Chelsea, we've been following somewhat, and by following, I mean, we did an update on it, and I believe the Urant episode.
Okay.
The James Webb Space Telescope.
Yeah, we've updated on it a few times.
Yeah, so we've been following it. I think that's safe to say.
I found an article that just came out, February 22nd, 2023.
This is from Colorado.edu, so Colorado State University.
Okay, no, no, not really, but okay.
Written by Daniel Strain.
The Webb telescope spots super old, massive galaxies that shouldn't exist.
Ah.
In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists have discovered several mysterious objects hiding in images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Six potential galaxies that emerged so early in the universe's history and are so massive that they should not be possible under current cosmological theory.
What?
Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the dawn of the universe roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago.
They're also gigantic, containing almost as many stars as the modern-day Milky Way Galaxy.
It's bananas, said Eric Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics XEU Boulder.
You just don't expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly.
These galaxies should not have had time to form.
Nelson and her colleagues, including first author, Evo Labay, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia,
published their results on February 22nd in the journal Nature.
The latest finds aren't the earliest galaxies observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December of 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space.
Last year, another team of scientists spotted several galaxies that likely coalesced for gas around 350 million years after the Big Bang.
Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.
The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as large and date back as far back in time as they appear.
Their preliminary observations, however, offer a tantalizing taste of how James Webb could rewrite astronomy textbooks.
Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting, she said.
There's a lot of excitement going around in 2022. Nelson and her colleagues who hail from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain,
formed an ad hoc team to investigate the data James Webb was sending back to Earth.
The recent image stemmed from the telescope's cosmic evolution early release science, Sears for short survey.
These images look deep into a patch of sky close to the Big Dipper, a relatively boring, at least at first glance, region of space.
The Hubble Space Telescope first observed in the 90s, and that's that very famous, like, deep field view picture that Hubble did.
Where it's just like nothing but stars, that's all you see.
Okay, yeah, I know that.
Yeah, it's that one where they just spotted the Hubble Space Telescope at just a blank spot in the sky.
And, like, it's nothing but galaxies.
They did that in the exact same spot with the James Webb.
And this is what they found.
They loved that spot.
They just love that spot.
If any spot is gonna prove them wrong, it's that spot.
Yeah.
Nelson was peering at a posted stamp-sized section of one image when she spotted something strange, a few fuzzy dots of light that looked way too bright to be real.
They were so red and so bright, Nelson said.
We weren't expecting to see them.
She explained that in astronomy, red lights usually equal old lights.
The universe, Nelson said, has been expanding since the dawn of time.
As it expands, galaxies and other celestial objects move further apart, and the light they emit stretches out.
Think of it like the cosmic wufflet of saltwater taffy.
Okay.
The more the light stretches, the redder it looks to human instruments.
I don't know if that analogy helped you in any way, but it certainly did not.
The redder something is, the further away it's moving from us is at least the running theory.
Okay.
And things that are coming closer to Earth, they're gonna look more brilliant.
The team ran calculations and discovered that their old galaxies were also huge, harboring tens to hundreds of billions of sun-sized stars worth of mass, on par with the Milky Way.
These primordial galaxies, however, probably didn't have much in common with our own.
The Milky Way forms about one to two new stars every year, Nelson said.
Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe,
which is just mind boggling.
Nelson and her colleagues want to use James Webb to collect a lot more information about these mysterious objects,
but they've seen enough already to pique their curiosity.
For a star, calculations suggest that they shouldn't have been enough normal matter,
the kind that makes up planets and human bodies at that time to form so many stars so quickly.
Quote,
If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,
Nelson said.
Now, I'm gonna leave it there.
There is more to the article if anybody wants to go take a look,
but it is actually on our subreddit if anybody wants to take a look.
Why this is a big deal is these galaxies shouldn't have been able to form that close to the start of the universe.
Like they shouldn't be able to get that big the type of matter that's in them shouldn't have existed yet.
There's basically two explanations that they can think of at this point.
It's either that we're wrong on how long ago the Big Bang happened,
or our fundamental understanding of how galaxies form is incorrect.
I was just gonna say probably not that shocking that we could potentially be incorrect about how we think space works.
I don't know. Smart people talk about space.
We got it figured out.
At least that's what we like to think.
Yeah, we know exactly everything that happens out there.
But yeah, this could be like a fundamental transformation of how we understand galaxies to form or how the universe itself formed.
James Webb,
leaving to some interesting findings.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Let's see if these are actually confirmed because again, they don't for sure know what these are,
but they're pretty sure they're galaxies and they're pretty sure they don't make sense in our current model.
So I thought that was pretty fringy and pretty cool.
Yeah, that is pretty cool.
And with that, we can get into the episode.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe,
where we strive to inform on fringe topics, but not too well,
lest these topics then become too popular and thus lose their status as fringe.
We are your sufficiently informing hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
And today we take a look at some of those species that are not those extinct,
but have not been de-extincted species.
Chelsea, I'll let you take it over from there like midthought.
Yeah.
Go.
Okay.
I do want to comment that I'm doing such an excellent job based on your opener or that,
not the opener opener, because I don't know that much about space.
You're doing an excellent job of galaxies.
I like that.
Because I know those were shocking to me.
We don't know what those are and it defies everything I know about space.
So back to what we're actually talking about today.
I'm going to pick up what Taylor was saying.
I chose to focus on a couple heavy hitters in the long extinct community,
the large and in charge, the no way in hell there could be sightings of these long extinct creatures.
Could there?
These sightings are live sightings of the extinct abyss.
They're not clones per se as per our last episode, I'm pretty sure.
Unless I'm foreshadowing again.
But sightings that make us think maybe they're not so extinct,
sort of like the Psylissine or maybe I go as far as say dinosaur ghost,
but maybe not because we already did an episode on that.
