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I'm fairly open-minded especially when it comes to the possibility of certain long-extinct animals (or recently extinct animals), such as the megalodon, magalania, and the Tasmanian Tiger, still being alive in unknown or very little known parts of the world. I just wondered if others felt the same and often entertained the idea about these creatures still being alive out there.
When I was in New Zealand in 1975, I watched a sailboat get hauled out and saw a half a dozen shark shaped teeth about 8 inches long imbedded in the hull. The owner said something grabbed the boat and shook it a few times, like a dig with a toy. The local scientists cold not identify the species by the teeth, but the consensus was that it could have been a megalodon.
"We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of our oceans."
- David Attenborough
The world is a mysterious place. Quite probable that megalodon is lurking somewhere down there.
I lived in mortal fear of sharks all throughout my childhood. Came from watching too many marine biology documentaries at an early age. Perhaps there's a reason why most five-year-olds stick to Whinnie the Pooh.
For the most part, sharks aren't indiscriminate eaters. They eat what they are used to eating and unless you are in the Solomon Islands, that's not people.
If you want to swim in the ocean, bleeding like a stuck pig, or carrying around a bunch of newly speared fish, you are going to put yourself on the menu.
If you read the preface in the book "Jaws" he states that that shark has grown too large to feed itself through the normal food chain. This happens occasionally in OZ, where dogs begin to disappear long before the first human is taken.
We all fear being eaten alive, but in reality, it is much more dangerous to get into your car or on the school bus each morning, than it is to swim with most sharks.
If there is the possibility of something being alive and us not knowing about it....the ocean is the most likely place.
Also...we find new species every day. "Extinct" species become un-extinct (or were never extinct to begin with) more often than you think.
I'm not saying megalodon is still swimming around but you can't 100% rule it out. That fake documentary that discovery channel did was totally crappy though. Making people think this was a real doc and it turns out to be a shark week promotional vid. Blah.
I'm a science buff, I'm actually a bioscience major in college, and I like to keep an open mind to the possibility that some of these creatures, especially creatures in the deep ocean, could still be alive. What really hooked me was at the end when all of those sharks disappeared away from the ship, something large smacked into that boat, and then the whale decoy was taken under. It was hard for me to wrap my head around since that boat was HUGE and I couldn't perceive it being shoved that easily (unless by another ship of similar or larger size), and the fact that the whale decoy was several thousand pounds, and the other sharks scattered (which usually smaller creatures will scatter in the presence of a larger one in fear of predation) before the boat was smacked and the whale decoy was taken under.
I could probably call myself a science buff as well, but mainly for physics. It's nice to think that some creatures have lived undisturbed under the ocean for millions of years, oblivious to our apparition and domination of the planet. In some ways, I really hope that many of them stay that way, since we would probably do them more harm than good. Look at the orange roughy for example. Fishers mindlessly dragged great trawl nets across the deep sea because someone thought orange roughy tasted nice. Turned out that the fish were hundreds of years old, and that irreparable damage had been done to their population had been done as a result of the fishing.
You are correct, humans seem to have a way of destroying things, and I could just imagine if people could prove that say...megalodon still existed. A bunch of people would be out trying to catch this creature for shark fin soup or other reason which could decimate it's population to the point that it actually became extinct.
Telling discovery channel to stop sensationalizing their reports would be like running a persian cat under the tap. There'd be nothing left. As long as you know to take things with a pinch of salt, everything's ok.
I do agree about their megalodon documemtary though.
I think that it depends on the environment. For example (even that it was portrayed more as a myth than an extinct animal): the giant squid went pretty much undetected in the oceans for centuries except for maybe and occasional siting. There might be a possibility that there could be some relatively large (not supper large) thought to be extinct land mammals running around, but I think that the big thought to be extinct animals would be more confined to deeper parts of the oceans.
We are yet to discover all of the mysteries of the universe, much less that of our own planet. I've seen the corpse of a Coelacanth. It was a few years back, I think, at a Maryland beach called,"Sandy Point". I am assuming that it had washed up on shore. I am hoping that it was dead because as soon as the other kids in my camp group saw it, they immediately took turns in bludgeoning its body. I tried to make them stop. I told them this was a extremely rare prehistoric fish but, they told me that I was lying. Those bastards. What a moral less bunch they were.
So many kids are like that. I saw a whole gang of them mocking a one-legged pigeon not long ago. That kind of stuff really makes my blood boil like nothing else. Those little punks were lucky that too many people were around for me to smack some respect into their empty heads.
That's terrible. I know that there are children who kill ants and try to flush their pets down the toilet, but most of society seems to ignore this. Actually, in general, many people don't seem to give this proper consideration. It has been shown that future serial killers/psychopaths usually prey on animals when they are younger before moving on to people as they get older. These kids would attack squirrels and other types of wildlife if they got near us and our group base. There was this one kid, I think his parents were going through a divorce, who would attack any kind of animal that wasn't human. I remember there were two fornicating dragonflies and he freaked out and started throwing rocks at them.
There was also this other kid who was already displaying violence towards humans. This girl, who also seemed to lack morals, was telling me that he told her that his father had his hand in the blender or garbage disposal and her turned it on! I think his father got hurt and all he did laugh. Well, I think he laughed when he told her this but during the incident he lied to father about it. O_O
Why is it that so few people seemed to be going to psychotherapists? And the ones that do see them see the wrong kind, which are psychiatrists who put them on medication that causes more problems?