This article originally appeared on Yahoo News.

Multiple reports of Tasmanian Tiger sightings are starting to flow in from everyday citizens in Australia. Several people have recently claimed they’ve spotted the animal, which isn’t a tiger at all — and, despite looking very much like a species of dog, isn’t of canine lineage either — but a carnivorous marsupial. Spotting an interesting creature in Australia isn’t exactly a rare occurrence, but there’s one problem with these reports in particular: the Tasmanian Tiger is supposed to be extinct.

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This article originally appeared on yahoo.com.

Steeped in mystery, the elusive, deep-sea-dwelling giant squid, with eyes the size of basketballs, may be larger than it has gotten credit for. In fact, the monster cephalopod may grow to be longer than a school bus, researchers say.

Specimens recognizable as giant squid (Architeuthis dux) have been found washed up onshore since at least 1639. However, these sea monsters — which some people say inspired the legend of the giant kraken, though not all scientists agree — are so elusive that they were largely thought to be mythical until they were first photographed alive in their natural environment in 2004.

Ever since giant squid were discovered, there has been considerable speculation as to how large they can get. In a previous analysis of more than 130 specimens, scientists said that none exceeded 42 feet (13 meters) in length. Suggesting that giant squid could grow larger was “a disservice to science,” they said

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This article originally appeared on ecowatch.com.

Scientists have found a whole new world hidden inside a cave that has been sealed for about 5.5 million years. The cave and its residents could provide scientists with answers to questions about global warming and the formation of life on Earth.

These interesting creatures call the Movile Cave in Romania their home. It was sealed when a sheet of limestone collapsed onto the opening. The cave wasn’t discovered until 1986 when Romanian workers were testing the surrounding ground as a potential power plant site.

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This article originally appeared on mnn.com.

The Tasmanian devil, brought to the brink of extinction in recent years due to a fatal, highly contagious disease, may yet recover thanks to the discovery of an isolated population in the island state’s remote southwest.

While the researchers didn’t actually lay eyes on the animals, they did discover quantities of feces in a heavily forested World Heritage area. When analyzed, the stool revealed nine completely new genetic variants for the devil, a boon for conservationists attempting to help captive populations improve their chances for survival.

“For us this is massive,” Sydney University geneticist Kathy Belov told the Sydney Morning Herald. “For years we have been calling devils clones because there’s so little diversity, and now we find that there is diversity out there, it’s just in remote areas.”

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This article originally appeared on The Washington Post.

A newly discovered marine reptile is giving scientists a glimpse into the wondrous feats of nature in the face of adversity. Sclerocormus parviceps lived about 247 million years ago — in the aftermath of the most devastating mass extinction we know of, often referred to as “The Great Dying.” Some 96 percent of all species went extinct, and changes in ocean temperature and acidification meant that marine creatures were hit the hardest. But about a million years after this bloodbath, an oddball ichthyosaur shows just how quickly the planet bounced back — and evolved astonishingly diverse new species.

When mass extinctions occur, new kinds of plants and animals are able to flourish. That’s why humans exist: The extinction event that killed the dinosaur left the Earth without a reigning champ, so to speak – most of the planet’s massive predators (and most voracious vegetarians) disappeared. Some tiny, rodent-like mammals happened to have the right skill set to survive the carnage, and in the new world they had a sudden abundance of food and lack of predators. They (and other surviving animals) quickly evolved to fill all the different ecological niches left behind by dinosaurs, from the giant predators to the lazy grazers. Today, mammals fill many of the slots left behind by the dinosaurs. If another mass extinction wiped out most mammals, some other group would likely evolve to take spots left by humans, cheetahs, rats and everything in between.

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This article originally appeared on Yahoo News.

It looks like something from a terrifying horror movie, but this is the mystery sea creature that’s baffled experts after washing up on a tourist beach in Mexico.

The monstrous 4-metre (13-foot-long) beast was discovered on Bonfil Beach, in the city of Acapulco, in the south-west Mexican state of Guerrero.

Stunned beach-goers stood around the beast and began taking photos – while also speculating on the possible species of the creature.

The creature’s body was washed on the shore by strong currents that have been affecting parts of the Mexican coast.

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This article originally appeared on cnet.com.

There’s something moving in the snow at the Formigal-Panticosa ski resort in Spain. It’s big and shuffling and as white as the ground. And it was caught on camera.

As with pretty much all Sasquatch-style sightings, the video is short, fuzzy and shaky, but it is possible to see what appears to be a large humanoid shape moving in the distance. Two photos were posted to the Spanish-language forum ForoCoches.com on January 29, and the shaky video appeared on YouTube last week, causing a hullabaloo.