Yeah.
For reasons.
This is a different episode.
Reasons.
I think to start, I went with the Saber 2 Tiger.
Hit good as anything, I guess.
You're probably familiar with the Saber 2 Tiger.
They were around a lot on the Flintstones, if you recall.
I've also always been a little bit upset that they didn't just call it the Tusk Tiger.
It could have gone by many things and most of the things,
most of the dinosaurs I find that I do know,
they go by much different names scientifically than the nicknames that we've all gave them.
Oh man, I've been going through child like under one books
for reasons that I will not be disclosing on this podcast.
Recently.
And yeah, like there's Brontosaurus or Brachiosaurus in those books
and apparently it's called Diplodocus now.
Like Mind Blown.
Is that its actual name?
Because I feel like growing up, we didn't actually learn their real name.
I think that we could do an episode on the Bone Wars
because there was basically two competing paleontologists
who kind of started making up dinosaurs to like one up the other.
They would find bones and put them together in ways that they definitely don't go
or are bones from different dinosaurs.
So once we got sufficient knowledge on what actually happened and what we had,
they started to realize that some of the dinosaurs that we talk about never actually existed.
They were just a gimmick to one up another paleontologist.
Oh no, this is bad.
I don't like this.
Maybe we do a Bone Wars episode at some point.
Yeah, I just wrote it down.
Okay, so that's not what this episode is about.
Savor tooth tiger.
They existed all over the world 42 million years ago up until about 11,000 years ago.
Wow, they had a really good role.
One of the dinosaurs did.
They existed for a long time.
I don't think the saber tooth tiger is a dinosaur.
He's not?
No, it's a tiger.
Oh, but he goes by something else.
That's our nickname for him.
Yes, but it's a mammal.
It's a mammal.
I thought dinosaur was just anything that existed in that time.
No, dinosaurs and 65 billion years ago.
Okay, fine.
So to my surprise, I learned they're not.
They're not dinosaurs.
That was just a surprise surprise.
The other surprise while I was doing my notes was that they're not really related to our
tigers that we know and love today.
They're pretty big.
They have the big teeth, the saber tooth, and they're big.
So by big, I mean they hunted bisons and camels and those are big freaking animals.
And from my understanding of what I've seen in documentaries, they could also talk and
work a job.
Yeah, they definitely had jobs.
All the dinosaurs did and they usually just perform mundane household duties.
For proto humans.
I would actually call them slaves because I don't think they were being paid.
Largely, these sightings take place by rivers and mountains and while the animals look the
same like saber two tigers, they vary a little bit based on where they're being sighted based
on mountains and rivers.
This will make sense in a second.
So the best place to start on a sighting like this is Africa.
And I think we really need to do a dinosaurs of Africa episode because while Africa
has all the crazy animals of the world like zebras and hippos and all the cool animals,
giraffes, those half zebras, the quaggas, I think.
And like Mochili and Bambi.
They also harbour the far less talked about animals apparently alive and well, the dinosaurs,
lots of them.
So I think that's another future episode we should do.
Dinosaurs in Africa.
Dinosaurs alive and well in Africa.
I'm just curious if you're for using the term dinosaur.
Are we talking about like just anything that's old?
Because again, we're talking about saber two tigers, which are now I'm really confused
about what dinosaurs are.
Okay, TBA TBA.
That one's don't really screwed us on this one.
It really did.
It was strictly like dinosaurs and then oh yeah, saber tooth tiger.
That's all I know.
So I would say that's a majority of where I know the saber tooth tiger from pretty much
exclusively it's the saber tooth tiger incident.
Outside of that, I don't think it really comes up a lot in life.
No.
Okay, so let's talk about this again.
One cryptid and I love that this is considered a cryptid again.
It's supposed to be an extinct animal like the Phyllisine, but then it like borders on
cryptid because it's like, does it exist?
Does it not exist?
If it's declared extinct, then it is a cryptid.
Yeah.
So that's where the boundary lies.
Whether or not it's extinct.
If you want to go back, we did an episode.
I think it's called cryptid 101.
It's one of our first episodes.
I think it's okay.
It's a good episode.
You're probably going to notice a difference, but it's still a good episode.
There's effort.
There was effort there.
We tried so hard.
There's effort on all of them kind of.
So this cryptid is cited in the remote regions of the Inetti Plateau in eastern Chad, Africa.
The natives of the area have long told of two distinct types of large cat, cat like creatures.
One that inhabits the mountains, which they call the Hadgel, Gissingram, or Visoko.
And another that prefers areas near water, which are locally called the Muronagu, Mamemi,
or Dilali, collectively often referred to as the Inetti Tiger.
So that's what I was just talking about.
They have like two distinct regions that they inhabit in these areas.
Again, I'll get into it.
These beasts are described as being much larger than a lion or other big cat and covered in
thick dark red or reddish brown fur, which often exhibits black or white stripes.
Most interesting of all is that the creatures are said to sport two very long, sharp front
fangs, which are often described as being like a walrus and claimed to be up to 16 inches
in length.
It sounds very much like the saber tooth cat, which is why it's in this episode.
I narrowed it down for you.
And indeed, when natives have been shown pictures of these creatures, they have been convinced
that this is what they are.
Do you think they got the pictures from the Flintstones?
Probably.
They're like, yeah, that's him.
He talked to me.
In particular, the Maturotus genus, which existed in the middle Pleistocene.
What is it called?
I thought I took these out because I couldn't pronounce them.
Which existed in the middle Pleistocene.
Far from being merely an elusive mystery creature known to the natives of the region,
the Ineddy Tigers have been spotted by outsiders on occasion as well.
