I have a confession: I like cryptozoology. I want the monsters to be hiding. Cryptozoology is an easy hobby to mock, and I’ll be mocking parts of it. The question is not whether bigfoot or Nessie are real – they are not, and you can dismiss the cases for them trivially. What interests me is how badly so many people, myself included, want the answer to be yes, and what that desire is doing in a century when the animals we already know about are vanishing faster than we can count them.

The wish

Many of us grew up with these stories, and in Britain, the old empire, they came with extra emphasis. White people with fancy accents went out past the edge of the map and came back with diaries full of wonderful tales and improbable creatures. They reached the poles, summited Everest, found the source of the Nile, charted vast rainforests. The okapi is the classic case, a forest relative of the giraffe that European science only recognised in 1901 after years of rumour. The story is a good one, and remains one of the founding myths of the Zoological Society of London. Even now, everyone who visits zoos loves to see an okapi.

We also know the story is incomplete. The forest was never blank. People lived there, knew the animal, and had a name for it long before a European wrote one down. None of these stories are true, really. Someone, somewhere, already knew these things. Local “help” did most of the labour for our intrepid white heroes. Regardless, they still work. They teach us to want another unexplored forest, another remarkable mammal, another revelation that overturns everything we thought we knew. We want a world that can still surprise us.

That world is gone. The map is full, drawn by satellites with far greater fidelity than any human could manage. The “last great explorer”, Ranulph Fiennes, is a legal football as relatives fight for the right to supervise his final years. The map is full, but the world it describes is emptying. Monitored wildlife populations have fallen, on average, by something like three-quarters since 1970. Species are going extinct at tens to hundreds of times the natural background rate. A million are thought to be at risk, and the rate is accelerating. We are living through one of the great extinctions in our planet’s history, and this time we are the asteroid.

It’s strange how quietly this is happening. There is no emergency cabinet meeting, no front page story – all we get is a figure in a report, a line about a dead beetle nobody had heard of. The Bramble Cay melomys was declared extinct in 2016, perhaps the first unambiguous case of a mammal disappearing from our world because of anthropogenic climate change. How many of us remember? How many of us ever knew?

This, then, is my claim: we want animals to be hiding because accepting that they’re gone means accepting the loss, our share in it, and our duty to stop the next one. A surviving monster, a cryptid out there in the woods, is a consolation. In contrast, protecting a habitat or running a breeding program is a chore that will never end. Cryptozoology comforts us, whilst the real work asks for decades of effort. Cryptozoology is rooted in the same love that makes extinction so hard to accept, but ultimately it is a false hope. It’s anaesthetic.

What cryptozoology is

Cryptozoology began as something more serious than it is now. Bernard Heuvelmans, the modern founder of the field, set out to gather scattered reports and possible physical evidence into a systematic study of undocumented animals. He was no conman; he was serious about it. The trouble is the label, which now contains within it several very different projects. Cryptozoologists can hunt for unknown species, like bigfoot, or believe extinct ones survive, like the thylacine.¹ Sometimes it is about reporting animals in the wrong place, as with British big cats. At its worst it becomes reading folklore as zoology and crediting animals with supernatural powers. An escaped jaguar in Hertfordshire lends no credibility to an unknown ape in Oregon, yet under one banner the claims borrow from each other constantly.

The narrative sometimes begins when a European arrives, even where others have long known, named, hunted, or lived alongside the animal. Formal zoology is international and ‘Western science’ erases the Malagasy, Colombian and Ecuadorian researchers who do much of the work. The opposite fantasy is just as tired: Mokele-mbembe turns Africa into a surviving prehistoric world, and the expeditions that chased it were steeped in colonial nostalgia and creationist expectation: the hope that somehow, somewhere, a dinosaur has been kept for us. Treating a being that belongs to religion or folklore as a dinosaur reproduces the orientalist fantasy of primitive people guarding ancient secrets. One failure dismisses observations because their authors lack institutional status; the other romanticises tradition until every story proves a cryptid. Both turn people into props for our fantasies and the animal into a prize to be claimed.

The vocabulary is muddled too. “Extinct,” “possibly extinct,” and “unrecorded for a long time” are not synonyms, and a gap in the records doesn’t mean that we’ve established an animal has definitively gone. The cryptid community presents every rediscovery as the overturning of a premature verdict, when reality is much less concrete. Researchers often think that survival was likely all along, but simply didn’t have the funding to establish it. It is important that we don’t let this convince us that, just because an echidna survives in New Guinea, bigfoot must surely be out there in the Appalachian foothills. An unusual report can justify investigation, but it must earn its own credibility; the only questions worth asking are whether a search could produce genuine evidence, and whether the funding is best spent there or elsewhere.

