Basically every sea monster cryptid. There's so much shit down there we don't know about. Guarantee many many many of them are over exaggerated yes but there has been more than one case of a sea monster cryptid turning out to actually just be a real creature. Fucks me up
Not exactly a cryptid, but the Ojibwe story about why they moved west is... Kinda compelling. If I understand correctly, the story goes that they were warned by a being which appeared like a cowrey shell that they had to move west if they wanted to preserve their cultural identity because pale skinned people from the east would soon arrive from the sea and attempt to keep them from their traditional way of life.
I guess there's always the chance that it was pure coincidence or that someone made something up to explain their movement after the fact, but it's kinda compelling imo.
If anyone who's from the tribe wants to further explain or correct any misunderstandings, please do! I'd love to hear more about it.
"If the light skinned race makes the wrong choice of the roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back at them and cause much suffering and death to all the Earth's people." 7th Fire Prophecy
Like, there's probably not any alive today. Probably not any in the last thousands years even.
But at some point in human history, that shit existed. Might even just be stories about gorillas that ancient hominids took out of Africa and kept telling afterwards.
For a stone age human, a silverback might as well been a mythical animal. And they're deceptively quiet. Imagine just walking thru the forest and seeing a fucking Silverback standing 10 feet away staring at you.
That story would keep getting retold long after people forgot what a gorilla was.
My favorite example of this is on the island of Flores, where old local folklore says that, in the woods and caves, you can sometimes find hairy, tiny ape people.
Cue homo floresiensis, an early branch of humanity that lived on the island for a long time before homo sapians sapians showed up and had some overlapping time with them. They are very short based on what skeletons we have found....and their anatomy suggests that they looked closer to apes than humans.
I always wondered if there were small groups of isolated Neanderthals that persisted past the assimilation of the majority of the Neanderthals by homosapiens. They could have been responsible for all sorts of tales of Bigfoot, dwarves, elves, etc.
Eh, it's possible, but I find it more likely that they're wild hermits, wrapped in crude bear-fur clothes. A large primate population sparse enough to be elusive but dense enough to reproduce is a dicey proposition. People occasionally fucking off to the woods to live in solitude is pretty reasonable, I've considered it myself.
It primarily lived in subtropical to tropical forest, and went extinct about 300,000 years ago likely because of the retreat of preferred habitat due to climate change, and potentially archaic human activity. Gigantopithecus has become popular in cryptozoology circles as the identity of the Tibetan yeti or the American bigfoot, apelike creatures in local folklore.
The ocean ones. There's unknown big critters down there, it's basically a statistical certainty.
I don't think I've ever heard a believable one on land. People's UFO and ghost stories can actually be hard to explain sometimes. All the cryptid stories are either very made-up sounding or some variant of "I looked and found nothing/got a super blurry photograph".
I once saw a flying creature that appeared to be a pterodactylpterosaur (except for the size), ever since since i've been on the lookout for any kind of "bird" with a diamond/kite shape at the end of it's tail, as that is what i remember most distinctly.
I really appreciate the hint! I looked at some google-images of flying herons & cranes. I don't think it was one of those, but it was also some time ago (and old memories can get rewritten as you recall them).