Free Republic

"WATER monsters" appeared in Kanasi Lake in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region again, Xinhua news agency reported. The "monsters" created a large wave in the lake about 8:20am on Thursday, and several witnesses recorded them with digital cameras until they disappeared eight minutes later, the report said. The 15 unidentified objects gathered together for some time, and then scattered to form a line like a fleet of ships, the report said. But they were reportedly much bigger than cruise ships. Kanasi, the country's deepest alpine lake, is at the center of the Kanasi nature reserve, the only Chinese reserve located...

AN eagle-eyed security guard with too much time on his hands claims to have found photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster in satellite images. British security guard Jason, 25, told The Sun "I couldn't believe it. It's just like the descriptions of Nessie." Researcher Adrian Shine, of the Loch Ness Project, said: "This is really intriguing. It needs further study." Sightings have been claimed for centuries. The object, pictured to the right, can be found by entering co-ordinates Latitude 5712'52.13"N, Longitude 434'14.16"W in Google Earth.

Along with other educational cable stations such as the Military Channel, Nat Geo, and Discovery, I love watching the History Channel. Recently the History Channel has aired a number of programs on the legendary hairly man-like ape often called Bigfoot on a special series called Monster Quest. Some creatures thought to be myth actually do exist such as the Giant Squid. The Gorilla was only discovered and confirmed in the 1800s. The evidence for the existence of a large primate living in the North American wilderness rests largely with a large number of eyewitness sightings and encounters as well as...

February 18, 2008 The skunk ape: Florida's answer to the abominable snowman Jacqui Goddard Deep in the swamps of Florida, something is stirring. Witnesses to its haunting presence speak of howls in the night, unexplained footprints in the mud and glimpses between the trees of a fiery-eyed creature that reeks of death. Now, a 30-strong team from The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) has embarked on an expedition to try to flush out the mighty skunk ape - the Sunshine State's answer to the abominable snowman. They have thermal imaging equipment, video cameras and microphones poised to capture the secrets...

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.” That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements. The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret...

CHANDLERVILLE — It was an encounter along Illinois 78 near Chandlerville that lasted just seconds. But it left a lasting impression on a driver going from Cass County to Tazewell County that night. "When it hit the shoulder, it looked back at me," he said. "I said to myself out loud, '(expletive)ing Bigfoot!'." Garver was driving the stretch of road about 10:30 p.m. Nov. 29, heading north, about 85 miles north of Alton. "I saw a large animal jump into the road about 40 yards ahead. When it hit the road, I could see very large legs spread wide in...

The thing was the size of a pickup truck. It reeked of decomposing mammal, and it was covered in what appeared to be long, white hair. “We’ve seen whales wash up before, and some that had been stuck on the shore for a few weeks, and never have they grown hair like that,” she said. Lynn touched it and said it was “firm but squishy” and felt blubbery. She could tell it was the body of something; she just didn’t know what. Tegner was confused by the long tendrils that appeared to be attached to it. He could see them...

JAKARTA (AFP) – Four calves of the world's rarest species of rhino have been found in remote jungle on Indonesia's Java island, giving hope to efforts to save them from extinction, an official said Tuesday. "Four Javan rhinos of six to seven months age were seen by scientists on the beach near the jungle during a recent field survey," Agus Primabudi, the head of the Ujung Kulon National Park in West Java, told AFP. Alerted to the presence of humans, the baby rhinos fled into the park to where two adult rhinos aged roughly 35 to 36, believed to be...

This healthy, 1-year-old male offspring of a rose-breasted grosbeak and scarlet tanager is the first-ever documented hybrid of its kind. The two species have such divergent nesting preferences that they have been on independent evolutionary trajectories for at least 10 million years—until now. Credit: Stephen Gosser In June of 2020, Stephen Gosser, a self-described "diehard birder," was out in the woods of Western Pennsylvania when he thought he heard the song of the elusive and strikingly beautiful scarlet tanager. The blood-red bird with black wings and tail is a favorite among birders for both its beauty and rarity, as the...

Commentary: A research project to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from oblivion reignites debate about de-extinction. A preserved thylacine body lies curled up on a metal table. Two scientists in white lab coats handle the body. PIC at LINK (Getty) The preserved body of a thylacine being prepared for display in an Australian museum in 2005. When Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University, took to the stage at 2013's TEDx De-extinction conference in Washington, DC, he posed a simple question. "De-extinction," he started. "Hubris? Or hope?" The answer, he offered to a smattering of laughter, was "Yes." Greely's...