None of this is to say that the world has run out of surprises. A living coelacanth turned up in 1938 when it was previously assumed to have died with the dinosaurs. In 1992, during a survey in Vietnam, scientists examined an unfamiliar skull in a hunter’s home, and the saola entered the record. In 2003 the kipunji was described and given a genus of its own – a distinctive African primate discovered within our own lifetimes. Substantial mammals can still turn up, and that ought to be exciting. But look at what made these cases convincing: observation, physical evidence, local knowledge and patient investigation. It was not enthusiasm, Google searches, or blurry photos that discovered them. We must also remember that an unexpected discovery doesn’t represent a victory for the cryptozoological movement, however keenly they claim it. So what do these cases encourage? Open investigation of poorly understood regions and wildlife, or confidence that our blorbos must exist too? Many make the wrong choice.

The hobby offers a great deal. Cryptid hunting gives people a reason to walk into the woods, learn a landscape, and pay attention to its inhabitants. Most of us in our capitalist world live between screens, and have little contact with the natural world. An elusive creature to hunt is an invitation back outside. Walking and camping, adventure, strange sounds at night, the slow knowledge of a place and the pleasure of knowing you will never know it all – these are good things, and people should experience them. Mothman shows it at its best. Point Pleasant holds a festival, with stalls and merchandise and a local identity built around a creature that few will seriously claim to believe in. That’s communal affection, and nobody’s being fooled.

You could fairly say I’m taking a hobby too seriously. Nobody was ever harmed by a Mothman t-shirt. I agree, and my complaint isn’t with the fun. It’s with what the fun stands in for – the attention, affection, and money a real animal might get if we could feel for it what we feel for a cryptid. The hobby is harmless until it becomes the only place our wonder goes. There’s a second problem, too: an investigation wants to reach an answer, but a continuing mystery sustains another program, another expedition, another festival, another month on Patreon. Mystery can be sold, and there is no shortage of salesmen.

The UFO world shows where that leads, and it’s uglier. Self-appointed insiders sell access to forbidden knowledge, disclosure is always imminent but never arrives, every failed prediction is blamed on suppression. Books, interviews, and subscriptions monetise the waiting. Nobody is ever required to verify anything. UFO belief is inherently tied to apocalyptic thinking and right-wing conspiracy traditions: hidden control, treacherous institutions, an enlightened few who see through it all, and, inevitably, white supremacy. The Tall Whites exist to guide us to paradise, and the Jews – always the Jews – stand in their way. Cryptozoology is warmer, friendlier, and more rooted in genuine affection for the world. It has its own conspiracy-minded fringe and its own celebrity opportunists, sure. They deserve to be called out, and I will talk about one later. Mostly, though, the enthusiasm is simple. People like animals and would love an extraordinary one to turn up. That affection deserves better than to be farmed, whether for mockery or for money. So let’s approach it with respect, then make the case against it.

Seeing things

Consider the woods at night. All is dark, sounds arrive without a source, and a landscape that seemed normal in daylight becomes alien. A snapped twig, a pale shape that may be a stump, an inexplicable feeling of being watched: anyone already thinking about bigfoot has their explanation prepared. It isn’t their fault. That is just what the brain does. Something is heard or glimpsed, the witness interprets it, the experience acquires a familiar name, and retelling makes the interpretation feel more certain than the original experience ever was. Four stages of progression, and only the first is rooted in reality.

Dark water changes the scenery, but not the mechanism. Reflections, distance, and odd wakes make shape and size hard to judge, and, once again, a brain primed by the Loch Ness legend can take ordinary phenomena for something extraordinary.

None of this means the liars are imaginary. A handful of hoaxers have done a great deal of work. The 1934 “Surgeon’s photograph” gave Nessie her famous silhouette, and only sixty years later was it confessed to be a toy submarine, filmed for a grudge. In 1958 a newspaper coined the name “bigfoot” after huge footprints appeared at a California logging site. Decades later, the witness’s family disclosed that they had been made with carved wooden feet. Not everyone accepts these explanations, and many believers desperately attempt to prove the hoax itself a hoax. A few pranksters can plant a legend, and sincere people keep it growing, even defending it when the deception is revealed. Cryptids have a momentum all of their own.

