From: Michael Newton's Florida's Unexpected Wildlife (ISBN: 978-0-8130-3156-9), $21, published by the University Press of Florida (Sept. 30, 2007), 208 pp.
Chapter 2: Going...going...gone?
Extinction, whether prompted by natural selection or the thoughtless acts of humankind, marks the termination of a species. From geologic times to the twenty-first century, thousands of species have vanished from Earth, swept away for all time, leaving only their fossil remains, preserved relics or photos to prove that they ever existed.
Cryptozoologists, however, are sometimes reluctant to accept extinction as the final word. Their quest for "living fossils"--creatures that defy scholarly efforts to erase them from the list of extant species--spans the globe. Some famous (or notorious) examples include Mokele-mbembe, a relict dinosaur alleged by some to dwell in certain Congo basin backwaters; surviving plesiosaurs, supposed by some to dwell in lakes ranging from Scotland to Argentina; and Australia's thylacine, a doglike marsupial predator officially extinct since the 1930s.
While none of those elusive cryptids has been found alive so far, some living fossils have surprised researchers by appearing in the modern world, alive and well. A classic case (and "poster child" for cryptozoology) is the coelacanth (Latimera chalumnae), a lobe-finned fish first identified from fossil remains in 1836, presumed by paleontologists to have vanished from Earth some sixty-five million years ago. That assumption proved false in December 1938, when fishermen delivered a freshly-caught coelacanth to market at East London, South Africa. Museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer claimed the specimen, subsequently identified by ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith. Another fourteen years elapsed before a second specimen was caught off Comoros, in December 1952, but a further 203 coelacanths were hauled from the depths by 1975. German naturalist Hans Fricke photographed six living specimens off Grand Comoro Island in 1987, and another coelacanth population was reported from Indonesian waters in September 1997.
In short, the experts had been wrong.
Many other "resurrections" from presumed extinction may be cited, including the pacarana (1904), Morelet's crocodile (1923), the golden hamster (1930), the desert rat kangaroo (1931), Cabanis's tanager (1937), the pygmy killer whale (1954), James's flamingo (1956), Fraser's dolphin (1956), the wood bison (1957), Bolsón's tortoise (1959), the Seychelles scops owl (1959), Leadbeater's opossum (1961), the black-footed ferret (1964), the parma wallaby and white-throated wallaby (1965), the long-footed potoroo (1967), the pygmy hog (1971), the yellow-tailed woolly monkey (1974), Ridley's roundleaf bat (1975), Andrews's beaked whale (1976), Bulmer's fruit bat (1980), the Deniliquen wombat (1985), the Javan rhinoceros (1988), the Chinese otter (1990), the desert warthog (1991), the bay cat (1992), Roosevelt's muntjac (1995), the Barbary lion (1996), and the dusky hopping mouse (2003), among others.3
While yet undocumented, Florida allegedly plays host to several species listed as extinct. They are examined in this chapter with the anecdotal evidence for their survival.
The Carolina Parakeet
The Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), initially described in 1891, was North America's only indigenous member of the parrot family (Pittacidae). Although a small bird, it was noteworthy for brilliant plumage, including a yellow head and orange face, and bright green overall. Its native range spanned Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, wherein its frugivorous diet drove farmers with orchards to kill the birds on sight. Those who survived that slaughter were trapped for sale as pets or killed for use as ornaments on women's hats. The last confirmed wild specimens were shot at Lake Okeechobee in April 1904, while the last captive specimen--a male named Incas--died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 21 February 1918.
Although officially extinct, Carolina parakeets were still reported from the wild over the next two decades. In 1920, witness Henry Redding claimed a sighting of thirty parakeets along Fort Drum Creek, in Okeechobee County. Six years later, also in Okeechobee County, Charles Doe saw three pairs of the elusive birds and collected several of their eggs, which he preserved as evidence. Bird wardens employed by the National Audubon Society reported multiple sightings of green parakeets with yellow heads from South Carolina's Santee Swamp (in Sumter County), during the 1930s, but those claims did not prevent workmen from draining the swamp in 1938, to construct the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric Project. Meanwhile, birdwatcher Oren Stemville made a color motion-picture film of a still-unidentified parakeet during 1937, in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp.