In 1910, there is a rather dramatic account of a group of French missionaries who were
traveling up the Emingui River, which were pounced upon by a massive cat with large,
protruding fangs, which apparently leapt right out of the water and drugged down one of their
party like a crocodile before submerging and vanishing.
And this happening before the Flintstones existed?
They have no idea.
They got no reference point.
I know.
They didn't even know.
This is why it's called this tiger because they don't know Saber II Tiger at this point.
Were the Flintstones.
In the same area, there is a hunter and naturalist named Marcel Harley who found a dead hippopotamus
in 1920 by the river that exhibited deep, grevious wounds that were seemingly inflicted
by no known predator, which he would later write about in his diary.
Couldn't hippos do that too?
Wouldn't hippos have like the exact same teeth?
I don't believe hippos have the same teeth per se.
Are hippos vegetarians?
They are, but they'll use their teeth in self-defense.
Yeah, I don't imagine them to be like large Saber II teeth though.
Just type in hippoteeth and look at the photos.
And the most concerning thing is all is the grevious wounds.
Yeah, just type that in.
They're terrifying.
The most interesting fact I know about hippos are about their balls and how they don't stay
in one place too long.
We learned a bunch.
This show knows way too much about hippos.
Whoa, I did not think hippos had teeth like this.
Yeah, they're terrifying.
They have Saber II teeth.
Yeah, but they point up, I guess.
Like they would be pointing in the opposite direction than a Saber II Tiger attack.
These are really gross and ugly teeth.
Of course, hippos also do exist in water and could be upside down.
So it could have been an upside down hippo.
Sometimes when you're in water that long, you don't know right side down.
You forget.
Yeah, it's really hard.
Okay, so he's writing about this in his diary.
In 1975, the hunter Christian Linnoel.
Sorry, can we just stay on that one for a little while?
I want to give him a little bit more credit that probably wasn't a hippo because he was
literally looking at a dead hippo and saying like, yeah, nothing could have done this that
I know of.
And there were hippo teeth like literally the other end.
It's true.
Yes.
So maybe it wasn't hippo teeth.
He didn't write about that in his diary.
I don't think because that's the end of that thought.
Okay.
He wrote about it in his diary.
So that's all I got.
Okay.
This was the hippo incident.
In 1975, the hunter Christian Linnoel was with some native guys at the Inetti Plateau when
they heard a booming spine tingling roar issue forth from the murky depths of a cave.
The panic natives allegedly immediately identified it as one of the saber tooth creatures and
refused to continue further.
I mean, who would go into the cave?
No one with any brains.
That's for sure.
No one who wants to write about it afterwards.
But interesting, Linnoel would also on the same excursion find a horribly mutilated hippo
near the river Wanja, which he believed had been killed by something with very long sphangs.
So there's that.
No sightings of it yet.
Just a lot of dead hippos.
Lots of dead hippos.
So we know those exist for sure.
So those are those sightings.
Those are the hippo incidents.
Let's explore further in Africa.
Maybe we get some actual saber tooth sightings.
I really thought there were saber tooth sightings.
Like Taylor said, we can't do it too well.
No, exactly.
Specifically, though, so we're going to the Sahel and Sudanian belts between the Sahara
and Central Africa.
One of the earliest references to this type of cryptic comes from the Imatong Mountains
in South Sudan.
The way this one goes, dead hippo, blah, blah, blah.
Just kidding.
I'll tell you the real story.
Some laborers working high in the Ekoli Hills, which are the western ranges in the Imatongs.
We all know where that is.
Clearing fire lines came to me with a tale of having seen a large animal bigger than a
lion and very broad.
Its head was large with a pointed muzzle and black mouth with long canine teeth.
The general color was brownish with vertical yellowish white stripes on its flanks.
It left in a long gated footprint the size and shape of that of a small boy but with
claws.
Small claw boy, okay.
It's a werewolf.
The beast was quite unknown to them and they were very scared about it.
This sighting comes from Jackson JK, animal life in the Imatong Mountains.
In the Bongo Massif in the Central African Republic, which is C-A-R, remember that because
I had to refer back to that many times to see what C-A-R was in the upcoming books.
So in the C-A-R and the Mountains of Chad, I hope you remember what that means.
The Tiger Dimontane.
Tiger Dimontane of these regions is described as a cat larger than a lion with red fur striped
with cream, a short hairy tail and very large protruding teeth.
It is nocturnal and carries its prey off to caves in the mountains.
Mountains of the Bongo Massif claim that the Gissagram had been seen doing this in 1937
and big game hunter Christian Lenol's tracker later described a firsthand experience of
his behavior in the C-A-R.
Hold on, is this the same guy?
It is the same guy.
Let's see if we get a better account.
Oh he says again, because I'm pretty sure we already talked about this account, a very
famous account.
He convinced me they took me to a rock shelter cave where, according to them, there was a
mountain tiger about 30 years ago.
We were there in 1970.
My first tracker, Dishame, affirmed that he had seen it with his father during a hunting
expedition in these hills of Mali.
He and his father had managed to kill a ron antelope and when they were skinning it,
a mountain tiger emerged from the bush to seize the trophy, carrying it off without
apparent effort in front of the both terrified and dumbfounded hunters who returned empty
handed to the village.
He didn't mention that in the other one.
They needn't have been afraid as the Tiger de Montaigne apparently does not harm men,
nor does it hunt buffaloes, preferring large antelopes.
In fact, the Hajire people of Chazgwuri mountains say that, well it might look frightening,
its big teeth force it to open its mouth so slowly that anyone can escape from it.
Imagine that.
And that's why they're extinct.
And sorry, when they say man, they mean the species man, right?
Like it doesn't thrive on women and children, right?
Yes.
Us as a species.
Because that's generally how you refer to all of us.
Okay.
It would just be weird if it thrived on women.