I called the cases trivial to dismiss, and they are. A large primate in North America would have to reproduce, feed, travel, and die. Each step leaves traces, and none are ever found. We live in a world where every pocket carries a high-resolution camera, and the forests are salted with motion-triggered ones that never get tired or bored. These cameras caught the saola, one of the shyest and most endangered large mammals on Earth. They caught the echidna. None has caught a bigfoot, and the most famous footage remains a known hoax from 1967. In Nessie’s case, repeated surveys, including with the use of DNA evidence, have found nothing but eels. If anything was there, in any of these cases, it would have been found.

British big cats are a different kind of claim, because the animals are real. Pumas and leopards live in collections, animals escape, and some may simply have been let go by owners who couldn’t cope or grew bored of them. There has never been any evidence of breeding populations, or even of survival into our present century; these are not animals built to survive our winter. One escaped animal is only evidence of one animal – and yet we keep seeing them. A dog crossing a field is read as a melanistic jaguar. A house cat looks enormous when distance and scale work together to fool our eyes and cameras. Vegetation and shadow make ordinary animals loom larger in our imagination, and the local legend supplies an explanation before our brain can properly process what it has seen. The imagined cat gives us an emotional geography: a tidied countryside becomes dangerous and unknown again.

The echidna is worth a proper look, because it’s what real discovery looks like. In New Guinea, local knowledge, hard fieldwork, and camera trapping combined to document the survival of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna in 2023. Researchers this year photographed pygmy long-fingered trioks² and ring-tailed gliders, previously known only from the fossil record. These cases have much of the excitement that cryptozoology promises. The difference is the evidence behind the story. What would persuade? Clear observations. Biological material. Identifications that survive comparison with known animals. Preferably, all of it at once. How often does a genuine cryptid come with even one piece of this puzzle?

The animals we can’t bear to lose

Those are the easier cases. The harder one is about an animal that certainly existed, certainly lived among us, and is missed more than any cryptid could be. The last captive thylacine died in 1936. We know the date and we know the circumstances. It belongs to the photographed world. We can watch it move, which is what undoes us: the stripes, the stiff tail, the extraordinary mouth. It is at once familiar and alien, pacing on our screens. It feels unbearable that the film has outlived it. And so, we refuse to believe it. Other animals lived beyond the camera, and live still. Nature escaped the ending we enforced on it. Somewhere in the Tasmanian scrub, the thylacine still lives. It is tempting to give that hope room, because it is a kind impulse. I feel it too.

The hope has an unpleasant companion, which is that we did this. Farmers lobbied for the animal’s destruction, believing it was killing their sheep, and the Tasmanian government paid a bounty for every corpse. Legal protection arrived in July 1936. Two months later, the last documented thylacine was dead. The protections came when there was nothing left to protect.

You can change the animal and the setting, but the story remains the same. Sheep become cattle. Ranches become palm oil, soy, timber, roads and suburbs. The bounty becomes a subsidy. The thylacine wasn’t killed by a vanished era, but by a method, and that method is capitalism. That method is still running.

Consider what the thylacine hope actually does for us. It makes extinction provisional. If the animal might still be out there, then the footnote isn’t final, the endling wasn’t quite the end, and the guilt can stay on hold. A society that believes extinction is reversible will tolerate it, and ours does. Every animal we refuse to let go is rehearsal for the ones we have yet to kill.

There are variations on the theme. The ivory-billed woodpecker is harder to judge, because the people looking are doing much that deserves support. Its last accepted sighting was in 1944, but it remains the most surveyed-for bird in the United States. The swampy old-growth forest it needed survives only in fragments, and those fragments are now protected. There is a constant stream of “sightings” that prove ephemeral. Ultimately, we must admit it is gone. The argument itself is a comforter, and every year of “maybe” is another in which nobody has to admit that we killed this bird.

The baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, shows the ending more starkly. Around 400 were thought to survive in the 1980s. In 1997 a survey confirmed 13, and in 2006 there was nothing. The conservationists had lost the race; overfishing, shipping, and pollution won. The baiji didn’t vanish into the dark, either. It died in one of the busiest rivers on Earth, in full view and after years of warnings. This is how most extinctions happen: slowly, in public, and with everyone looking elsewhere. In 2007 and 2016 hope was briefly rekindled when large white mammals were filmed in the river. These were finless porpoises, which are themselves now critically endangered. Whilst we looked for cryptids, it was the animal actually in the water that needed us.

