Marcela
Bejarano-Álvarez / National Geographic
By Stephanie
Pappas | LiveScience.com – 4 hours ago
This article was updated at 4:10 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug.
17.
In this world of Photoshop and online scams, it pays to have a
hearty dose of skepticism at reports of something strange —
including an albino fetal shark with one eye smack in the middle of
its nose like a Cyclops.
But the Cyclops
shark, sliced from the belly of a pregnant mamadusky
shark caught by a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of
California earlier this summer, is by all reports the real thing.
Shark researchers have examined the preserved creature and found
that its single eye is made of functional optical tissue, they said
last week. It's unlikely, however, that the malformed creature
would have survived outside the womb.
"This is extremely
rare," shark expert Felipe Galvan
Magana of Mexico's Centro Interdisciplinario
de Ciencias del Mar told thePisces Fleet
Sportfishing blog in July. "As far as I know, less than
50 examples of an abnormality like this have been recorded."
[See photos of the one-eyed "Cyclops" shark]
Pisces Fleet, a
sportfishing company, rocketed the Cyclops shark to viral status
online this summer with their photos of the creepy-cute creature.
But this isn't the first time that reports of a mythical-seeming
creature have spurred media sensations — last week alone, Russian
officials announced "proof" of a Yeti, and paleontologists
spun a theory about an ancient Kraken-like squid. Few reports of
mythical beasts, however, come with proof.
Cyclops shark
The Cyclops shark is an exception. While rare,
"cyclopia" is a real developmental anomaly in which only one eye
develops. Human fetuses are sometimes affected, as in a 1982 case
in Israel reported in 1985 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
In that case, a baby girl was born seven weeks early with no nose
and only one eye in the center of her face. The infant, who lived
only 30 minutes after birth, also had severe brain
abnormalities.
In 2006, a kitten
born with one eye and no nose (a rare condition called
holoprosencephaly), created a stir online as news organizations and
bloggers tried to determine if the bizarre photos of the animal
were real. A veterinarian confirmed the kitten's condition; "Cy,"
as the cat was known, lived only a day. The remains were sold to
the creationist Lost World Museum.
The fisherman who
discovered the Cyclops shark is reportedly hanging on to the
preserved remains, news outlets reported. But scientists have
recently examined and X-rayed the fish, authenticating the catch.
According to Seth Romans, a spokesman for Pisces
Fleet, Galvan Magana and his
colleagues will publish a scientific paper about the find within
the next several weeks.
Romans
told LiveScience that the fisherman
who caught the strange shark is "amazed and fascinated" by the
attention his catch has drawn.
It's not the first
strange shark fetus Galvan Magana has found; he and his colleagues
discovered two-headed shark embryos in two different female blue
sharks. It's possible that one embryo started to split into twins,
but failed to completely separate because of crowding in the womb,
the researchers reported in January 2011 in the journal Marine
Biodiversity Records.
Lair of the kraken?
Another recent
report of a cryptic creature comes without the benefit of
photographic evidence. Nor do the monster-hunters in this scenario
have a body to display.
That's because the
discovery is of an alleged "kraken's lair," a spot where
200-million-year-old ichthyosaur bones mingle in odd patterns.
Paleontologist Mark McMenamin reads these patterns as evidence of a
giant, ancient squid-like creature playing with its food, and he
said as much on Oct. 10 at the annual meeting of the Geological
Society of America. Supporting his claim, he said, is the fact that
even today Pacific octopus, which are also cephalopods like the
ancient "kraken," have been seen taking down sharks.
Other researchers
responded that McMenamin was seeing what he wanted to see in the
patterns.
"To my mind, this
hypothesis is like looking at clouds — being able to see what you
desire," Glenn Storrs, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at
the Cincinnati Museum Center, told LiveScience.
Mythical krakens
are now thought of as giant squid or octopuses, capable of bringing
down a ship with their tentacled arms. But many of the earliest
kraken reports were of creatures so enormous that they grew
vegetation on their backs like islands. These krakens dragged down
anchored ships or swamped them by surfacing suddenly.
[Read Get Kraken: Why Scientists Should Study Sea
Monsters]
The 1816
"Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences Literature, Etc.,"
(advertised as "intended to supersede the use of other books of
reference") defines the kraken as "a most amazing large sea
animal," said to be "of a crab-like form."
"Its back or upper
part, which seems an English mile and a half (some have affirmed
more), looks at first like a number of small islands, surrounded
with something that floats like seaweeds," the dictionary author
writes. "At last several bright points of horns appear, which grow
thicker the higher they emerge, and sometimes stand up as high and
large as the masts of middle-sized vessels. In a short time, it
slowly sinks, which is thought as dangerous as its rising; as it
causes such a swell and whirlpool as draws everything down with
it."
Den of the Yeti
October's most
recent cryptozoology report comes courtesy of Russia, where
researchers claim to have found "indisputable proof"
of the yeti, a hairy ape-like creature not unlike
Bigfoot.
This "proof" takes
the form of a few strands of gray hair and some tracks in the snow,
but similar claims have come up short in the past.
Some Sasquatch claims have even been brazen
hoaxes, such as a 2008 press conference in which two Georgia men
claimed to have the body of Bigfoot in a freezer. The "corpse"
turned out to be a rubber ape suit.
There's no way of
knowing yet whether the Russian yeti enthusiasts are out to pull
the wool over anyone's eyes, or whether they genuinely believe
their yeti evidence is real. The yeti fur was supposedly found in
Azasskaya cave in western Siberia during a yeti conference.
[Mythical Creatures: Beasts that Don't Exist]
"During the
expedition to the Azasskaya cave, conference participants gathered
indisputable proof that the Shoria mountains are inhabited by the
'Snow Man,'" a spokesman for the region told LiveScience's sister
site Life's Little Mysteries. "They found his footprints, his
supposed bed, and various markers with which the yeti uses to
denote his territory."
No word on where
the supposed yeti went or why researchers didn't stick around with
cameras. Unlike the Cyclops shark, it seems this yeti finding may
not stand up to scrutiny.
