Come on. Are you serious? Are you knowledgeable in woodcraft?

One or two prints are often left by animals when the terrain is not one that allows a trackway to be imprinted. Indeed, leaving no tracks are not out of the question.

For example, a rocky shore, icy covering, or water often interrupt the ability of feet to leave good tracks.

Do you leave tracks when you walk about on asphalt roads and concrete walks? Animals often pick the places they step or drag themselves so that tracks are not left so they will not be followed…and eaten.

The problem I have with alleged footprints should be an obvious one to everybody. I’m a man, and when I walk somewhere and leave footprints, I’ve never left one or two. How could a huge creature traverse an impressionable area and leave a lone print, maybe two? It’s just never made any sense to me. I’ve seen the same thing in documentaries about Bigfoot, etc., where we hear about an 800-pound creature that manages to leave behind a lone footprint. It seems to defy common sense.

Couldn’t of said it better myself. Poor things. What is really sad, is these “were” two beautiful animals. And one was just a baby. What a shame.

I saw a lake monster program a few years back where an FBI forensic specialist was commenting on the Art Folden film of Ogopogo. Just what sort of expertise an FBI forensic specialist had to offer a discussion of Ogopogo was never revealed. Anyway, he was clearly stumped by the film. According to him it wasn’t faked. The object in it was large and it submerged and surfaced during the course of the film. Rather than just admit that he didn’t know what the object in the film was, he stated that in a few frames he saw what looked like a reflective shine on the object. As an amateur fisherman, he told us that he had seen shiny fish before and therefore the object in the film must be a school of shiny fish. Are you kidding? First, this guy was a forensic expert, not a fish expert. Second, no effort was made to either produce or recreate a film of shiny fish behaving like the object in the Folden film. This all suited the editors of course, as the program had a very obvious anti-lake monster position.

In another program I saw an “expert” from a natural history museum tell us that Nessie couldn’t be a plesiosaur because plesiosaurs were extinct. A nice bit of circular reasoning that would never be acceptable coming from a “believer”.

I think it is very important to collect all the evidence–even when it’s known to be hoaxed (and I know that that’s not quite the same thing as you’re describing here). When we can place data known to be false beside that which are still unexplained, the latter become even more glaringly in need of explanation (and the former become more obviously fake).

I think that cryptozoologists have, in the main, been very strict in their standards for what constitutes credible evidence; time and again I have seen them quick to be skeptical of new data (witness the recent discussion here regarding Jacob’s Creature). Generally speaking, I do not find that same level among the skeptics, who are either very quick to dismiss something outright or else refuse to even examine it. For example, Jeff Meldrum’s book has comprehensively presented some pretty strong points (dermal ridges and mid-tarsal ridges in footprint casts; ear-witness and sound recordings of vocalizations that fit the vocal patterns of no known animal; ape behavioral patterns that are consistent with the behavior of bigfoot in encounters with humans; data found in very remote places; etc., and some of this has obviously been discussed before). Any skeptic who does not address these points in a very thorough manner is no longer a part of the discussion.

A baby hippo made into an ashtray. Why do I frequently have such misanthropic feelings rush through me?

But I too agree, Loren. Let’s see the evidence, and see if a modern analysis agrees with the old one.

I’d like to see them too