Real Encounters With Creatures Scientists Say Should Not Exist

Fishing boats hauled up a fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years. Government teams spent years tracking wild men in remote mountains, and scientists searched for a massive undiscovered ape in China. These are real encounters with creatures scientists say should not exist. On December 22, 1938, a fishing boat off East London, South Africa hauled in its catch, and the crew was sorting through it like usual, tossing most of it back overboard. One fish didn't get thrown away, though. It stood out right away. About five feet long, deep blue, with thick, fin-like limbs. It had no idea what it was and set it aside. Word got to Marjorie Courtney Ladmir, a local museum curator, and she went down to the dock to check it out herself. She saw it, she knew it was not a normal fish. Didn't match anything in the reference books at the time. So she had it preserved in salt and sent sketches to J. L. B. Smith, a fish expert at the University of Cape Town. Smith didn't actually see the information until early 1939. When he went through the drawings, he realized what he was looking at. A coelacanth, a fish only known from fossils. It was believed to have gone extinct roughly 65 million years earlier. By the time the actual specimen reached him in February 1939, the soft tissue had already broken down, but the bones and scales matched fossil records. He announced the discovery in March of 1939. The specimen is still preserved in the East London Museum. So coelacanths are incredibly rare to find in the wild, but they do still exist. One of the most ancient species of fish living today. Throughout the 70s and into the 80s, the Chinese government actually funded expeditions to go find the Yeren, this big ape that villagers in Hubei province have been talking about for years. People described it standing around six and a half feet tall with red or dark hair, walking upright, sometimes letting out these loud calls in the forest. Teams from the Chinese Academy of Sciences went out, talked to hundreds of witnesses. They took footprint casts, collected hair from the areas where people kept seeing it. In 1976, they found and documented a big footprint pressed into the dirt. In 1980, they collected hair samples that some scientists say don't match any known ape. But nobody ever came up with a body, a skull, DNA, anything that actually proved a new species. A lot of scientists were still skeptical, figured it was probably bears or hoaxes, old folklore getting passed around. Still, it's a pretty cool case because government scientists spent years out there interviewing people and collecting evidence. Can't say that about Sasquatch. And who knows, just because they didn't find it, doesn't disprove its existence. There could be something lurking out there. In the early 2000s, researchers from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund started looking into stories out of the Bili region in the Congo. Locals kept talking about these huge chimp-like apes doing stuff that normal chimps just don't do. People called them Bili apes or Bondo apes, way bigger than regular chimps, building nests on the ground instead of up in trees. There were even stories about these things fighting off lions. Some people said they stood almost six feet tall and were super aggressive. Primatologist named Thurston Hicks led a team out there collecting feces, hair, photos, whatever they could find. By 2019, they had a full study published on the chimps living in that region. The DNA said, yeah, these were eastern chimpanzees, same subspecies you'd find anywhere else. But the behavior was still weird. Ground nests, fighting lions, extra large in size, none of that is normal for chimps out there. So for whatever reason, maybe something to do with their environment, it had these particular chimps acting totally different than others of their kind. Bili ape thing is real in that people kept spotting these strange apes, and scientists have actually studied them. I'm just not sure why they act the way they do. Starting in the 2000s, marine biologists at NIWA, that's New Zealand's Ocean Research Agency, started dragging trawl nets hundreds of meters down to see what was living down there, and what came up looked like something from another planet. Long bodies, smooth skin, huge eyes, this pale, ghostly look to them. People call them ghost sharks, but they're not really sharks. They're actually closer to rays. Some don't even have teeth, just flat plates for grinding. Plus, these long, whip-like tails. As scientists dug into the specimens, they realized a bunch of them are species nobody's ever classified before. Body shapes, spine structure, genetics, all pointed to several brand new species. These things are crazy looking, though. They look like leftovers from millions of years ago. And look at this one. Looks like Jack Skeleton's ghost dog from Nightmare Before Christmas. In the early 1900s, explorers in the Congo kept hearing the same story from locals. Somewhere out in that forest was an animal