Quasi-cryptozoology of the Day

[anotheranon]

White and Black Squirrel 2006 roundup - "quasi-cryptozoological" because this article appears in a cryptozoology blog but the little guys definitely exist - my locale fairly crawls (scampers?) with black squirrels (more appropriately called melanistic grey squirrels - damn, I love Wikipedia!).

A zoologist laments, Will writing about sasquatch negatively affect my career prospects?. I hope not. Blind belief would call his professionalism into question, but considering what (admittedly blurry, controversial) evidence there is shouldn't.

Comments

[ellid.livejournal.com]

There are definitely black squirrels in Westfield, Southampton, Westhampton, and Easthampton, Massachusetts. I nearly ran over one of them the other day.

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Interesting ...

Calgary's melanistic grey squirrel population isn't native, but are all descended from a zoo escapee, which means the gene is probably permanently dominant here (I've only seen one "grey" grey squirrel here)

The comments about odd gene pools in cat families in Kenya caught my eye and had me digging out my copy of Cynthia Moss' Elephant Memories. Yes, I remembered correctly ... she mentions that the population of elephants around Mount Kilimanjaro (in Tanzania, but with its northern lower slopes in Kenya) have such a distinctive appearance that they are easily identified when they wander further afield. In her words: The Kili elephants are, and I do not hesitate to say it, extremely funny-looking, verging on being ugly. They are smaller and leaner, have narrow pinched faces, with wrinkled foreheads and hairy heads, little triangular-shaped ears, skewed, oddly shaped tusks or no tusks, and squiggly, crooked tails, which rarely have any hair at the end. Sounds like a subspecies in the making to me ...