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400 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2011
One day in 1949, a doctor of zoology called Bernard Houvelmans opens the Saturday Evening Post and reads an article entitled ‘There May Be Dinosaurs’. He’s wary when he sees that it’s signed by a writer he trusts. Then, amid the claims made in the text, he reads the names of researchers he also considers serious, and by the end he has found that he needs to look into the information.
Seven years later, he publishes On the Track of Unknown Animals, introducing a series of animals discovered to date in the twentieth century. Most of them are pretty big. There you’ll find the okapi, the coelacanth, the Paraguayan peccary, the pygmy hippopotamus, the Cambodian wild ox, and the Komodo dragon.
Heuvelmans is a scientist, he considers himself a scientist, the animals he writes about exist ‘in reality’, but he has demonstrated that many of them were only located after conversations with indigenous people who gave assurances of their existences by recounting stories, describing them. Before they were discovered, these animals were no more than legends to westerners, or the victims of extinction. In which case why should we not believe other stories told about fugitive beings? (p.32)