that looked like a mash-up of a deer and a horse with stripes down its legs. A British explorer, Sir Harry Johnston, went to document wildlife in the region, and in 1901, he managed to get some skin and a skull of some hunters who'd killed one. He shipped it back to Europe, and zoologists lost their minds. Zebra-like stripes on the legs, a skull that didn't match anything they had on record. Johnston wrote it up and named it Okapi Johnstoni. More people went out looking, and eventually, someone actually spotted live Okapis wandering the Ituri rainforest. Turned out, it was a totally new animal. Basically, a close cousin of the giraffe that had been hiding out in the deep forest this whole time. Before this, western science had zero proof the thing even existed. People started calling it Africa's unicorn. Even now, it's one of the least-seen big mammals on the planet. In 1902, a German officer, Robert von Beringe, was leading an expedition through the Virunga Mountains in what's now Rwanda and Uganda. Locals kept telling him about huge apes deep in the forest, way bigger than anything known to science at the time, and supposedly dangerous ones. So von Beringe took his men out to go find them. On one hunt, they came across two of these large apes and fired at them. The bodies were shipped back to Europe for scientists to look at. Once researchers got eyes on the skeletons and skulls, it was immediately obvious that these were real, undocumented creatures. They were classified as a new subspecies, Gorilla Beringe, the mountain gorilla. But up until that point, there was zero hard-proof apes like this existed in Africa. Local people had always known about them, but Western science was totally unaware. So von Beringe's encounter in 1902 became the first confirmed scientific contact with mountain gorillas. Of course, today, they're one of the most famous, but also most endangered animals on Earth. It's kind of hard to imagine, though, that back then, outside of stories, basically nobody had heard of them. Conservation workers from the World Wildlife Foundation, along with Vietnamese forestry officials, were looking into hunting activity in the Annamite Mountains. Inside a hunter's house, they spotted a skull with these strange, twisted horns. Didn't match any deer, didn't match any cattle. Scientists took a look. They realized it was a completely new type of bovine, something nobody had recorded before. They named it the saula, sometimes called the Annamite-striped deer, even though it's really more like a small antelope crossed with a cow. After that skull turned up, teams headed back into the forest with cameras and trackers. Eventually, they got actual photos proving live saulas are still out there, just barely in tiny numbers. Now considered one of the rarest large mammals on the planet, with only a handful of confirmed sightings ever. For a while, scientists genuinely worried it might already be extinct, though. Even today, almost nobody's actually laid eyes on one in the wild. The clouded leopard's a big cat, with gray-brown fur covered in these dark patches. They're found across the forests of Borneo and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. For a long time, scientists knew it existed, but had basically no idea where it actually lived or how many there were. In the 2000s, researchers started placing camera traps deep in Bornean forests. Some of the earliest photos show cats with markings that don't quite match what anyone was expecting. Strange patterns on an animal that's already almost impossible to track. A closer look at the photos, plus DNA pulled from SCAT, confirmed these really were clouded leopards, including in spots nobody had ever recorded them before. Turned out, the species is way more widespread than people thought, even if it's still pretty rare overall. That helped scientists figure out where these cats actually live and how much force they need to survive. And we gotta finish off with one of the most incredible cases of a seemingly mythical creature turning out to actually exist. There were always tales from fishermen of a large kraken-like creature with big long tentacles attacking ships. Sounded totally outlandish, though. But there were also cases of carcasses washing ashore. Bits of beak found in sperm whale stomachs. Scientists eventually figured that giant squids existed, but no one had ever seen one alive, let alone filmed it. In the early 2000s, Japanese researchers led by Tsuname Kuboto started trying to capture giant squid in their natural habitat. They used baited lines and cameras to lure the animals closer, working the waters around Agasawara Islands. And in 2004, they finally got the first ever images of a live giant squid. The squid was about 8 meters long, that's about 26 feet. In 2006, they filmed another live specimen. And later in 2012, a team filmed the first ever video of a giant squid in its natural habitat. Before these modern sightings, the giant squid was basically a myth to most people. That's been the video. I'll catch you, yes you specifically, in the next one.