Yeah, that would be weird.
No other creature does that.
Little did we know.
I mean there's parasites known as babies that do.
True.
So we're a real meat species because almost, no, I'm just kidding.
All humans, yes, it's something.
Every species would more than likely do that.
The most exactly similar to the Saber II Tiger is also the water lions of Africa, which you
may have put two and two together by this point because we did mention this one that
was vaguely killing hippos, but we didn't know what it was.
Also took someone out like a crocodile.
So there's the river Saber II Tigers and there's the mountain Saber II Tigers.
I like the picture of the water lion.
That thing looks creepy.
Oh, I didn't even do that.
That's a good, hold on a second.
They literally have it in the stance like a crocodile coming out of the water to grab
something.
I'm sorry.
This needs to be on a t-shirt.
Are you watching them with the lion head like?
No, I'm just on the cryptid website for water lions.
I have to send this to you.
Okay, look at that water lion.
Oh, that is beautiful.
Yeah, that's nice water lion.
Honestly, all we need is like a clock in the corner and Andrew Bozziago's face and we
got a 2024 campaign right there.
Okay, so we have the two type of tigers Saber II Tigers.
Sorry, I left out a very important part of that tiger descriptor.
The water lions like love the water for some reason and that's the only kind of deciphering
point between the two is where they kind of dwell.
Okay, but we're talking about fresh water, right?
I'm pretty sure, yeah.
Okay, because I just want to make sure that sea lions are a distinctly different thing.
We're not talking about that.
Yes, they are.
So because these have also been compared to walruses in this episode, but they're not
near oceans, I'm assuming they still dwell near the land.
And also like there's only two blinks for water lions that pop up.
Everything after that is all sea lions because Google apparently thinks I'm an idiot.
What's that name of that lion that's in water?
Okay, water lions, they dwell near the water as we were just talking about.
And they go by up to as many as 24 different names in 16 different African nations, especially
the Central African region, which is the C.A.R. in my notes and I just think that's bizarre.
These cryptids as well as five unnamed versions and the stories are surprisingly consistent
over such a large area, although the alleged color of the coat varies strangely enough.
Their defining characteristics are their fangs and their habit of killing hippos, unlike
the tiger de montaigne.
Water lions do attack man and are consequently feared.
The other ones just can't open their mouths.
So that's the other differing factor.
The ones in the mountains can't open their mouths.
That's enough.
So they're harmless.
So between 1994 and 1995, there's two sightings, one included in this one sighting I'm about
to tell you with.
One man, a prospector named Dennis, super African name, claimed to have seen one swimming
in 1962 or 1963.
And a guide named Marcel even claimed to have almost been knocked into the river when Moro
Ngu, ambushed him in 1985.
That's the name of the Saber II Tiger.
Next one was a Chiuemba man, claimed to have seen a long fanged animal in these marshes,
where there has long been rumors of a hippo killing monster during the 1920s, but his
description was rather unusual.
I mean all of them have been pretty sane up until this point, so let's see where this
goes.
He described the Chippei Kui as rather larger than a hippopotamus, covered with shaggy hair
and endowed with slippers instead of legs and feet.
This seems like a completely different animal.
This seems like the other kind of waterline that Google wants me to talk about.
It kind of does.
He also added that it has two large teeth that projected downwards like those of the
Saber II Tiger, though we're dependent mostly on teeth here.
He said that this animal could kill the hippopotamus and that he had several times seen not one,
but two or three of these monsters playing about in shallow swamps at the edge of the
lake Ban Guelieu.
I may say that neither of us believed him and the passage of years has not provided
any confirmatory evidence that might tend to make me more credulous now.
So that was published by McCray Farqua Bailoyle from More African Mysteries, the national
review.
He was not the first to claim to have seen waterlines in this region.
According to Rhodesia pioneer Joseph E Hughes, a British native commissioner claimed to have
encountered a short tailed black swamp leopard, which wounded some of his men.
Well that one just sounds distinctly different though.
Yeah, it does.
So with all this confusion that I've just laid out for you here, I really thought I
did a better job of proofreading all this into a cohesive information for you.
Let's just move out of Africa.
Clearly they're seeing saber two tigers and this all completely lends to a point of favor
that they're still alive and well in Africa.
Some moving their jaws faster than others.
So Mexico, there is an account from the great cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson.
He's so great I have not even heard of him, who claimed that in 1940 he had come into
possession of a unique skin from some sort of big cat, which natives said had been killed
in the area not too long before.
The skin measured around 6 feet long and was unlike any sort of cat known to the area.
Displaying stripes of dark and light brown, very dark hindquarters and most unique of
all was some sort of hairy rough that grew upwards from the shoulders and over the neck
and ears.
Sanderson had the skin stored for future analysis, but unfortunately it was destroyed along
with other unique skins when the building was flooded.
Based on the unique nature of the skin, Sanderson speculated that it was a new species which
he called the Mexican roughed cat.
And there has been speculation since that it might have come from a surviving saber
tooth cat.
So that's Mexico.
I'm just looking.
Ivan Sanderson apparently wrote quite a bit.
He wrote on paranormal stuff too.
He had a book called Things and More Things.
Abominable snowmen.
Things come to life, the story of subhuman on five continents from the early Ice Age
until today.
Invisible residents, the reality of underwater UFOs.
Investigating the unexplained, more things, uninvited visitors, a biologist looks at
UFOs and things.
So I think that's in the reverse order.
I.
Wait, sorry.
It is a reverse order because he has things and he has more things in the first book.
I said things and more things.
I really like the titles for.
Like what am I going to call this book?
Things is perfect.
That just perfectly encapsulates.
What's this about things?
I don't know.
He also wrote fiction under the name Terrence Roberts.
I hate it when they do that.
They not.
Well at least this time he's not a military propagandist.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I haven't read the biography.
Nobody ruin it for me please.
We want to ruin it for ourselves.
Yes.
In a later episode.
We're just up South America where the allegations of surviving sabertooths exactly parallels
those in Africa.
The sightings generally falling into the two categories of river or mountain.
Even their names are similar.
Sorry Chelsea.
I need to do an aside really quick.
During World War II, Sanderson worked for British naval intelligence in charge of counter
espionage against the Germans in the Caribbean.
Then for British security coordination, finally finishing out the war as a press agent.
What?
Yes.
He's another military press guy who got into UFOs.
And why can't I remember that guy's name right now?
Junkheel.
Did he also go by the pen named Junkheel?
I don't think so.
Oh man, this guy's got a pencil thin mustache too.
Oh okay.
You know he's up to no good.
But I'm a fan of that.
I'm going to be honest.
I just wrote him down so we'll take a look at that in future.
So stories of sabertooths have come out of the tropical clout forest in Peru, Colombia,
Ecuador, and especially Venezuela.
Where the Tigre de Tero has been seen in Canema National Park in the Guayana Highlands.
There was an account in 1966 from a seaman in Paraguay who claimed to the naturalist
Peter Matheson that the locals of Colombia and Ecuador often spoke of a striped big cat
around the size of a jaguar out in the jungles that possessed outsized and very sharp protruding
front teeth.
Interestingly, in Paraguay there was a possible sabertooth cat shot and killed in 1975.
Very possible.
The carcass apparently had a long gait of front teeth measuring 12 inches long and when
a zoologist named Juan Acavar examined it he reportedly believed it to be a surviving
sabertooth cat.
It is unknown what happened to the specimen after that which is frustrating to say the
least following a long legacy of supposed missing physical evidence of cryptids.
Between November through March of 1991, Kirsten Sosa, a Pemon Indian in his 50s was hunting
in the jungle about 3 days upriver on the left bank of the Carreo River.
Very specific.
The animal the size of an adult jaguar, they are really comparing it to a jaguar not a hippo
in South America, emerged from a thicket to drink water from a pool.
It was neither a puma since it did not have a long tail nor a jaguar since it did not
have the characteristic spots of camouflage.
He also pointed out that an important detail that strongly caught his attention, although
the feline was positioned on fairly flat ground, its front legs were higher or most robust
than the back ones.
Its color was a yellowish brown or light brown and what appeared to be two large fangs protruding
from his mouth.
Now that is better than any sighting we had in Africa.
South America is doing a way better job but Africa does have the dinosaurs or sabertooth
tigers or potentially hippos or sea lions.
The aquatic variety of these sabertooths in South America are called water tigers.
Go big year.
Compared to the water lions, South America's water tigers seem less mythologized.
Almost every account I have described them as real animals.
Their apparent heartland is restricted to rivers of the Boianas, the Atlantic territories
of South America between the mouths of the Amazon and Morinoco, which similar creatures
are reported from as far north as Nicaragua and Costa Rica and perhaps as far as Paraguay.
In 1962, the inhabitants of Merre Pesula in French Guayana blamed a monster called the
Papoke.
When the body of a boy named Ustache, Bulgense was found scavenged more likely by known animals
in the Moroni River.
Colonel Rene Raccattle later spoke to a Rekuyane Indian named, who claimed to have seen what
he called a Maipolina in the Moroni in the same year.
Holy man, that's just a lot of words I don't know.
That is a lot of words, yeah.
Emma Pette described it as follows.
Hopefully this goes a bit easier.
It is in English, so there's that.
It was three meters long by one wide.
It was also about a meter thick.
I don't even know what that means.
It's four legs, all clawed, resembled the anteater's hind legs.
The head wore two eyes identical to those of the Maipori, which is the name given in
Guayana to the tap here.
The ears were drooping a stripe 10 to 15 centimeters wide and a different color from
that of the coat appeared on the head and the back.
This is a really good sighting so far.
It's very detailed.
The mouth was armed with visible teeth, according to the description he gave me.
They would be like the teeth of a walrus.
The tail resembled that of a cow.
The chest was whitish, like the line on the back, while the rest of the body was rather
tan.
The hair as a whole was short and that is from Riccate Vrené in 1978 from this French
book.
It was sighted from.
Those of 2020, inhabitants of Pepechton say they still sometimes see the poke poke in
the forest and in the river.
A very similar water tiger, the Massacura man, is or was also reported in the Demerara
river in Guayana.
Like the poke poke, it supposedly disembowels children.
That's the first time that has come up.
This one actually, they do say men don't have to worry.
They don't either.
So Sabertooth Tiger, that's what we got for sightings.
I can't say I'm convinced that it's still out there.
There's probably something out there, but Sabertooth, water tiger.
Based on the sightings that you've described and like what people are saying about it,
I'm kind of hoping they're not real.
They sound kind of terrifying, except the one that you can just easily walk away from
as it tries to bite.
Yeah, no, that guy seems cool.
He seems like he might be alright as a pet or something.
So someone better try and domesticate that soon if they can actually have a legit sighting
of it, I guess.
So we're just going to move on from that confusing little bit of this episode on the Sabertooth
and ST for short.
If you don't want to say Sabertooth, it takes up too much time.
We're going to move on to the woolly mammoth, Big Woolly himself.
And he's mainly extinct during the epoch, in which I'm not even going to put in here
because they say if you say it too perfectly bad things will happen.
I just took it out.
This epoch was about 2 million, how do you say this number?
2,588,000?
It's 10,000 years ago.
I'm pretty sure that was right.
Yeah, you're good.
Yeah.
That's the scientific way to pronounce that number, but I think I did it okay.
