couchtripper

Scientists and yeti enthusiasts believe there may finally be solid evidence that the apelike creature roams the vast Siberian tundra, reports the Guardian. A team of a dozen-plus experts from as far afield as Canada and Sweden have proclaimed themselves 95% certain of the mythical animal's existence after a daylong conference in the town of Tashtagol in the Kemerovo region, some 2,000 miles east of Moscow. In recent years, locals there have reported sightings of the yeti, also known as the abominable snowman.

The Kemerovo government announced on Oct. 10 that a two-day expedition the previous weekend to the region's Azassky cave and Karatag peak "collected irrefutable evidence" of yetis' existence on the wintry plateau. "Conference participants came to the conclusion that the artifacts found give 95% evidence of the habitation of the 'snow man' on Kemerovo region territory," read a statement. "In one of the detected tracks, Russian scientist Anatoly Fokin noted several hairs that might belong to the yeti," it added. The group also discovered footprints, a presumed bed and various other markers.

The scientific community has historically disputed the existence of the yeti given scant conclusive evidence. But numerous sightings of such creatures have been reported in Himalayan countries and in North America, where it is known as Sasquatch, or bigfoot.

THIS angler landed an a-ray-zing catch — a stingray weighing 20-STONE. Jeremy Wade grappled with one of the world's biggest and deadliest freshwater fish for four hours before reeling the whopper in. The 53-year-old caught the monster short-tailed stingray during a fishing trip to Argentina. The flat fish is one of the heaviest found in the world's freshwater rivers and has been known to kill people with its lethal poisonous barb.

Jeremy, host of the TV series River Monsters, hooked the 280lb specimen while fishing on a small motor boat on the River Parana near Buenos Aires. After taking his bait of eel, the creature stuck itself to the bottom of the river, prompting an exhausting battle of wills with Jeremy. The four hour stalemate was broken when the fish became tired and Jeremy was finally able to lift it towards the surface. Even then he had to tow it towards the shore using his boat before he could see the huge fish in all its glory.

Jeremy, from Bath, Somerset, had to wear a pair of stab-proof gloves while he handled the creature which was then released back into the water safe and well.

Jeremy said: "This is the largest true freshwater fish that I have ever caught. It took me four hours to reel in. It just stuck to the bottom and burrowed itself into the sand and the mud, so it was like lifting a dead weight. It was a huge circular shape, humped in the middle and the same colour as the sand. My arms and back were completely shot afterwards, I was so tired."

People are normally only attacked by the mammoth stingray, whose Latin name is Potamotrygon brachyura, when they step on it by accident, as it lies camouflaged in sand. The fish lashes out with its lethal tail covered in thorny spines that can rip flesh to the bone. Its two barbed four-inch prongs can also inject a flesh-rotting venom.

Jeremy said: "If you get the barb through an artery or body cavity it can be fatal. It normally attacks feet and ankles from where people tread on them by accident. It can leave a nasty wound and take six or seven years to stop weeping. People in that area of Argentina shuffle their feet forward when walking through the surf so that they kick the side of it and not tread on top of it."

People can see Jeremy land the ray on the new series of River Monsters which will be shown on ITV in January.

A nature-lover has revealed how he spent two days tracking down a giant insect on a remote New Zealand island – and got it to eat a carrot out of his hand. Mark Moffett’s find is the world's biggest insect in terms of weight, which at 71g is heavier than a sparrow and three times that of a mouse. Mark came across the cricket-like creature, which has a wing span of seven inches, after two days of searching on a tiny island.

The 53-year-old former park ranger discovered the giant weta up a tree and his real life Bug's Bunny has now been declared the largest ever found. There are over 70 types of Weta species in New Zealand but the giant weta has been named the biggest insect in the world because of its weight. A female giant weta filled with eggs can reach up to 70g or more and the largest of the species are found on Little Barrier Island.

They are usually less social and more passive than other weta. Their diet consists of plants, other small insects and fruit. Their size is an example of island gigantism, which is a biological phenomenon leading to a larger size than their mainland relatives because of their isolation and lack of large predators.

After Mark found the female weta he fed it the carrot before putting it back where he found her. Mark, 53, said: ‘Three of us walked the trails of this small island for two nights scanning the vegetation for a giant weta. We spent many hours with no luck finding any at all, before we saw her up in a tree. The giant weta is the largest insect in the world, and this is the biggest one ever found, she weighs the equivalent to three mice. She enjoyed the carrot so much she seemed to ignore the fact she was resting on our hands and carried on munching away.

‘She would have finished the carrot very quickly, but this is an extremely endangered species and we didn't want to risk indigestion. After she had chewed a little I took this picture and we put her right back where we found her.’ Mark, from Colorado, America, added: ‘We bug lovers hear a lot of people who think insects are inferior in some way because of their size, so it was great to see such a big insect. This became all the more amazing when we realised that this was the largest insect recorded.’

[web]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... stery.html[/web]

Reporters are meant to write the news - not make it. But there must be something in the water, because - for the second time in a month - a fishing writer has stumbled across something extraordinary. The Australian Daily Telegraph fishing columnist - and big-game fisherman - Al McGlashan was sailing off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, at the weekend when he came across the carcass of a 13-foot squid.

And when McGlashan got into the water to explore the carcass, he found he was not the only interested party - a large blue shark came and made himself known, before devouring parts of it. McGlashan, also writer of a book called the Fishing Bible, discovered the squid yesterday - but it was so big he could not bring it onto the boat.

He believes the squid has only died recently, as its flesh still had a vibrant colour - perhaps what attracted the shark. McGlashan told ABC News: 'They’re sort of one of those mythical things. You hear those stories about ancient mariners getting attacked in their boat ... and you only hear about the very occasional one being washed up down in Tassie [Tasmania].' Squid specialist Mandy Reid told the Telegraph the squid may have been killed by a sperm whale, or died of natural causes. She said: 'Most squid only live for a year, they grow extremely quickly.'

McGlashan found the squid 50km from shore off the coast of Jervis Bay. And, while he was in the water and filming, the shark came for a peek and a bit to eat. He said: 'It hoed into the squid straight away and didn't care a bit that it was right next to us. It was taking great chunks out of the squid in one bite. In all my time of fishing, I’ve never seen calamari rings so big. It was massive.'

Although giants squids are known to science, sightings are very rare.

Wombats might have a reputation as comical, clumsy creatures - but you would not be laughing if you came across an oversized, 2.8-tonne version. Australian scientists unveiled the biggest-ever graveyard of an ancient rhino-sized mega-wombat called diprotodon, with the site potentially holding valuable clues on the species' extinction.

The remote fossil deposit in outback Queensland state is thought to contain up to 50 diprotodon skeletons including a huge specimen named Kenny, whose jawbone alone is 70 centimetres (28 inches) long. Lead scientist on the dig, Scott Hocknull from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said Kenny was one of the largest diprotodons he had ever seen and one of the best preserved specimens.

Pigeon-toed and with a backward-facing pouch large enough to carry an adult human, Hocknull likened diprotodon to 'a cross between a wombat and a bear but the size of a rhinoceros'. 'When we did the initial survey I was just completely blown away by the concentrations of these fragments,' he told AFP by telephone from the far-flung desert dig site, which he estimated at between 100,000-200,000 years old. 'It's a paleontologists' goldmine where we can really see what these megafauna were doing, how they actually behaved, what their ecology was. With so many fossils it gives us a unique opportunity to see these animals in their environment, basically, so we can reconstruct it.'

The mega-wombats appeared to have been trapped in boggy conditions at the site after seeking refuge there from extremely dry conditions during a period of significant climate change in ancient Australia, he added.

Diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to roam the earth, weighing up to 2.8 tonnes, lived between two million and 50,000 years ago and died out around the time indigenous tribes first appeared. Human and climate triggers for its disappearance are hotly debated.

A huge array of other animal bones have also been found at the site, including the teeth of a six-metre long venomous lizard called megalania and the teeth and bony back-plates of an enormous ancient crocodile. 'We're almost certain that most of these carcasses of diprotodon have been torn apart by both the crocodiles and the lizards, because we've found shed teeth within their skeletons from both animals,' Hocknull said.

Towering super-kangaroos up to 2.5 metres tall called protemnodon have also been discovered at the location, along with the remains of tiny frogs, rodents and fish -- an important find in what is now an extremely arid region. 'Very little is known about arid zone fish and their evolution, and finding a fossil record for them is amazing,' said Hocknull.

A relative of the modern-day wombat, the herbivorous diprotodon was just one of a host of megafauna to roam ancient Australia including the tree-sized kangaroos and gigantic crocodiles. Megafauna are thought to have evolved to such large sizes to cope with inhospitable climates and food scarcity, with fossils found in Australia of prehistoric emus, tree-dwelling crocodiles and carnivorous kangaroos.

The apparent 'monster' was found and pictured by an amateur photographer who was walking under the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan on Sunday. The lady who captured the images, Denise Ginley said: "We were horrified by it and we took some camera phone pictures and then finally we decided to come back with my camera and I got up the courage to climb over the fence and get closer to it."

On first glance it appears that the animal is simply a bloated pig – a theory the New York Parks Department insist is correct – but closer inspection reveals that the animal appears to have toes rather than hooves. Online theorists speculated it may be a dog or, even more worrying, a giant rat. Other online comments suggest it could be an aardvark, a raccoon or something related to a possum.

One online commentator suggested the beast was from a nearby government-run animal disease centre.