Selling the wish

Now the wish has a business model. In 2022, Colossal Biosciences announced it was working to bring back the thylacine by gene-editing cells from the fat-tailed dunnart. Its co-founder predicted that within ten years there would be wild thylacines in the Australian bush. This is a scam. The gene-editing done by this company does not bring back an extinct species any more than asking an LLM to generate an image of them does. What comes out is a living animal, a dunnart, with a handful of genes edited to superficially match the aesthetic of the dead one. Even if it worked, it wouldn’t matter much. Bringing an animal back doesn’t restore the habitat and ecosystem it lived in. They died for a reason, and we can’t just expect a magical techbro to fix that.

It is also a dangerous promise. Much like the wider cryptid movement, it tells us that extinction isn’t permanent and we needn’t worry. Why worry? Give us money, and we’ll bring them back. Don’t spend it on habitats or breeding programmes. No hedgerow ever held a press conference.

The charismatic TV version of the same business is Forrest Galante, biologist, plagiarist, fantasist, and proud Rhodesian. Galante is the most successful salesman of the wish that this whole essay is about. He has built his name on the thylacine, on an endless supply of rumours and “new leads” that never resolve and never need to. The rumour is the product. He has also lent his face and his public standing to Vantara, a vast greenwashing menagerie in India that poses as the world’s largest zoo. It is not, of course. It isn’t a zoo at all. It’s the Ambani family’s private playground, off-limits to the public and fuelled by thousands of illegally imported animals, many critically endangered. Attention and money are the scarcest resources conservation has, and this is where it goes. Ask how many people have listened to a podcast about the thylacine, and how many have heard of the saola.

Meanwhile, Tasmania withers and dies. The Tasmanian devil, the closest surviving relative of the thylacine, has lost most of its numbers to a contagious cancer. The swift parrot breeds nowhere else, but is down to scant hundreds in the wild and nests in forests that are still being logged. Yes, a reserve population exists in zoos. I have seen a pair, in Berlin. They deserve better than to live as curios in cages, no matter how well-furnished. Captive breeding is an emergency measure, insurance against the day the forest is gone and we have already failed. Australia has one of the worst records of mammal extinction of any country. The most recent ones, the Christmas Island pipistrelle and Bramble Cay melomys, were lost in living memory. They had no funding, no attention, and now they are gone. The country obsessed with looking for a dead mammal is losing the living ones.

Rediscovery would be wonderful, but conservation can’t rely on hope. There is no mystery in the thylacine. It is not waiting to be found. It’s just dead. We have to accept its extinction, our responsibility in it, and our responsibility in preventing the next one.

What we haven’t found yet

Notice what the monsters have in common: they’re all spectacular. Cryptid classics are large, distinctive, and easy to imagine as individuals – an intelligent ape, a dinosaur, a stripy marsupial – and each promises immediate spectacle. Our enthusiasm for undiscovered animals often carries the unspoken condition that we find them exciting. Despite this, most of the world’s unresolved biodiversity belongs to invertebrates, fishes and other organisms that most of us couldn’t tell apart, and most of what we’re losing belongs to the same unglamorous majority. Real zoology demands patient work, genetics, museum specimens and deep expertise. That’s too hard, so why not look at AI-generated images of Bigfoot instead? Admiring an impressive silhouette takes less effort than appreciating the beautiful differences actually present in nature, and real animals are no less gone just because few could have told them apart.

Even the big ones are hard to see. Giant squid were known from carcasses and the stomachs of whales, but it was 2004 before one was first photographed in its natural habitat. Then there’s the frog. In 2014, the Atlantic Coast leopard frog was formally described from a region that includes urban New York, using its calls and genetics. For centuries it had simply been confused with familiar frogs. Americans have combed forests for an ape whilst an unrecognised amphibian called along their own coast.

Mouse lemurs make the same point about a whole mammal genus. Populations once lumped together turned out to be distinct species. Two became 24, and an animal that was considered safe – as safe as any primate can be in Madagascar – is now a great many threatened ones. Several, including Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, the smallest primate of all, may already be gone. They may have been gone before they were ever formally differentiated from their cousins. Too often, naming a species is the last thing we do before drawing a red line through it.

Survival is not safety

Even when an animal is found, even when it’s counted and photographed and celebrated, what we’ve found is usually a remnant. The echidna survived, but in a small fraction of what it once inhabited. The mouse lemurs are named, and marked as critically endangered. The saola I mentioned earlier hasn’t been detected since 2013: if it isn’t extinct already, it will be within this decade. The great rediscoveries tend to be last stands, found at the moment they are the hardest to save.