Woolly mammoth was the last of the mammoth species and was similar but slightly larger
in size to the modern day African elephant.
The main difference is that it was covered in shaggy hair, like the woolly mammoth we
know with a head full of hair.
He had smaller ears than the elephant to minimize the effects of the cold since it was alive
during an ice age.
And it's enormous tusks which it used for fighting, foraging, moving, I mean moving
objects very much like the elephants we know and love today.
Although the mammoth declined considerably during the end of the era it's from, there
were relic populations that are believed to have still been around up until perhaps around
4,000 years ago, after which it is considered to have finally gone extinct.
In recent times there have been many discoveries of well preserved skeletons, tusks, dung,
which is poop if you weren't sure, stomach contents, and even full carcasses buried
underneath the ice in both Siberian and Alaska.
And I think that's actually happened since we've been alive.
I think I remember that in the news.
Oh yeah, they find them all the time.
Big news, yeah, just like fully preserved which is weird.
We don't find like other dinosaurs like that.
And then they try to eat them.
Is this a dinosaur?
I'm gonna go with no, it's not a dinosaur.
It's not a dinosaur.
Yeah, it's like an elephant.
It's kind of hard to believe a sabertooth tiger existed for 40 million years longer
than a woolly mammoth though.
Yeah, a woolly mammoth actually had like lots of ancestors though and I still consider
them both dinosaurs.
Okay.
And no one's really gonna change my mind on that.
Well, it's not like you're in that profession so don't worry about it.
It's true, so I can hold any belief I want to.
So an early encounter with a mammoth, these ones I remember more of than the sabertooth
one so these ones I think are a little bit more organized.
Early encounter with a mammoth was by an English explorer David Ingram in the 1560s.
During his travels he took very detailed notes on the regional flora and fauna as well as
the topography and customs of the native peoples he encountered.
These notes are overall very accurate like David Ingram accurate.
The explorer wrote of how he had seen hairy elephants roaming about which is remarkable
considering that there's no such indigenous animals at the time and also Ingram's notes
were usually quite accurate just like I just really emphasized it's coming up again just
how accurate they were.
Generally he didn't make up facts about hairy elephants.
It wasn't just the thing he added at the end of every journal I'm sure.
Yeah.
Again with the fucking hairy elephant.
It wasn't one of those things but they're like David Ingram and his fucking hairy elephants.
He can never leave those out of his story.
Very articulate, very precise, except for those fucking elephants he adds at the end of everything.
Definitely a shortfall.
He could have gone places.
He could have gone far.
We wouldn't have sent him so far north if he did.
Another very early account comes from the 1580s when a Russian family called the stroganovs
supposedly sent mercenaries led by Yermak Pefiyanovich to hunt down some bandits in
Siberia what a time to be alive.
When they passed the Earl Mountains Yermak claimed that they had come across what he
said was a large hairy elephant lumbering through the wilds.
Natives to the area then confirmed that these creatures although rare were very real indeed
and were sometimes hunted for their ivory and meat.
I don't know if anyone's ever put this forth but I believe the Earl Mountains is where
the Dyatlov Pass incident happened.
Do you think it was a woolly mammoth?
It could have been a woolly mammoth.
Okay.
Or maybe a mountain saber two tiger.
I'm pretty sure.
We often overlooked water lines.
I'm pretty sure they've probably done their due diligence and ruled that out however but
I just thought I'd bring it up.
We are journey to the fringe after all.
In the early 1800s there were several reports of supposed surviving mammoths as they all
are at this point I believe.
In 1807 there was a report from the explorer David Thompson who told of hearing from First
Nations in Canada of enormous elephant like creatures hanging out in the wilds of British
Columbia Canada.
That's right we have woolly mammoths.
We should have a woolly mammoth on our flag.
The natives said that the immense hairy creatures were rarely seen and that they slept while
leaning against trees.
Thompson encountered elephant like tracks in 1811 which he believed had been made by
a young mammoth and in the end Thompson would say this of the encounter.
Quote, the circumstantial evidence of the existence of this animal is sufficient but
notwithstanding the many months the hunters have transversed this extent of country in
all directions and this animal having never been seen there is no direct evidence of his
existence yet when I think of all I have seen and heard if put on my oath I could neither
assert nor deny its existence.
For many hundreds of miles of the rocky mountains are yet unknown and through the ephiles by
which we pass distant 120 miles from each other we hasten our march as much as possible.
End quote.
It's interesting that I live in the Thompson Oak Gnoggin as a region and I'm wondering
if it's named after this guy.
Oh I don't know maybe or maybe it's just a coincidence.
It could be a coincidence.
Thompson's a common name.
Yeah it's just gonna say.
There's also an account in the Edinburgh magazine supposedly made in 1803 in Western
Canada weird name for a magazine in Western Canada but here we are talking about it.
This is near a place called York Fort.
So tons in Canada for some reason.
And you're positive this is not on the British Isles.
No I'm pretty sure I at least know where Canada is if anything.
I hope.
I really hope I could point that out on a map.
The witness Thomas Pollock claimed to have been a sergeant with the Hudson Bay Company
at the time and he and his guide had come across quite the curious beast while venturing
out to make contact with native tribes.
Pollock would say this of what happened thus quote we left York Fort on the 19th of May
1803 about a fortnight after having been sent across a river the name of which I do
not now recollect by Mr. Lewis's orders.
The guide and myself suddenly came upon an animal of enormous size that appeared about
20 feet in height and had very heavy and unwieldy appearance.
I can give but a very lame account of it on account the consternation in which I was
thrown.
The largeness of its belly was enormous nearly touching the ground its color was dirty black
end quote so this elephant like large creature was obese like its stomach was on the ground.
