Some cryptozoo news, via Cryptomundo, of course:

Its discoverers named it a new species. But a later publication suggested that the creature's strangeness wasn't because it was new, but rather because it might be old: it was proposed that the Laotian rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus) was the last surviving member of a once-large group of rodents that was known only by fossils. Although the group had vanished from the fossil record 11 million years ago, the morphological similarities were striking. The rock rat, it was proposed, is a living fossil.

DNA sequence analysis has now joined the argument and comes down strongly in favor of the living fossil contention. Not only is the rock rat like nothing we've ever seen before, it's not much like anything we've ever sequenced before.

An odd, ancient rat with a hairy tail, and taken straight from the "wild," they are apparently as comfortable playing around with humans as your average pet hamster.

And as long as I'm on the topic, check out this picture of a new species of anglerfish that was recently discovered off the coast of Sydney, Australia.  The warthog might have to step down as the standard "as ugly as a" cliche.

A favorite phenomenon of mine.

Frogs rain down on Serbia:

He said: "A whirlwind has sucked up the frogs from a lake, the sea or some other body of water somewhere else and carried them along to Odzaci where they have fallen to the ground. It is a recognised scientific phenomenon."

But wait.

This...whirlwind, you say?...Sucked up a bunch of frogs from some body of water and dropped them somewhere else.  Yet, it did not rain frogs and water.  Only frogs.  It didn't rain snails, fish, insects, or any of the various other forms of animal life that must exist alongside the frogs.  It only rained frogs.  That's a very selective whirlwind, don't you think?

I've blogged  before about how I get asked direction questions that sometimes seem very strange or funny.  Like the guy who came rolling up in front of our office one day just as I was about to leave, and the first thing he said was, "Is this San Antonio, Texas?"  Turns out he was looking for Sea World, but his first question was so unexpected that it took several seconds for my mind to process it and give him a simple "yes" answer.  Then there was the woman who 1) didn't know how to get to Dallas, 2) didn't know IH35 went to Dallas, 3) didn't know the big highway in front of the convenience store was IH35, and 4) didn't know which way north was.


This morning, before daylight even, before all the employees had come in, someone came in the door and asked if anyone spoke Spanish.  Two people there did.  So he started asking a question and one of them, who isn't from around here, got a puzzled look on his face.  The other one, who is a S.A. native, said, "Oh, he's looking for where the ghosts push the car away from the train tracks."

Strange, and funny.  So while they gave him verbal directions for how to get to that area, I made a copy of the pertinent map page and circled the ghost tracks for him (just above the red star on the map, where the road makes a right-angle bend).  Fortunately for him, he had managed to walk into an office where myself and one other person knew where they were.

Personally, I wouldn't want to go there during the dark.  Not because of alleged ghosts, but because that's a place that always sets my spidey-sense a-tingling.  It looks like a good place for all kinds of nefarious goings-on--the kind of place someone might hastily dump a dead body.  I find the nearby Mission Espada much more interesting.

Photo thanks to Roadside America, which has this article explaining the downhill/uphill illusion that gave rise to the local legend.  As pointed out in the article, these tracks have no warning lights, bells, or crossing barricades and is not a particularly safe place to hang out since the track is still in use.

American archaeologists were stunned as news broke today that a high-school student with a cameraphone caught Bigfoot in the act of planting artifacts at Burns Mound. An important Mississippian period (A.D. 900-1100) site outside of Memphis, Tennessee, Burns Mound's discovery during a joint Bigfoot-University of North Memphis expedition was one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 finds of 2003.

"We're taking this very seriously," says Bigfoot's co-principal investigator, University of North Memphis archaeologist Louis Patlin. "While there is no definitive proof that Bigfoot has 'salted' the site with faked ceramic artifacts, I can confirm the university has opened an investigation."

A year ago Cassandra Sotting, a former University of Michigan graduate student and site supervisor at Bigfoot's excavations at Grover Mound in Illinois, created a blog (bigfootcoverup.blogspot.com) to publicize her doubts about the spectacular finds at sites where Bigfoot has worked. "I was drummed out of archaeology for telling the truth about Bigfoot," says Sotting, who is currently unemployed. "Now the whole world knows I was right. They can't say I'm crazy any more."

Full article at Archaeology.

Via Cryptomundo.

P.S.  Hee hee!