Cryptozoology

Etymology

Cryptozoology comes from the Greek words kryptos (hidden), zoon (animal) and logia (study). In essence, it means the study of hidden animals.

A bit of history

The term “cryptozoology” first appeared in Lucien Blancou’s 1959 World Hunting Geography which was dedicated to “Bernard Heuvelmans, master of Cryptozoology”.

Four years prior to this, Heuvelmans published his own book On the Track of Unknown Animals, the result of a scientific approach to hundreds of years of sightings of strange animals and digging up evidence of these creatures in scientific and literary sources.

Due to the book’s success, Heuvelmans found himself in correspondence with dozens of institutions and individuals. It was within one of these letters that he coined the term cryptozoology, although it did not make it into publication until 1959.

Also referred to as the “Father of Cryptozoology”, Bernard Heuvelmans became the first president of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC). In 1982, Heuvelmans and members of the ISC worked together to expand the definition of cryptozoology.

They expanded “hidden animals” to “the possible existence of known animals, in areas where they are not supposed to occur (either now or in the past), as well as the unknown persistence of presumed extinct animals to the present time or to the recent past… What makes an animal of interest to cryptozoology… is that it is unexpected.”

These animals are known as cryptids.