I don't know how that would make for any sort of mobility in any sort of animal if its stomach
was on the ground other than crocodiles it's always on the ground for them unless it's
in the water.
Exciting in 1818 there is yet another account of Big Woolly from the Rocky Mountains this
time in the United States part of the Rocky Mountains.
The witness said that there is what seemed to be woolly mammoths wandering around the
region and would say this of the mysterious creatures quote.
The fact of its existence rests upon the testimony of two different parties who had been sent
some errand into the interior valleys of those mountains.
The first party came suddenly upon an animal in a deep informally unvisited recess and
were so alarmed as its religious size exceeding that of the largest elephant at its unknown
aspect they immediately retreated in great consternation to the encampment from which
they had been dispatched.
Another party was sent to the same spot to ascertain the fact and though the animal was
not observed its footsteps could be distinctly traced and each compartment of its hoof is
stated to have admitted both the feet of the travelers.
It ought to observe that these parties were perfectly familiar with the appearance of
the buffalo which indeed they were in a daily habit of killing and that the animal which
they saw cannot therefore be regarded as an individual of that tribe.
The tribe of Buffalo.
God they talked weirder than the 1800s.
I know that's why I'm having troubles with this.
It was seen to as I have stated in a very remote and central valley and the intervals
between its paces are described having been of astonishing magnitude.
Now we know well that animals of immense size have inhabited the northern parts of our earth
in former times and the huge remains which are every day dug up are more likely to have
belonged to individuals of such an animal as that now alluded to then to any extinct
species of the former world.
In the same year 1818 to refresh your memory after all of that quote that I just read to
you you probably forgot I forgot where am I.
There was a similar experience made by a Russian hunter who would finally relate the
encounter decades later to Mr. Senor M.L. Gowan of the French consulate in all places
Vladistok Russia in 1920.
A hunter said that he had found enormous elephant-tine footprints as he was exploring out on the
taiga and that he had then followed the tracks for several days.
What kind of time does this guy have on his hands?
He began to think that he would never find the source of the mysterious giant tracks but
then he would come across two apparent woolly mammoths.
He would say this of the ensuing encounter.
One afternoon it was clear enough from the tracks that the animals weren't far off.
A wind was in my face which was good for approaching them without them knowing I was there.
All of a sudden I saw one in the animals quite clearly and now I must admit I really was
afraid.
It had stopped among some young saplings.
It was a huge elephant with big white tusks, very curved.
It was a dark chestnut color as far as I could see.
It had fairly long hair on the hind quarters but it seemed much shorter on the front.
I must say I had no idea that there were such big elephants.
It had huge legs and moved very slowly.
I've only seen elephants in pictures but I must say that even from the distance, he
was about 3000 meters from them, I could never have believed any beast could be so big.
The second beast was around.
I saw it only a few times among the trees.
It seemed to be the same size.
So if he hasn't seen an elephant I'm not sure the scale of what he's talking about
because I mean elephants are pretty big as well.
Next up we have another report that was relayed by Colonel F. Fowler who in the late 1800s
resided in Alaska.
When talking to a reporter he related a tale about something he had seen out in the wilderness
near the Snake River while traveling to an Inuit trading post.
Once at the outpost he claimed that he had purchased a load of what he thought was fossilized
mammoth ivory from Chief Tuliteema and upon inspecting the tusk, Fowler claims that he
found fresh traces of blood and flesh upon them gross.
When he asked the chief about it, Tuliteema explained that the ivory had come from animals
that had been killed just 3 months before, just about 50 miles away from where they were.
According to the chief, the hunting party had run into a whole herd of mammoths and
it managed to take down two of them.
Yeah I guess I could read this.
Fowler would explain the stream's incident thus.
He says, he and his band were searching along a dry water course for ivory and had found
a considerable quantity.
One of the party who was in advance rushed in upon the main body one morning with the
startling intelligence at a spring of water about a mile above where they then were.
He had discovered the sign of several of the big teeth.
They had come to the spring to drink from a lofty plateau further inland and had evidently
fed in the vicinity of the water for some time.
The chief immediately called about him, his warriors, and the party under the leadership
of the scout approached the stream.
So they went to the stream, him and his posse.
It nearly reached it.
When their ears were suddenly saluted by a chorus of loud, strolled trumpet-like calls,
an enormous creature came crashing toward them through the thicket, the ground fairly
trembling beneath the ponderous footfalls.
What a way to say that.
With wild cries of terror and dismay, the Indians fled, all but the chief of the scout
who had first discovered the trails of the monsters.
They were armed with large caliber muskets and stood their ground opening fire on the
mammoth.
A bullet must have penetrated the creature's brain, or it staggered forward and fell dead
and subsequently on their way back to the cramped ground, they overhauled and killed
a cow big teeth, which was evidently the mate of the first one killed.
I asked the hunter to describe the monster, and taking a sharp stick he drew me a picture
of the pale animal in the soft clay.
According to his description, it was at least 20 feet in height and 30 feet in length.
In general shape, it was not unlike an elephant, but its ears were smaller, its eyes bigger,
and its trunk longer and more slender.
Its tusks were yellowish white in color and six in number.
What?
Huh.
It had six tusks?
And also, I just want to point out at this point, how was he using color when he's
outlining something in clay?
I think he just ascribed it that way.
Okay, we're gonna have to assume that.
Four of this tusks were placed like those of a boar, one on either side of its jaw,
in each jaw.
They were about four feet long and came to a sharp point.
The other two tusks he brought away and measured them and they were over 15 feet in length
and weighed upward of 250 pounds each.
They gradually tapered to a sharp point and curved inward.
The monster's body was covered with long, coarse hair of a reddish-done color.
What a sighting.
Lots of First Nations sightings.
I actually wish I could include some legends of First Nations in this.
That's an afterthought, obviously.