The poster, identified only as L13, wrote: "I don't think it's purely coincidence that these unidentifiable creatures have washed up on shores around Plum Island where the government has their Center for Animal Diseases. "I think these poor things are lab experiments the govt doesn't want us to know about." The New York's magazine's Daily Intel blog has cranked up the conspiracy with a blog post entitled: "We're Supposed to Believe the New East River Monster Is Just a Pig?"

Mrs Ginley told the Daily Intel blog: "I definitely agree that the feet are not pig-like at all. No hooves or cloven feet to be seen it definitely had five toes on all its paws, front and back. I think it could be a monstrously huge rat, but it could also be a monster. A rat that big would pretty much be a monster anyway, wouldn't it?"

The blog compares the animal, which appears to have part of its jaw missing, to something from the X-Files. But the New York Parks Department is not budging from its initial identification of the animal. "It was a pig left over from a cookout," a spokesperson told the Animal NY website. "We disposed of it." Pressed further, the spokesman added: "It was a roasted pig we threw it out. We didn't count its toes, we just threw it out."

But the blogosphere was not convinced. "Hopefully by 'threw it out' they mean transferred to a top-secret lab for more testing, because we are not yet done demanding answers," the Daily Intel poster wrote.

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I'm calling this the pacman ghost spider...

[web]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ircus.html[/web]

I reckon this is faked because of the matt colouring of the egg. But it's pretty cool anyway

From Japan comes news of a giant isopod that knows all there is to know about the hunger game. How else to explain the fasting behavior of the animal that, his minders say, hasn't eaten in more than 1,500 days? The male giant isopod, known simply as No. 1, last ate on Jan. 2, 2009 — or, to put it in perspective, 18 days before President Obama began his first term.

The giant isopod's last meal at the Toba Aquarium, reports Japan Times, was a horse mackerel, which it devoured in just five minutes. But that was four years ago. Since then, No. 1 has only pretended to eat — going so far as to rub its face on dead fish before walking away, according to reports. The aquarium's Takaya Moritaki says he has tried everything he can think of to get the finicky giant isopod, which was caught in the Gulf of Mexico, to eat.

"I just want it to eat something somehow. It's weakened in this state," he tells the Japan Daily Press. He recently invited the media to witness the giant isopod's hunger strike, as it spurned several pieces of fish. The mysterious behavior has not taken an obvious toll on No. 1, which has reportedly remained healthy during its long period of abstaining.

Giant isopods are close relatives of rolly pollies and "pill bugs," with a few adaptations for living on the ocean floor in the deep, cold waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They have seven pairs of legs and four sets of jaws and can grow to more than two feet in length. As scavengers, the animals are built to survive long periods between meals.

"Giant isopods are always in a state of semihibernation because they don't know when they can eat, so they limit their energy on breathing and other activities," marine ecologist Taeko Kimura tells Japan Times. "For that purpose they sometimes keep a large amount of fat in their livers, so maybe No. 1 still has a source of energy in its body, and that's why it still has no appetite."

But aquarium staff are concerned, especially as the tank No. 1 is in previously housed a healthy, and hungry, giant isopod. The artificial seawater it contains is "highly unlikely to generate organic substances" to sustain the animal, Japan Times notes.

Could someone be sneaking food to No. 1 — perhaps in an odd show of allegiance to the old British TV show The Prisoner? Or could it somehow be living on the err... effluvia of its fellows? Somehow, this mysterious animal, which Sea and Sky calls "without a doubt one of the strangest creatures found in the deep sea," has managed to keep some of its secrets.

It sounds like the plot of a childhood adventure movie. Two young boys stumble across a giant, decomposing foot in the woods, leaving local police to wonder whether the grisly find is evidence of the fabled Bigfoot. But that's exactly what has happened in Massachusetts, U.S., where tests are being carried out on the mysterious remains amid speculation over exactly what kind of creature it belonged to.

According to a report on Discovery.com, the boys found the decomposing foot in woods in Quincy last month. Baffled officers at the Lakeville Police Department sent the foot to medical examiners to see if they can shed any more light on its origin.

'On March 29, Sgt Steven Leanues picked up what appears to be a decomposed foot that the boys found in the woods off Pantheon Road,' it said, citing the Patriot Ledger newspaper. 'Police Chief Frank Alvihiera sent it to the medical examiner, who determined it is not human, although it appears to have five toes.'

Also known as Sasquatch, Bigfoot is the name given to the hairy, ape-like creature that some believe live in forests in North America. Sightings of the beast have been reported over decades by people who have pointed variously to mysterious sightings, inexplicably huge footprints, and giant nest-like structures as evidence that the elusive creature does in fact exist.

Believers who claim to have spotted the legendary creature - which was immortalised in the 1987 film Bigfoot and the Hendersons - say it stands between 6ft and 10ft tall, is covered in reddish brown fur, and has a distinctive, unpleasant odour. While fans are likely to seize upon the find as further proof of the beast's existence, sceptics might predict the tests will reveal the foot belonged not to Bigfoot, but to a big bear.