From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Discoveries
Columbus Could
Only Dream Of
Not all monsters are myths.
The Hobbit. The Lord God Bird. The Kraken. As we mark Columbus Day next week, we can look back on a year in which we, like the European explorers of centuries ago, discovered things once thought to be the stuff of fantasy and myth.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit," wrote J.R.R. Tolkien, conjuring the most beloved of his Middle Earth characters. It turns out that the hole is a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores and that the character is a three-foot tall hominid known to science as
Or consider the Lord God Bird, which for six decades had gone about its business in the swamp forests of eastern Arkansas as if wearing Tolkien's Ring of Invisibility. The bird acquired its grand-sounding moniker because those who saw it tended to say, "Lord God what is that bird?" There had been no verified sighting of the bird, otherwise known as the ivory-billed woodpecker, since 1944, and it was widely assumed to have become extinct.
In February of this year, an Arkansas man named Gene Sparling spotted a white- and black-plumed bird with a red crest and a brilliant white bill while kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. Within days, Mr. Sparling's account of the sighting--posted on a bird watchers' Web site--attracted the attention of Cornell University's Tim Gallagher, who'd been writing a book lamenting the Lord God Bird's extinction. A week later, Mr. Gallagher and a companion were floating down the Cache River with Mr. Sparling; on the second day, the very thing nearly flew into their canoe. Mr. Gallagher, an Indiana Jones of ornithology, calls the ivory-bill "the holy grail among birdwatchers," and, like his cinematic equivalent, he has found it.
Then, late last month, the Kraken. "If they were to lay hold the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom," wrote Eric Ludvicsen Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his 1752 "Natural History of Norway." The story of the Kraken--a tentacled beast the size of a small island--had been part of Nordic legend since at least the 12th century. While Nantucket whalers had come across Kraken-like carcasses in the bellies of sperm whale, and giant squid had occasionally washed up dead onshore, nobody had ever actually seen a living specimen--at least nobody who'd lived to tell about it.
But in September 2004 two Japanese researchers, Kyoichi Mori and Tsunemi Kubodera, dangled a remotely controlled camera and some bait from 3,000 feet of cable off the Bonin Islands in the Pacific and found what they had spent nine years looking for. "Contrary to belief that the giant squid is relatively inactive," said Mr. Mori, "the squid we captured on film actively used its enormous tentacles to go after prey." After four hours of struggle, it left behind one of those tentacles--a mere 20 feet long--which the researchers brought to the surface and which promptly gripped Mr. Kubodera's fingers the moment he touched it. A gentle giant the giant squid apparently is not.
The yeti? As in the Abominable Snowman? I called the MacArthur Foundation to ask if this was money well-spent; a spokeswoman assured me that the story was in error and the foundation did not, in fact, subscribe to the legend of Bigfoot. But Lee Poston, a WWF spokesman in Washington, had a more easy-going view. After extolling the virtues of Sakteng as a sanctuary for snow leopards, red pandas and barking deer, he added: "Hey, if the yeti is there and it helps create awareness of the place, then we're all for it."
Count me in on that one, dudes. After a year in which creatures of legend, creatures of lore and creatures of the deep came out from their lost worlds, I, for one, am ruling nothing out.
Mr. Stephens is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