Elephants thought extinct may have survived Pygmy elephant with radio collar. Credit: Cede Prudente The Borneo pygmy elephant may not be native to the island of Borneo after all. Instead, the population could be the last survivors of the Javan elephant race – accidentally saved from extinction by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, suggests an article co-authored by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The origins of the pygmy elephants, found only on the northeast tip of the island in part of the Heart of Borneo, have long been shrouded in mystery. Their looks and behavior differ from other Asian...

Twice as nice: The two-headed garter snake is in the care of the Herpetology lab on East Campus. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln's herpetology lab is seeing double after securing a two-headed garter snake. The newborn bicephalic garter snake was discovered by Joshua Marshall of Hastings while clearing brush in Clay Center on Sept. 4. "I lifted up a log and wasn't surprised to see two small snakes, but then I realized that they weren't making great progress because there were two heads," he said. Once Marshall realized it was a two-headed snake, he placed it in a jar and...

Sightings of alligator gar - dubbed “monster fish” in mainland China - which authorities fear could trigger an ecological disaster have been reported in at least eight provinces. This followed the draining of an entire lake in central China on the weekend that eventually caught a pair of the invasive fish species. The large species of freshwater fish, which has razor-sharp teeth and can grow up to three metres long, has captivated the nation after a high-profile, month-long hunt for it that culminated in the draining of an entire lake in the city of Ruzhou in Henan. Now other parts...

Jaws may have terrified you at the cinema, but the iconic great white would have been dwarfed by Carcharocles megalodon, the largest shark in the history of the planet. The giant creatures lived between 23 million and 2.6 million years ago and scientists are divided over how and why the species perished. Now, details of fossils from the huge shark that lived alongside the dinosaurs have been studied for the first time in an attempt to solve this mystery.

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus. The effects of such a supernova—and possibly more than...

SARASOTA, Fla. (WFLA) – A Florida man is recovering after surviving an alligator attack over the weekend. Jeffrey Heim was diving in the Myakka River on Sunday looking for megalodon teeth when he was attacked from behind by an alligator. “I thought it was a boat it hit me so fast or it felt like it was so fast,” the 25-year-old said. He told our sister station WFLA he wasn’t in the water for very long when the attack happened. He thinks the alligator was about 9 feet long and possibly a female. It’s currently alligator mating season in Florida....

Megalodon, the largest shark that ever lived, is known only from its gigantic bladelike teeth, which can be more than 7 inches long. But these teeth, described by some scientists as the "ultimate cutting tools," took millions of years to evolve into their final, iconic form. Megalodon's earliest ancestor, Otodus obliquus, sported three-pronged teeth that could have acted like a fork for grasping and tearing fast-moving fishes. In later megatooth shark species, teeth flattened and developed serrated edges, transitioning to a knifelike shape for killing and eating fleshy animals like whales and dolphins.But the final tooth evolution in this lineage...

The reconstructed megadolon was 16 metres long and weighed over 61 tons. In a new 3D modeling study published this week in Science Advances, we show that the giant extinct shark, Otodus megalodon, was a true globetrotting super-predator. It was capable of covering vast distances in short order, and could eat the largest of modern living super-predators, the killer whale, in five gargantuan bites. It could have swallowed a great white shark whole. The largest shark that ever livedMegalodon was the largest shark that ever lived, and it was around for a long time—from around 23 million to 2.6...

SEA SHELL CITY WAS SET up in 1957 and relocated in 1963 to its current location. The kitschy shop has been selling seashells since. Though none of the shells are native to the area, the shop sells an incredibly wide variety. The crown jewel of the shop is The Man Killing Clam, a bleached shell of a Giant Clam (Tridacna Gigas) that sits proudly along the back wall of the shop. The shell is more than 500 pounds and is ivory in color. There’s a light installed inside the clam to illuminate the maw of the shell. The clam’s image...

The bizarre pom-pom creature is yet to be officially named. An image of the unnamed spaghetti worm from the newly released MBARI video. (Image credit: 2012 MBARI) A bizarre seafloor creature covered with luminous orange, spaghetti-like tentacles recently made its internet debut in newly released video footage. The unusual pom-pom-shaped creature is actually a type of segmented marine worm known as a polychaete, and it belongs to an appropriately named group: spaghetti worms. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) captured footage of the pasta-mimicking worm in 2012 using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), while they were exploring...