No sightings of a Carolina parakeet in Florida have been reported publicly since 1926, and while they may still theoretically exist, any future sightings will be complicated by the FWCC's listing of sixteen exotic parakeet species sighted in Florida between 1920 and 1987. None are listed as established in the state, and one--the orange-fronted parakeet (Aratinga_canicularis)--was officially extirpated soon after its 1972 arrival, but fifteen species remain present in unknown numbers. Possible look-alikes for the Carolina parakeet include the green parakeet, reported first in 1920, and the red-masked parakeet, breeding in the wild for "at least ten years," but still "not established" to official satisfaction. Other parakeets known to inhabit the Florida wilds include the blue-crowned, brown-throated, crimson-fronted, dusky-headed, Hispaniolan, mitred, orange-chinned, peach-fronted, scarlet-fronted, tui, white-eyed, white-winged, and yellow-chevroned.
The ivory-billed woodpecker
North America's largest woodpecker, the ivory-billed, was christened Campephilus principalis principalis by Carl von Linné in 1758, then received the alternate name C. p. bairdii from John Cassin in 1863, based on specimens obtained from Cuba. Stateside observers nicknamed it the "Lord God Bird," after the startled exclamations voiced by witnesses upon their first encounter with a twenty-inch woodpecker displaying black-and-white plumage (with a bright crimson crest on male specimens). Its white bill instantly distinguished the ivory-bill from the otherwise similar, but slightly smaller, pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).
The ivory-billed woodpecker once ranged throughout Dixie, from North Carolina to eastern Texas, and northward through the Mississippi River valley to Missouri, southern Illinois and Indiana. It was, sadly, another avian victim of man's depredations, needlessly slaughtered by hunters, while commercial logging eradicated much of its natural forest habitat. The last confirmed sighting of an ivory-bill in Florida dates from 1924, when a specimen was shot near Tallahassee and sold for $150 to the University of Florida. Nationwide, the last confirmed sighting of the twentieth century was logged in 1944. The species was officially presumed extinct in North America by the early 1960s, and in Cuba by 1990.
Still, as in the case of the Carolina parakeet and so many other lost species, sightings continued. Wildlife artist Frank Shields reported sightings of single specimens near Interlachen, Florida, on 4 and 15 April 1969, followed by recovery of a distinctive black-and-white feather from the same region on 11 June 1969. Elsewhere across the southern United States, tentative sightings were filed by John Dennis in Texas (1966
Ironically, it was another Cornell spokesperson who broke the stunning news, in April 2005, that ivory-billed woodpeckers had been found alive and well in the Big Woods region of eastern Arkansas. As detailed in Cornell's report, a year-long expedition including fifty members, operating under quasi-military security precautions, produced multiple eyewitness sightings and caught at least one ivory-bill on videotape. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, declared, "The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives." Scott Simon, director of the Nature Conservancy's Arkansas branch, agreed. "It is a landmark rediscovery," he said. "Finding the ivory-bill in Arkansas validates decades of great conservation work and represents an incredible story of hope for the future."
Rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, while clearly not on par with capture of a living coelacanth, energized birdwatchers and cryptozoologists alike. It also, predictably, inspired a rash of sightings from Virginia to South Daytona, Florida, where John Hicks allegedly saw an ivory-bill with a "huge wingspan" at the Ra-Mar mobile home park. It was, Hicks assured reporters, "the one y'all wrote about." FWCC spokesmen dismissed Hicks's sighting, still insisting that the ivory-bill is extinct in Florida, but Prof. Jerome Jackson of Florida Gulf Coast University, author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (2004), disagrees. In Jackson's view, Collier County "is the most promising place for ivory-bills. There's a possibility because so much of the Big Cypress [Swamp] is protected. There have been at least three sightings of the ivory-bills in Collier County that we simply cannot dismiss."
