Normandy Nessie---ALL HYPE

       It would seem as though Normandy Nessie is blessing the Internet circuit once again. This water monster mystery has been solved over a year ago, but some like Ron "I WILL SELL YOU AN AUTOGRAPH" Strickler keep wanting to drive patrons to their blogs by keeping this story....floating.......no pun intended. After researching this subject, it was discovered that Normandy Nessie is nothing more than an often mis-identified, everyday...........family of Manatee's. Yes.....Manatee's.

    These gentle giants have been the blame for many monster sightings in Florida and even the butt of a "Monster Quest" episode. When traveling in groups they can span over 40 feet in length. This makes appear as a much larger single animal. They do this to ward off sharks in the wild. After interviewing the neighbors where the sightings took place, all were in agreement that there was NO NORMANDY NESSIE. They even admitted to seeing the Manatee's on the or around the same time that all the newspapers reported the sightings. SO....in closing....once again......this one is and has been debunked............sorry guys and gals. I guess it's time to go back to searching for Skunk Apes!!!

Big black cat creature spotted prowling near Gloucester

     THREE people have reported spotting a big black cat type creature near Gloucester. The report was made on the website - Big Cats in Britain which records and investigates sightings of suspected big cats in the UK.

     In the latest report on the site three people say they saw a large cat liike creature at Hasfield, between Ashleworth and Tirley on August 28.

     They describe it as being black with rounded ears and a thick tail approximately 30cms in length. They also say it was slightly smaller than a German Shepherd dog.

 

     The report said: "Firstly I was inside and spotted the cat out in the middle of the field by an old tree where a lot of rabbits tend to live.

"Having watched it from inside through the binoculars for about 45mins I then went outside to get slightly closer.

"The big cat was aware I was there but was in no way bothered at all (it had a good old stare at me!).

"The big cat moved around the tree several times with one successful catch and then made it's way along the hedgerow and up into the woodland surrounding the field."

 

Seeking the Puerto Rican Chupacabra

By Benjamin Radford

  

     The chupacabra hasn’t reared its ugly head in Albuquerque lately. In fact, it’s been almost exactly three years since the last local sighting on the Westside. But many believe the creatures are out there, sucking the blood from goats (chupacabra means “goatsucker” in Spanish) and other livestock. Descriptions of the chupacabra vary widely, but the typical version is a creature 4 to 5 feet tall. It has short, powerful legs, long claws, and terrifying black or glowing red eyes. Some claim it has spikes down its back; others report seeing stubby, bat-like wings.

    The chupacabra was first seen in 1995, and believers say it is the result of secret U.S. government experiments in the jungles of Puerto Rico. It had a heyday of about five years when it was widely reported in Latin America, Florida and elsewhere. Reports have dropped dramatically, except for occasional sightings of animals in Texas resembling hairless dogs or coyotes that have been proven to be nothing but that.  

     I have spent much of the past five years investigating the chupacabra, including an expedition into the jungles of Nicaragua and trips to Texas for the “MonsterQuest” TV show. By 2009, my research had unearthed central facts about the chupacabra, save perhaps the most important: its origin. Why was the goatsucker first sighted in 1995 and not before? Animals simply do not appear out of thin air.

     To get answers about where the chupacabra came from, I visited its birthplace, Puerto Rico. I began by interviewing the woman who first sighted the monster, and whose eyewitness description was the basis for the most famous drawing of it in the world.

     A woman named Madelyne Tolentino said she saw the beast through a picture window outside her house in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, during the second week of August 1995. In a 1996 interview, Tolentino said the bipedal animal had dark gray or black eyes that “were damp and protruding, running up to its temples and spreading to the sides,” like typical alien eyes. Its height was “about 4 feet, more or less. At the time, it was walking like a human, on both legs. Its arms were drawn back in an attack position, as though it were a TV monster.” She said it had three long, skinny fingers and that its arms were also very long. Its hair “was rather short, and close to its body. Rather well-combed in fact.”