That might be its own episode.
Yeah, these are clearly European encounters with First Nations and then saying, yes, these
are what they are seeing.
So I apologize, I probably could have presented that in a better way, but that's an afterthought.
So maybe a future episode.
In October of 1899, there is a strange article called Killing the Mammoth published in McClure's
magazine written by a Henry Tuchman.
The article discussed the supposed killing of the last mammoth, which had apparently
happened in 1890 out in the Frigid Wilderness of Alaska again.
Tuchman claimed that he had been staying at Fort Yukon for the winter and at some point
he was showing some pictures of African animals to the native Inuit when one of them saw a
picture of an elephant and they all became excited and agitated.
One villager called Joe, said he had seen such a creature recently not far away, which was
odd since there should have not been any elephants around for thousands of miles.
Joe claimed that he had seen the creature, which he had called the T. K. Koa, while out
hunting for beaver with his son some years before when they came across the massive creature
apparently bathing in a lake.
The son then promptly shot at it, but the creature was only angered by this and they
were treated.
This was all very intriguing to Tuchman, who interpreted this as a sighting of a possible
living woolly mammoth and made plans to actually go out after the forbidding winter had passed
to investigate the area of the sighting.
When summer came and the snow melted, Tuchman supposedly went out into the rough wilds with
an Inuit guide and they finally found what they were looking for after spending over
a month camping out in wait.
At one point he set up a fire under the impression that the mammoth would emerge to try and stamp
it out and unbelievably they seemed to work.
The mammoth allegedly came out of the trees to proceed to try and stomp out the fire and
at that point the two hunters opened fire until the mighty bees fell.
They then went about skinning the colossal animal and collecting its bones, but the coming
onset of the winter meant that they were forced to hunker down with their trophy until the
spring.
According to Tuchman, he finally did manage to sell the bones and remains to his kill to
the Smithsonian.
They allegedly kept them under wraps.
Although the story was subsequently widely reported on in many publications of the time,
this thought to have most likely been a hoax and the Smithsonian itself has denied the
claims but it's still bandied about as a possibly true event.
Or his part, Fowler continued to claim that the whole tale was true, even going as far
as to say that the government knew these creatures were still alive.
Okay.
So that brings me to my last woolly mammoth sighting.
And this is going to be what if you just type in woolly mammoth sighting, I bet you this
is the one that comes up.
Yeah.
I'm going to do that right now.
Just type in woolly mammoth.
Woolly mammoth sighting and go to videos while I talk about this.
The most recent talked about piece of supposed photographic evidence, not just stories from
the 1800s here anymore.
This is photographic video from 2012.
Is this the one crossing the river?
Yes.
So you can watch it.
The Opposite Russian government employed engineer named Ludovik Pitho allegedly managed to
film a woolly mammoth wading through a river in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of
Siberia while surveying for a planned road.
It became an immediate internet sensation and caused many jaws to drop as well as many
theories to swirl.
Man, that is one grainy video.
Yeah.
It's very grainy and I watched it and I was like, I can't see it.
It kind of looks like a woolly mammoth.
I actually think it more looks like a bear with a fish in its mouth.
Yeah.
So that's the thing.
I first watched it and I was like, okay, I could see woolly mammoth if we're looking
at this until I saw one of the explanations is a very out of focus bear carrying a fish
in its mouth in which it looks exactly like that.
Yeah.
And that's definitely what it is.
And that is the latest woolly mammoth site and with all of those credible woolly mammoth
sightings, except for the last two hoaxes or confusion that I just shared with you.
I think there's definitely some more substance to the woolly mammoth sightings than a saber
tooth for sure.
I want to will it to be the more true of the ones we went through today?
Like, if we could just live in a world with woolly mammoths and slow-mouthed tigers.
It would be a better place.
You would definitely want to, what do they call it when you selective breeding the saber
tooth tiger that you just can't close his mouth that fast.
So it's not that dangerous.
That's probably the one in the Flintstones.
I'm going to go out on a limb.
Yeah.
You can get your can in there and just get it open.
Yeah.
In time.
There's so many good household needs that they would be there to provide.
That's the end.
So do you have any thoughts of my extinct animal sightings?
I think it was a lot of fun.
I know I personally am now going to start ending all of my logs with a sighting of a
furry elephant creature taking after Ingram.
You're going to be like, yeah.
And I think if there's one thing that was taken from this, it's that.
Yeah.
And we all include furry large elephants in our logs going forth.
Yeah.
It's going to be an incident while it'll be one major incident.
The furry elephant.
The lying furry elephants and everything that we do moving.
And if there's one more thing that I do take from this episode as well is that if we split
up our episodes, despite the fact that we're recording them beside each other, it can seem
like we have ongoing jokes.
It really brings it all together.
It looks like we thought ahead, which I quite like.
But only for like a month apart of episodes.
Yeah.
And then that's it.
It'll never come up again.
Yeah.
No, that was a fun little jaunt through time and no less than three continents.
So thank you for that, Chelsea.
You're very welcome.
And I'm sure we could actually do more of these because there are more extinct creatures
out there.
And not one time I was a little sad that you didn't do this.
Did you mention that they could just be woolly mammoth ghosts?
I did briefly bring it up a little.
I said dinosaur ghosts because I really just generally throw them all into dinosaur.
Yes, I'm noticing.
So by that, I didn't mean woolly mammoth ghost.
So do you think we live in AD and that means after dinosaurs?
After dinosaurs.
Okay.
Yeah.
They were just a general time period of animals.
I'm dinosaur.
D and AD.
Yes.
Okay.
And with that, I think we...
Yeah.
I think that's a good place to end this off.
We just learned a lot.
And I don't know what to do with this information.
I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We have been Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening.
We will see you next week.
Bye.
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