Comments on: New Frog Species Discovered in New York and New Jersey

By: Pam

Pam — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:30:51 +0000

Oh, you people are blind! That’s clearly a guy in a frog suit! Show me the body! Show me DNA! Show me a note from it’s mother!

Kidding, just feel like it’s easier to pick up a froggy and snap a pic of it in your little hand than to pick up a little squatchy and snap a pic of THAT in your little hand.

By: Novelhawk

Novelhawk — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:11:05 +0000

I’ve been lurking here for years, but this story made me want to register and post.

This story proves one thing: It is a lot easier to discover a new species when you are looking for it. In this case a collection of universities banded together to verify the status of this frog species.

Imagine how quick the status of a species would be determined if a concerted/coordinated effort was made to find it, free from “Barnumian” antics and publicity stunts.

The best chance for cryptids to stay hidden is for mainstream science (and mainstream culture) to scoff at anyone who thinks a serious study is warranted.

The best quote for me was: “‘It is very surprising for a new species like this to have been unrecognized in this area until now,’ said Rutgers doctoral candidate and guest researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory Jeremy Feinberg, who made the initial discovery.”

I can imagine that same quote for the discovery of sasquatch, bigfoot, etc.

Send a team of scientists to the PacNW, with the plan to spend several weeks in deep country. Or send them to the Japanese island with the alleged clouded leopard-type cats, or to the many deep water lakes that supposedly house something, etc.

Cost would be an issue, but it didn’t seem to be a problem for four different universities to “investigate further” regarding the not-a-leopard frog.

By: djwcaw

djwcaw — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:30:57 +0000

Just remember there is a BIG difference in ‘discovering’ a new species of animal that was previously known but misidentified (ie this frog being assumed a leopard frog species) and finding a new animal not seen/documented before.

By: flame821

flame821 — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:48:12 +0000

While I agree with Hapa regarding a large mammal being found I have to add that we won’t find anything if we don’t look. Or more precisely don’t know where/how to look. I often find that people have no concept as to how large an area the Pacific NorthWest Forest is. Google Map it sometime. It is a huge area, densely forested with little to no access in many areas. There ‘could’ be prehistoric megafauna in there and you would never know it. Ask rescue and recovery teams how hard it is to find someone in a forest, and that is a someone who WANTS to be found.

Although I still think it is amazing that any animal in a metropolitan area went undiscovered for so long. Think about the history of the USA, the East Coast was the first to be populated by settlers, the one with the heaviest concentration of people, roads and industry and still something can go unnoticed. I just hope they manage to survive with all the crazy weather we’ve been having over the last 2-3 years.

By: Hapa

Hapa — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:04:46 +0000

This is an interesting discovery, much like the Giant Crawfish recently discovered in the south. However, what would really get the skeptics to think twice before discounting the possibility of cryptids/unknown species living in North America would be the discovery of a new species of large game, Megafauna, in the US, and not necessarily a Bigfoot or lake beast (perhaps a new species of deer, or perhaps a surviving prehistoric species, like the Stag Moose or Glyptodon. Woodland Bison were thought extinct before they were rediscovered in 20th century Canada, but it was a contemporary animal, not something that died out ages ago, and combined with the “we already documented that animal before” argument, it is still rebuffed by the skeptical elites. The latter skeptical argument would not be so believable a defense from knowledge if it was a Prehistoric Longhorn Bison or something else from remote time.). Once something remotely big and all new is found, the skeptics would have lost a argument; that its one thing to discover something small and new in North America, but another thing to discover a big animal like the Beast of Bray Road or Loveland Frogmen (The bigger they are, the harder to hide and more likely to be mythical argument).

Until new big game is found in North America, whether a well known cryptid or something totally unknown and unexpected, skeptics will brush this discovery off as a faulty example of the possibility of Sasquatch and other large Cryptids in our own backyard, because a new frog is so much smaller than a Gorilla or Elasmosaur.