h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A few points I find interesting:

The Beast of Bogmin Moor - this is not a "mythical" creature. It is plainly a large cat, such as a puma. There are several of these to be found in the British Isles, once owned by wealthy-families and kept on estates. They were released into the wild following the "Dangerous Wild Animals Act" (I forget the year) making owning these animals illegal. Unfortunately, because they are extremely rare, their sightings and attacks have gained "folklore" status and, as such, scientist and "experts" determined not to be seen to be falling in with the "ghosts and goblins" types (A real credit to science, boys, even if it exists, deny it to keep your credibility - Einstein would be *so* proud) laugh it off in that pompous way and say "what a load of rubbish". In recent years, however, people are starting to accept that these creatures are not supernatural and are a real, if rare, problem. I doubt they are breeding, though, and so they will soon die out.

Dragons are interesting, because they appear in both Western and Far Eastern legend. If they are based on something that does or once existed, I have no idea what it is. There certainly haven't been any recent dragon sightings.

Vampires have taken on a life of their own. We *know* where the story originated, it was Bram Stoker. One day maybe Jedis will become the stuff of myth and legend.

I seem to remember reading that Mermaids were actually some sort of pig-ugly sea creature that sits on rocks and "sings". How these became beautiful, I'll never know.

The Loch Ness Monster - controversial. If it exists, it's undoubtably a though-extinct creature from the dinosaur age. I've seen nothing to convince me it does, although some of the evidence is quite good. The famous footage from the 1920s (which was rubbish anyway) is a fake, though.

Reading about the verdict on Yeti, it reminds me of the Giant Squid. This creature was thought to be the stuff of myth. It had been described as a vast, tentacled sea-creature. "Experts" (pah) claimed it didn't exist..... until the corpse of one was washed up on a beach one day It's still never been seen alive.

With reference to the point of Vampires originating from Bram Stoker, if memory serves, and it usually does , the mythology of vampires goes far further back than Bram Stoker's "Dracula", although the modern idea of vampires comes from him (stakes, sunlight, silver, no reflection etc) I do remember that he based Dracula on a real person, a brutal overlord, I think is the best way to put it, who was reputed to drink people's blood, the rest he used from mythology.

I find it interesting that there is no reference to Faeries or Sprites in the list of mythical creatures, since they have been a part of folklore for a long time.

He based Dracula on a medieval/early Renaissance Russian ruler called Vladimir, known as the Impaler. He would (I have heard) impale his enemies on spikes and even nail the hats to the heads of those who wouldn't take them off in his presence. Oddly, I found out somewhere, he was a relative (I think it was him) of the last Eastern Roman Emperor, Constantine XI, who died defending Constantinople from the Turks.

I went to Loch Ness a couple of weekends ago. (ok, end of september)

Beautiful day, driving down the side of the Loch, it was both bright and cloudy with low hanging clouds drifting up off the surface of the loch. Very 'mystical' conditions, not neccessarily best monster viewing conditions.

It's quite obvious, and quite sad, though why there have been no sightings of monsters for years. It is far too busy. There's a main road down one side of the loch, there is plenty of traffic on the loch. Any large aquatic animal with good hearing (which it would almost undoubtably have - far too murky in the loch to have good eyesight) would be keeping well out the way.

I think there may have been monsters in the loch until quite recently.

Vampires of course wasn't invented by Bram Stoker. Many places had legends of people sucking blood and such. Also had different thing attributed to them. Some had one nostril, other could turn into bats and such. He collected a few of them and made a vampire that defined a new stereotype. He was probably inspired by Vlad Tepes, the guy who impaled people. Also called Son of the Dragon/Devil, which in his language was Dracul.

Why should Nessie be a dead dinosaur. The loch froze solid during the ice age. Probably it is a long necked seal or so. If it exists. But it may not necessarily be scared away by the noise from roads. When they in the 30'ies build a motorway next to it, that was when the sightings topped.

As for the squid, what you said doesn't seem wrong to me. "People claimed to have seen it, but science didn't believe it." Well, a few eye witness accounts isn't enough to determine wether an animal exists or not. "Then one washed up on shore dead, and they had to admit it" Well, of course now they suddenly had good evidence so it would be wrong not to. However the one you talked about was only a medium sized squid. Some believe there is an actual giant squid down there. Bigger than whales.

I'm not surprised something like this turned up, I have a feeling there's someone else than me who is on the Fortean Times bulletin board.

Many mythical creatures have a basis in reality. For example, mariners may have heard manatees singing and seen their silhouettes far beneath the surface of the water. The sailors pobably mistook the manatees for people that live underwater, leading to the myth of mermaids.(I think manatees are the "pig-ugly sea creature" that Zagreb was referring to earlier.)

Dragons are probably based on a large lizard (perhaps the Komodo dragon). People saw the lizard flicking out its long, red, forked tongue and thought the creature was breathing fire. The bite of a Komodo dragon is fatal, encouraging the notion that they are powerful and possibly evil creatures.

Many mythical creatures are just imagined hybrids:
Centaurs - half human, half horse
Griffins - head and wings of an eagle, body of a lion
Minotaurs - half human, half bull
Sphinxes - lion's body, human head
Vampires - humans that suck blood like a vampire bat and, in many stories, have the ability to transform into one
Werewolves - humans by day, wolves on nights with a full moon

Some creatures are just regular animals with an additional body part:
Pegasus - horse with wings
Unicorn - horse with a horn

"People saw the lizard flicking out its long, red, forked tongue and thought the creature was breathing fire"

This doesn't sound like a very likely explanation to me, fire and a red forked tongue are two distinctively different things. Remember, our ancestors had as good eyesight as we do

The story could have been exaggerated. One person says he that he saw a huge lizard with a fiery red tongue, the next person says that he knows someone who saw a lizard with fire for a tongue, and the next person says that there is a fire-breathing lizard loose.

As far as I'm aware many if not most lizards have black or blue tongues. The komodo may be amongst these, although it may be the one with the alarming yellow tongue. Also they have appalling breath which would fit with the common bit of the myth about dragons haveing foul and devestating breath.

However, at least for the European myths I don't think the Komodo's are the culprit. They only live in Indonesia and it took a long time for sailors to get that far. Crocodiles transported over from North Africa are far more likely I reckon.

Didnt they catch a whale a while back that had HUGE sucker marks on it or something? The Loch Ness monster has also be speculated to be a huge eel but that goes against all the pictures ive seen. On mythical sea cretures: The ocean is a vast amount of the earths surface and also very deep, While larger creatures may have ventured up in the time of relativley quiet sailing ships, like the Loch Ness monster they may have been scared away by the large amounts of noise from cargo ships. just food for thought.

Yeah, the scars is one of the reasons some believe there is big squids down there. But the problem is the scars grow with the body. A baby whale attaked by a normal squid would when grown up look like a whale attacked by a giant squid.

ah i see your point, and isnt life also fairly limited in size once you reach a certain depth? ijust thought of that, correct me if im wrong.