     It had some round things on its torso, and the region seemed ashen, as if something had burned it there. The burn mark revealed pinkish-purple skin, as if the top layer had fallen off.” The creature’s legs, Tolentino said, “were very long and skinny, and I could see three separate toes.” She said they were similar to goose feet, and that it had something like webbing between its toes.

     Tolentino’s curiosity about the chupacabra extended to its genitals: “I even got down on the floor to see if it had genitals. It had nothing at all. It was plain and sealed." She also noted a row of distinctive spikes on its back.

     The creature turned away, ran into the road, and leaped off into tall grass in a neighboring vacant lot.

      Despite being such a significant eyewitness, Tolentino dropped from sight and had only been interviewed once or twice since 1995—never by a professional investigator. With help from a friend, I tracked her down and met her at a busy Borders bookstore outside the capital, San Juan. I had never been able to find a photograph of her and wondered what she looked like. Was she a wacko UFO nut wearing the standard-issue tinfoil hat? Was she a wild-eyed young woman who saw monsters behind every tree?

     Tolentino is neither; instead I found an intelligent and sober petite woman in her 40s with an easy smile and quick laugh. She was cautious at first. All she knew about me was that I was a writer from New Mexico who had come to Puerto Rico specifically to see her, so she showed up with her ex-husband at her side.

“At the time, it was walking like a human, on both legs. Its arms were drawn back in an attack position, as though it were a TV monster.”

Madelyne Tolentino

     But she soon warmed up to me as I interviewed her in Spanglish, and Tolentino recounted her story.

     The basics remained the same. She said the creature she saw was about 3 feet tall, not the 4 to 5 earlier reported. She also said its skin looked like she expected an alien’s might. “I have an interest in UFOs and aliens, but I never said it was either an extraterrestrial or an animal. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never changed my story,” she told me. “Most people have believed me. People trust me and know I’m telling the truth.” I showed her a drawing I made based upon her original description, and she endorsed it as the most accurate depiction to date.

     She then kindly drove the four of us to the site where she had been the first person in history to see the chupacabra. We zoomed through the verdant Puerto Rican countryside, heading east toward her hometown of Canóvanas. We chatted and joked as she drove, and after about 20 minutes we pulled onto a side road and parked in front of a house where her mother still lives. It was a rural residential area, and I almost felt there should be a little monument or plaque commemorating the spot: Birthplace of el Chupacabra.

      Tolentino reenacted her sighting, which she said occurred at about 1 p.m. that day in 1995. She had been sleeping when her mother woke her up, excited and alarmed about something odd she saw near the house. Tolentino said the sighting lasted from three to five minutes, and though it happened near a fairly busy road, during that time no other cars appeared.

      In the 15 years since her sighting, a few things had changed. A wall had since been built between her house and the road, and a house stood in the once-vacant lot across the street that had tall plants through which the chupacabra disappeared. But, otherwise, the scene was more or less the same. Having studied her account many times at length, it was fascinating to visit the actual location.

      I did more investigating while on the island, spending hours in libraries searching through newspaper accounts from 1995 and visiting the Caribbean National Forest (better known as El Yunque), where the chupacabra is said to have emerged.

   

      Speaking to the original chupacabra eyewitness didn’t dramatically alter my information, nor did it change the course of my investigation (for example, she didn’t admit to me that it was all a hoax—not that I think it was).

      But mysteries are rarely solved all at once. Pieces of the puzzle come together in increments; a fact established here, a claim disproved there. I had picked up the last few pieces that I’d need to finally solve the mystery.

 

 

 

 

Mass Extinction Threat: Earth on Verge of Huge Reset Button?

Jeremy Hsu

LiveScience Senior Writer

LiveScience.com jeremy Hsu

livescience Senior Writer

     livescience.com – Thu Sep 2, 2:30 pm ET Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramaticallychanged the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, accordingto a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans willlive in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, becausethe loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems.

     Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans -from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great massextinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch,leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the AnthropoceneEpoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry,increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from alteredflowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals andpotential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain.

     Scientists had once thought species diversity could help buffer a group of animals from such die-offs, either keeping them from heading toward extinction or helping them to bounce back. But having many diverse species also proved no guarantee offuture success for any one group of animals, given that mass extinctions moreor less wiped the slate clean, according to studies such as the latest one.

Then and now

     Looking back in time, the diversity of large taxonomicgroups (which include lots of species), such as snails or corals, mostly hoveredaround a certain equilibrium point that represented a diversity limit ofspecies' numbers. But that diversity limit also appears to have changedspontaneously throughout Earth's history about every 200 million years.

     How today's extinction crisis - species today goextinct at a rate that may range from 10 to 100 times the so-called backgroundextinction rate - may change the face of the planet and itsspecies goes beyond what humans can predict, the researchers say.

"The main implication is that we're really rolling thedice," said John Alroy, a paleobiologist at Macquarie University inSydney, Australia. "We don't know which groups will suffer the most, which groupswill rebound the most quickly, or which ones will end up with higher or lowerlong-term equilibrium diversity levels."

What seems certain is that the fateof each animal group will differ greatly, Alroy said.

His analysis, detailed in the Sept. 3 issue of the journal Science,is based on almost 100,000 fossil collections in the Paleobiology Database (PaleoDB).

     The findings revealed various examples of diversity shifts,including one that took place in a group of ocean bottom-dwelling bivalves calledbrachiopods, which are similar to clams and oysters. They dominated thePaleozoic era from 540 million to 250 million years ago, and branched out intonew species during two huge adaptive spurts of growth in diversity - each timefollowed by a big crash.

     The brachiopods then reached a low, but steady, equilibriumover the past 250 million years in which there wasn't a surge or a crash inspecies' numbers, and still live on today as a rare group of marine animals.

Counting creaturesbetter

     In the past, researchers have typically counted species inthe fossil record by randomly drawing a set number of samples from each timeperiod - a method that can leave out less common species. In fact two studiesusing the PaleoDB used this approach.

     Instead, Alroy used a new approach called shareholdersampling, in which he tracked how frequently certain groups appeared in thefossil record, and then counted enough samples until he hit a target numberrepresentative of the proportion for each group.

"In some sense the older methods are a little like theAmerican voting system - the first-past-the-post-winner method basically makesminority views invisible," said Charles Marshall, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who didnot take part in the study. "However, with proportional systems,minority views still get seats in parliament."

     Marshall added thatthe study was the "most thorough quantitative analysis to dateusing globalmarine data." But he added that researchers will probably debatewhether the PaleoDB data represents a complete-enough picture of the fossilrecord.

Nothing lasts forever

    The idea that rules of diversity change should not come as asurprise for most researchers, according to Marshall.

"To me,the really interesting possibility is that some groups might not yet be closeenough to their caps to have those caps be manifest yet," Marshall toldLiveScience. Or "evolutionary innovation" might happen so quicklythat new groups emerged to increase overall diversity, even if each sub-groupreached a cap on diversity.

    If anything, the record of pastextinctions has shown the difficulty of predicting which groups win out inthe long run. "Surviving is one thing and recovering is another,"said Marshall, who wrote a Perspectives piece about the study in the same issue of Science.

    One of the few consistent patterns is that growth spurts indiversity can apparently happen at any time, according to Alroy. He added thatthe background extinction of individual species has also remained consistent - theaverage species lasts just a few million years

     Of course, the ongoing extinction crisis of modern timesgoes far beyond the background extinction rate. Alroy noted that it could notonly wipe out entire branches of evolutionary history, but may also changethe ecosystems shaped by each species.

    That means today's species matter for environments aroundthe world, and so humans can't simply expect replacements from the diversespecies of the future.

"If we lose all the reef builders, we may not get backthe physical reefs for millions of years no matter how fast we get back all thespecies diversity in a simple sense," Alroy said.