"Extinct" Rodents
Moving from birds to mammals, we encounter the case of the silver rice rat (Oryzomys argentatus or O. palustris natator), a ten-inch rodent with silver-gray fur on its back, once found in salt marshes on nine of the Florida Keys. Researchers D. Bruce Barbour and Stephen Humphrey declared the species extinct in 1979, based on their field work in its known habitat. One year later, Rhode Island mammalogist James Lazell Jr. captured a live specimen, while Numi Goodyear found silver rice rats alive and well on eight separate islands. Lazell concluded that the rats are "far from extinct, but finding specimens depends on the skill of the searcher." Lazell notes in passing that Barbour and Humphrey issued a similar verdict of extinction for the pallid beach mouse (Peromyscus polionotus decoloratus), and concludes that while that species "may well be extinct. . . a specious method was used to argue for extinction." The risk, as Lazell rightly notes, lies in the realm of environmental politics, because "once a species' 'extinction' is published in the refereed literature, most conservation organizations lose interest in preserving its habitat."
"Specs"
On the afternoon of 11 March 1959, skin-diver Bob Wall was swimming off Miami Beach, at a depth of thirty-five feet, when he spotted a large underwater cave and went to investigate. Inside, he saw a bizarre and frightening creature whose cylindrical body, roughly five feet six inches long, was mounted on eight spiny legs, standing approximately three feet off the cave's rocky floor. The animal's pointed head sprouted twin stalks, each supporting an apparent brown-spotted eye the size of a silver dollar, trained directly on Wall. As the creature moved toward him, Wall beat a hasty retreat. He reported his sighting to the press, which dubbed the animal "Specs," but when five divers from Miami Seaquarium returned to capture Specs on 12 March, no trace of it remained.
Three possible explanations for Wall's sighting have thus far been advanced. The first, a deliberate hoax, seems unlikely based on Wall's reputation and apparent desire to continue his employment as a guide for the glass-bottomed tourist boat Comrade II. The second, favored by critics, is a simple case of mistaken identity, and cryptozoologist Karl Shuker suggests that Wall may have been spooked by a large spiny lobster (Panulirus argus). Arguments against this solution include the fact that spiny lobsters rarely reach two feet in length, and that Wall--an experienced diver--staunchly denied that Specs was a lobster, crab or octopus. As noted by George Eberhart, the only known crustacean that approaches five feet in length is the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), found only off southeastern Japan.
A third, rather startling suggestion, aired by cryptozoologist Mark Hall, involves the possible survival of prehistoric eurypterids, commonly known as sea scorpions. Based on the fossil record, eurypterids reached the peak of their evolutionary development in the late Silurian Period (400 million years ago) and lapsed into extinction near the end of the Permian Period (about 155 million years later). Hall suggests that relict sea scorpions or their evolved descendants may account not only for Specs, but also for similar creatures reported by witnesses from Greenland to the South Pacific, and from various landlocked American states. Dr. Shuker demurs from that one-size-fits-all solution, while conceding that Specs, at least, might represent some kind of relict eurypterid.
When is Extinction the End?
It is unquestionably true, as noted by critics, that some cryptozoology "buffs" accept any wild theory advanced to explain sightings of unknown or unexpected animals. Likewise, it is certain that some "experts" have pronounced species extinct without sufficient research and have later been compelled to eat their words. From the coelacanth to the ivory-billed woodpecker, dozens of "extinct" creatures have resurfaced over time, proving reports of their demise to be exaggerated.
How many more "living fossils"--if any--remain to be found in Florida or its surrounding waters? That question can only be answered with time and exhaustive research, but our next chapter suggests that some of those elusive cryptids may be very large indeed.
Reprinted courtesy of the University of Press of Florida