by a creature described as “an elongated pig”, but this was not the first attack. 10 years ago, a 17-year-old Nepali was pulled below the surface while bathing, and three months later the same thing happened to another young boy.

Jeremy Wade is a biologist and TV presenter who investigated the Kali River-rumours for a TV documentary. You can find out more about him and his work here. (http://www.jeremywade.co.uk/about_jeremy_wade.html)

Today we have the pleasure of bringing you a unique interview with Marc van Roosmalen which illustrates his situation and problems as he sees them. For those of you who aren’t familiar with who Marc van Roosmalen is, what he has done, and his present situation, I recommend reading this short introduction before reading the interview.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Marc!

You have discovered a number of different species. Was finding one of them more special than finding the others? Is it still as much fun to find new species as it was when you found your first new species?

Marc G.M. van Roosmalen (MGMvR): Most fun but also most time and energy consuming for me was finding the ‘Land of Dermis’, where the relatives of Dermis occur – the baby black-capped dwarf marmoset that was delivered on my Manaus doorstep April 1996. With decades of experience in keeping all kinds of primates in halfway houses I knew right away that Dermis represented a new species of monkey and, undoubtedly, also a new primate genus. That event instantly took away the scepsis in me as a primatologist that nowadays it would be impossible to find new species of primates hitherto unknown to science. The quest that followed to find the monkey’s distribution somewhere in the huge Rio Madeira Basin had me stumbling into a Conan Doyle type of ‘Lost World’ – the Rio Aripuanã Basin – a hotspot of biodiversity that I soon recognized to be a totally new ecosystem within Amazonia, whose fauna and flora had never before been inventoried by naturalists, animal collectors, botanists and ornithologists alike. It took me a number of boat surveys to find Callibella humilis, a needle in a haystack as big as France. During innumerable surveys of the local rainforest and through interviews with the locals showing pictures of Dermis I happened to identify at least five other hitherto undescribed primates in the area.

Other highly memorable discoveries were those of some large terrestrial mammals whose existence I did not know of until I had close encounters with them while hiking alone through the forest. First spotting of a giant peccary (Pecari maximus) family silently crossing my trail while I was watching a group of Gray sakis in the canopy, or a group of dwarf peccaries (Pecari?) bumping literally into my feet while chasing one another through the undergrowth. And, back in camp, asking the locals what the hell the creature was that I had come upon that day…

Nowadays, under the Lula regime, it is not so much fun anymore to find new species because you run the risk to get caught in the ‘criminal’ act of collecting and transporting living evidence to support the validity of your find. To be able to publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal you need at least to collect and deposit holotype material in a Brazilian museum. Without the proper collecting permits – a federal “license to kill” you can apply for in Brasilia, but never get granted – you seriously run the risk to be thrown in jail on accusation of what officials in Brazil call “biopiracy”. That is when you – like me – still collect, transport or keep alive any biological sample that could serve as holotype material or for DNA analysis in order to determine the phylogenetic and taxonomic status of your find. This way they make it impossible for Brazilian as well as foreign scientists to carry out biodiversity studies so needed for a sound nature conservation policy.

What do you feel when you finally find a species you have been looking for during a long time?

MGMvR: In the field you really feel yourself catapulted back in time, following the footsteps of the great naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, Spruce, Spix & Martius. Little progress has been made in the Brazilian Amazon ever since my natural-history heroes collected and described a large part of the Amazonian flora and fauna. In this euphoria one tends to forget that times have changed. That having the great privilege to pick up the thread these icons left behind some 150-200 years ago is now considered a ‘criminal act against nature’.

Continue reading →

Another lake monster sighting. This time in West Hartford, Connecticut. The pictures that are supposedly depicting a lake monster were taken in a water reservoir last Friday. The photos were taken by Barbara Blanchfield who claims that she witnessed the sea monster in her pictures surface and then submerge again while out photographing. The Metropolitan District Commission was shown the pictures and it is now working with their wildlife and patrol department to determine what (if any) is in the water.

People who have seen the pictures say that it don’t look like any known animal from the area. My personal opinion after having looked at the pictures is that it looks like a part of an old wooden, stockade like construction of the type that often used to be constructed around channels and ponds to prevent land erosion at the water edge. That also seems like a plausible explanation based on the fact that the sighting took place in a water reservoir which hardly seems like the most likely place to find an undiscovered Sea monster. But I might be wrong and no one would be happier than me if I was proven wrong and the pictures actually depict a new species.

Take a look at the video below and let me know what you think. Am I right or do we have a new (or perhaps a known) species on our hands.

So what do you think about the movie:

Not long ago we also reported on this video of a sea monster filmed with U/W cameras in Sweden.

A swedish documentary film crew claims to have caught images of a famous swedish sea monster on film. The beast is called “storsjöodjuret” which translates into “the monster of the big lake”. Storsjön is the name of the lake in which it supposedly lives. The monster have been sighted for a very long time and is very bellowed by the people who lives by the lake. It has been used to promote the area and have become a symbol for the area in much the same way Nessie is a symbol for Loch Ness.

The team have capture the picture with submerged cameras placed on a small island and you can follow the cameras online here. The film apparently show a large creature generating body heat and since there are no similar large sea creatures in Sweden except for the wells catfish which normally isn’t found this far north they believe the film shows the lake monster.

The team currently have six cameras but are going to place 24 more cameras next year and a NBC is going to make about the lake monster and their work this fall.

If you asked me the video is far from conclusive and very blurry but it is still better than many other videos like this so I decided to post it here and allow you to make up your own mind about what it depicts

The clip is from Swedish television

Transcript if dialog:
TITLE: Sweden’s Legendary Great Lake Monster (Storsjödjuret) has been caught on Film

ANNOUNCER: .6 constantly monitoring submerged cameras have captured poor images of the Storsjöodjuret, and an American TV company is on its way to depict the hunt for it.

VOICE OVER: This is supposedly the first moving images ever caught of the Great Lake Monster (Storsjödjuret) taken by an underwater camera . The red is representing heat. At least the group trying to disciver the lake monster want to believe that the swedish Loch Ness is captured on film. A special monitoring station have been built in Svenstavik.

SUSANNE KINDSTRÖM (on the team) It is clear that what have been caught on film is alive and contain cells as the equipment shows red (heat) So, is it a sea snake or a part of the lake monster on might wonder. As we’ve just discovered.

INTERVIEWER: It can’t be a piece of wood, or something else..?

SUSANNE KINDSTRÖM: That’s NO piece of wood, that I can see! Not with that movement pattern

VOICE OVER: This is supposed to be the back fin of the lake monster, the camera supposedly indicates heat on this video as well [Shown on video is a BLUE rectangle] Since the project Storsjöodjuret began this spring [2008], the interest for it has been huge – most of all from abroad. The american TV-company NBC is said to be making a film about the lake mosnter this fall. Next summer, they (the lake monster team) are going to increase from 6 to 30 cameras. It is on this small island the cameras are placed today.

INTERVIEWER: But.. do you believe you will ever get Storsjöodjuret on film?

KURT JONSSON (project Storsjöodjuret): I believe so. And I am also convinced that the technology will also be able to….(help) . in 15 or 20 years, you will be able to search any lake. From space or with unmanned vehicles. Technology goes forward..

INTERVIEWER: So this won’t end with it being (just) a piece of wood?

KURT JONSSON: No, I don’t think so. Something will turn up, yes.