Tracking and trailing hidden beasts - Richard Freeman


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Oct 16 2020 43 mins   5

Scientists discover many new creatures each year, and they’re not all tiny bugs and sea worms, there are big lizards, monkeys and lemurs and sloths, dolphins and rays and species of deer and in 2010 a new species of clouded leopard. All of them existed in our world and we mostly had no idea they were there.

Some of these creatures appear to us by chance, they show themselves when we were looking for something different, in places we maybe didn’t expect. Others are searched for more intentionally. Perhaps there existed stories or tales of them from remote villages, or we found traces of evidence from a creature we didn’t yet recognise. Many of them take years and years of painstaking research to finally discover, teams of specialists go into the wild season after season, chasing down leads and reviewing hundreds of thousands of images from trail cameras in the hope of catching a glimpse of the illusive beasts.

Not too long ago, a team of specialists knew that Canadian black bears had been coming south, over the border and making homes around the forests of the Pacific North West. Hair and scat was found, very occasionally, but it took the team of highly trained trackers and experts more than five years to actually see them for the first time.

Zoological journalist and author Richard Freeman has dedicated his entire life to tracking down some of the more illusive creatures that may, or may not, share the planet with us.

As a cryptozoologist, Richard has penned 8 books and holds the role of Zoological Director for the Centre for Fortean Zoology.

He has expeditioned to some of the most remote places on the planet in search of cryptids like the Yeti, the Orang Pendek and the Almasty, and made huge strides in his pursuit of the once-presumed extinct Thylacine.

Richard joins me tonight to discuss his work and to tell us why we may not have to try that hard to Peer Beyond The Veil.

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