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This article originally appeared on eartharchives.com.

One of the most mysterious huge animals in the fossil record is the ape Gigantopithecus. Only a few bones have ever been found, and we still do not know the secrets to its existence. One thing though, is quite clear: Thanks to a team from the Seckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, we finally know why it is no longer among us today.

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This article originally appeared on npr.com.

They call it “Ball’s Pyramid.” It’s what’s left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What’s more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don’t know.

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This article originally appeared on The NY Post.

I honestly don’t know if Bigfoot exist.

But after spending an extremely cold evening in the New Jersey woods, I think they must hate the cold as much as I do.

The coldest night of the winter (so far) just happened to coincide with my outdoor excursion at High Point State Park, in Sussex, NJ, with Ranae Holland and Matt Moneymaker — the stars of Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot.”

And the weather wasn’t a coincidence; Ranae attributes the sudden temperature drop to something she calls the “Curse of the Sasquatch.”

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This article originally appeared on answers.com.

Click the link to view the answers.com gallery, 14 Mythological Creatures That Turned Out to Be Real.

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This article originally appeared on MSN.com.

A giant squid made its way into Japan’s Toyama Bay on Christmas Eve, treating onlookers to a rare sighting of the magnificent creature. Japan seems to be the place to find these staggeringly large beasts: The first-ever images of a giant squid in the wild were snapped off the coast of the Ogasawara Islands in 2004, and the first film of a living adult came from the same area in 2012.

CNN reports that one intrepid diver had a close encounter with the real-life sea monster.

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This article originally appeared on Yahoo.com.

Hundreds of dinosaur footprints and handprints dating to 170 million years ago adorn the shore on the Isle of Skye, making it the largest dinosaur site ever discovered in Scotland, a new study finds.

The discovery proves that dinosaurs — likely long-necked, four-legged, herbivorous sauropods — splashed around Scotland during the Middle Jurassic period, the researchers said.

“These footprints were made in a lagoon, which is a pretty interesting environment for dinosaurs,” said study lead researcher Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “We can tell that they were making these footprints while they were walking underwater — probably shallow water.”

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This article originally appeared on Flathead Beacon.

HOT SPRINGS – The morning of Oct. 24 was one of chill and fog, with gray, opaque clouds hanging low over Flathead Lake and the pavement on U.S. Highway 93 punctuated with fresh, dark blood.

Sure, the gore was just a sign that the local deer have begun the annual process of losing their minds during mating season and are running into the road, but since I was on my way to a conference about monsters, it was easy to let the mind wander to spookier and more sinister explanations.

Beacon photographer Greg Lindstrom and I headed out early that Saturday morning, driving the windy road to Hot Springs, where the inaugural Big Sky Bigfoot Conference was scheduled to take place at the historic Symes Hot Springs Hotel.

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This article originally appeared on www.nj.com.

For more than 200 years, people living in or passing through New Jersey’s Pinelands have reported seeing a strange, winged creature that has come to be known as the Jersey Devil.

There are tons of stories about the monster, and thousands of witnesses who claim they have encountered it.

Late Tuesday night, I received an email from a reader who recently became one of those witnesses.

Dave Black of Little Egg Harbor Township was driving home from his security guard job in Atlantic City when he saw what he thought was a llama running in and out of the trees lining the road.

“I was just driving past the golf course in Galloway on Route 9 and had to shake my head a few times when I thought I saw a lama,” he wrote in his email.

What happened next is the bizarre part.

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This article originally appeared on Grind TV.

A 9-year-old boy said landing a prehistoric-looking fish measuring 10 feet long and weighing 600 pounds was a dream come true–and more than a little bit scary.

“I thought the fish was going to pull me into the water,” Kegan Rothman told Calgary Sun, in reference to the massive white sturgeon he caught Monday on the Fraser River.

After measurements were taken–the fish also boasted a 50-inch girth–the sturgeon was tagged and released. (The video below shows Kegan coaxing the sturgeon into a deeper portion of river, where it slowly swims out of sight.)

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This article originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Shouldn’t creatures of the deep be … a bit deeper?

Russian sailors recently came across a massive squid, which they captured on video posted to YouTube. The bright red creature was apparently trying to eat a fish the men had snared, but the sailors pushed it off its prey before it jetted back down into the depths.

There was some debate over whether the animal in the video was a “giant squid” or a “colossal squid,” cephalopod relatives that are rarely seen alive. Michael Vecchione, an adjunct scientist at NOAA’s National Systematics Lab and giant squid expert, told The Huffington Post the creature seen in the video above is a colossal squid, not a giant squid.

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