Look at how we talk about “survivors.” The last two northern white rhinos there will ever be are guarded around the clock by armed rangers as we wait for the inevitable. The vaquita, the smallest porpoise in the world, is counted in the low dozens at best. The Javan rhino clings on in one national park. The kākāpō, a flightless parrot, numbers a couple of hundred, and every one of them has a name. Tigers, orangutans, Amur leopards, gorillas: alive, yes, and squeezed into slivers of the country they once owned, in numbers that would have been unthinkable to whoever first wrote their names down. We call it success if the count rises by a few, and hold up their survival as though it were a rescue. Rather call it a hostage situation.

Many of these survivors are worse off than the headlines admit. Conservation biologists have grim terms for these populations: extinction debt, the living dead, survival without recovery, endlings. They are still counted, still listed as present, and yet are already dead. The bar for “success” has become “not yet gone.” We would not accept that bar for ourselves. Imagine a people, any people, reduced by three-quarters in fifty years. The survivors live in a few fenced reserves on a small fraction of their old land, counted by name, guarded by armed men, unable to leave. Imagine being told their population had “stabilised.” We would not say they were doing well. A great many of us refuse that bar for the people of Gaza, or Darfur, or Yemen, or the Rohingya, and rightly so. Why do we accept it for these animals?

What have we done, what can we do?

This isn’t really about cryptozoology. It’s about what we’ve done, and how we hide from it. It’s ecocide, and we retreat into fantasies about animals that don’t exist, or did but no longer do. None of us can do anything about climate change alone. None of us can fix this. All we have are the tiny fragments of attention and money that the late capitalist lives we lead allow us. It’s tempting to give up, and retreat into those fantasies, because what else can we do? The extermination belongs to beings which cannot vote, protest, or spend money to remind us. We spend far more subsidising what destroys habitat than we spend protecting it, but who amongst us wants to live in a log cabin?

The baseline shifts, and what was once unthinkable becomes normal. Each generation takes the diminished world it was born into as normal, and nobody ever sees the whole loss at once. A child today may think a field with a few butterflies is a meadow. In my childhood I saw hedgehogs; the expansion of concrete and the escalating summer droughts have taken them. The bees are going. Remember road trips? The layer of dead bug spatter on the bonnet? Where is it now?

There is a nature reserve a few miles’ walk from my house. It isn’t big – around 50 acres. That’s 31 football fields for those who speak the right sort of English, and 38 for Americans. It has been there for most of my life, and never once did I think to go. Recently, I did.

The walk is not a pretty one. It took me through suburbs of concrete and brick, where nothing living can be seen save for wood pigeons resting on TV aerials. I passed into farmland, the “green and pleasant” countryside that Britain so loves. This, too, is dead. Fields of harvested crops are presided over by flocks of carrion crows. Finally, I entered the reserve, a tiny postage stamp of peat bog and old woodland surrounded by dead places. For the first time I can remember, I heard a cacophony of birdsong. You don’t see the birds, really, except as distant shapes flitting through the trees, but patience and a helpful app can tell you what they are. Wrens, finches, jays, tits, goldcrests, ravens and buzzards. Twenty species in an hour. A little corner of England is still alive.

There is a recording of a bird called the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō. It was made in 1987, in a Hawaiian forest, and it is the last male anyone heard. He sings, and then he stops, leaving a gap the exact length of a reply. Then he sings again. Nothing answers, because there was nothing left to answer. The recording has outlived the bird, as the film outlived the thylacine, and I challenge any reader to listen to it without feeling something. I don’t have the words to describe how it makes me feel, but I know it isn’t comfort. Comfort is what the cryptids and the monsters and the thylacine are for. Set it against the reserve: twenty species, all calling at once, and every one of them has an answer.

The reserve does not exist by accident. It exists because a very small number of people thought it worth preserving, and put in the effort to convince the council. It survived a plan a few years ago to turn it into a housing development. Six thousand people signed a petition, and the plans were withdrawn. I neither knew nor particularly cared at the time, but enough people – and it was not very many – did to save this place. You might not be able to stop climate change, but this, you can do. Defend whatever piece of the world is within your reach. If you have a garden, plant meadow grasses. Leave a log pile for insects. Dig out a pond for frogs. Turn up to the meeting and sign the petition. If nothing else, you can give the world your attention and your care. Just, please, stop looking for the thylacine.