monsters

I’m a Monster Biologist. No — that’s not a self-aggrandizing professional description. I actually think about the biology of monsters. Twenty years ago, when I first conceived of Biology 485 as a rigorous treatment of “Why Things Aren’t,” I figured that it was already nearing obsolescence. Surely the speed of information through this new-fangled Internet, […]
In Science Salon # 41, Dr. Lieberman considers disgust and its impact on the legal system to show why the things that we find stomach-turning so often become the things that we render unlawful.
We all remember that one moment when we began to think like a skeptic. Join us in celebrating our 25th anniversary by telling us the story of when you became a Card-Carrying Skeptic.
Did a family in Kentucky get drunk and mistake owls for ‘space-goblins’, or was something much more complex going on that hot August night in 1955?
In this week’s eSkeptic, Janna Levin Discusses the Edge of the Universe; Michael Shermer looks at Memories, Points of View and the Self; MonsterTalk interviews Ben Frable about Naming Monsters.

Daniel Loxton considers how fuzzy folkloric phenomena come to be crystallized as "cryptids."

Donald Prothero expresses exasperation at press linking Nessie to a small armored fish which vanished into extinction 160 million years before dinosaurs evolved.
Just in time for Halloween, Blake Smith recommends some of the spookiest episodes of MonsterTalk, The Science Show About Monsters.

Blake Smith defends the value of the examination of monster beliefs, arguing that “In the world of cryptozoology you see the entirety of belief writ small.”

According to legend, an awesome, primeval monster — a huge serpent with flippers, a mane, and a head something like that of a camel or horse — slides undetected through the frigid waters off British Columbia and Washington State. Could a living dinosaur, a monster out of time, lurk here beneath the waves?
In this week’s eSkeptic, Daniel Loxton provides a skeptical commentary on Gordon T. Holmes Loch Ness Monster video and reviews Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures, by Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell.