Thylacine at the Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, in the 1930's.

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, so far has the dubious distinction of being one of the few animals to go extinct so recently that it has been captured in motion pictures before its demise. I have seen excerpts of the films here and there on television, but today I stumbled upon this good collection of them online, at a site called the Thylacine Museum.

They are haunting. The animal is familiar-looking at first– we see the small, delicately balanced feet of a carnivore, the pointy ears reminiscent of a coyote, the muzzle– but also so alien. Especially when it opens its mouth. Where is familiar pattern of incisors and canines? And how can it open so wide? It’s crocodile-like, and the long, long, wedge-like head and strangely expressionless eyes give it an eerie, prehistoric countenance that I find thrilling.

But, despite the constant hopes and occasional reports, the thylacine is gone for good. One of the more interesting books on the subject is Michael Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, illustrated by the great Alexis Rockman. Above all, it’s a story about desire and regret– regret that it’s gone, and desire for one of the many sighting reports to be true. Well worth the read– and funny as well.

The most interesting thylacine story I have ever come across was an article in the in-flight magazine of Air Niugini, the national airline of Papua New Guinea, from the early 90’s. It was a back issue that Ralf Stüttgen had kicking around his guest house in Wewak when I was there in ‘93. This missionary in the highlands of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian side of the border, near Puncak Jaya, had brough a picture book of animals with him to show the children at the school where he taught. People in the village got to looking at it, and amongst the photos was one of a thylacine.

The villagers got quite excited, and said they knew this animal. The missionary, of course, pointed out that was impossible; they were from Australia and Tasmania, and the last of them died out decades ago. Not so, insisted the people, there were some in the general vicinity. Well, a couple expeditions were launched and turned up nothing, although it did turn out that the local people could describe the animal’s habits, footprints, and scat with uncanny accuracy.

And, let’s not forget, Australia and New Guinea were once a single land mass, up until very, very recently: about 8,000 years ago, with the final melting of the Pleistocene glaciers. In evolutionary terms, that’s like yesterday. Recently enough, one might even think, to be remembered.

So for a couple years now, I have been following the controversial opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati). My good friend Sean Miller, director of the John Erickson Museum of Art, proposed that I do a show for one of the museum’s location-variable galleries, that would somehow take in the phenomenon of alternative natural histories via Biblical literalism. Sean is a pretty brave guy, and while I have been keen on the project, the prospect of vexing the famously well-armed and bellicose security staff at the museum has put me off it for a bit. Besides, funding seems to have run dry.

Well, now Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has a scathing review (hat tip to Pharyngula). He does the dirty work so you don’t have to. There’s even a slideshow with lots of pictures.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do.

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As always, Jason Meert, my amazing photographer, delivers the goods. Photos of my recent installation, Bigfoot is Probably Real, at Gallery 4Culture. Click the image or click here for an annotated slideshow.

Yeah, it's not a great photo. The cell phone's camera doesn't have a zoom.

This morning, as I was drinking my coffee and surveying the backyard from our top-floor kitchen window, wondering what needed to be done yet before spring, I caught sight of a coyote in our backyard. This is not uncommon in Seattle: coyotes are regularly spotted even downtown (a security camera once famously caught an image of a coyote trapped inside the elevator of Smith Tower), and in our wooded, fringe neighborhood of the city, near a large beach park, they are common as raccoons.

The neighbor’s golden retriever was in its yard, and it was at attention: it could smell the coyote, but not see it. The coyote popped over into our other neighbor’s yard for a moment, then circled back around, paying special attention to the blackberry thicket which grows over the fencerow in the back corner of our yard, where raccoons regularly sleep. I could see its breath steaming in the dawn light. Our crows circled overhead, making their alarm sound ( I say our crows because like most animals, they are territorial, and usually in the large fir tree in the corner of our lot).

A second coyote appeared a few moments later, as I went downstairs to summon my wife so she could have a look. Then the first re-appeared, this time with something dark and furry in its mouth. It turned out to be half of the neighbor’s cat. The front half, to be precise.

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The ancient Egyptians loved mummifying other things besides people. I remember visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo once, years and years ago, and, despite just being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of amazing things to see, somehow the mummified crocodile stuck in my mind. I found an image of one quite similar on Flickr:

Mummified crocodile. Apparently from a museum in Wien.

The Egyptians also mummified cats. The image here is funny and macabre at the same time. It looks as much like a homemade child’s doll from a pioneer homestead as it does an Egyptian mummy– or possibly a rejected prop from a Brothers Quay film.  So much attention is paid to the ears and eyes, they are rendered right in the cloth, and the pupils are even painted on. It’s cute and slightly eerie at the same time.

A mummified cat on display at the British Museum, London.

From this article in Scientific American on the origins of the domestic house cat:

By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

Apparently the export of live cats from Egypt was banned for centuries, but there was a thriving cottage industry in cat mummies, which were created as offerings to the goddess Bastet and, assumably, sold to pilgrims, who them presented them to the goddess at the temple. Which, I suppose, would explain the effort expended to make them look cute– who wants to go to church with an ugly kitty mummy tucked under one’s arm?

This story has been floating around the online-news-o-sphere for the past few days, and at least two people have forwarded it to me. Some local hunters in Northern Minnesota have produced a trail cam image that they claim is Bigfoot.

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My good friends Cynthia Rose and Steve Sampson have moved to Paris. I am happy for them, but sad to see them go. I got an email with some amazing photos by Steve of a massive installation by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, using animals from Deyrolle, the most famous taxidermy shop in the world, an institution in itself in Paris and a must-see for visitors (I havent had the privilege myself, I haven’t been to Paris since the first Bush administration).

Ark, by Huang Yong Ping. Photo: Steve Sampson

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Part of my new show at Gallery 4Culture involves a simple, Myth-Busters type experiment: is it possible to replicate Bigfoot footprints with those giant wooden strap-on feet made famous by Ray Wallace in the 1970’s?

As the video shows, results are mixed. The average step reported in Bigfoot trackways is 48 - 60″. My target trackway was about 57″. For most ordinary individuals, taking steps large enough to replicate this spacing, with wooden feet strapped to your shoes, is simply not possible, at least not for any distance. My friend Jay Bryant, however, at 6 foot 6, is the exception that proves the rule.

In the video you can also see people interacting with the taxidermied bigfoot whose construction I have been chronicling here over the past few months. This is the effect I have wanted: to put you in a dark room with Bigfoot and a flashlight. It changes the experience completely from the open, well-lit group show in Kirkland. There is something pulse-quickening about carrying a flashlight into the dark, to see what you might find there, especially the big lantern type with the huge square batteries and over-arching handles, that bring memories of childhood campouts and thunderstorm-induced power failures. It’s simply primal.

Journalist Scott Bowen is On the trail of the New York Bigfoot. He joins an expedition sponsored by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, and tells us all about it. I have always wondered about these expeditions. At the reception to my show the other night, I met a field biologist working on the Olympic Peninsula, who has met some of the core members, and what she had to say wasn’t terribly kind. Another gallery visitor mentioned that the expeditions have become so popular (despite the $300 fee for first-time joiners) that BFRO is no longer allowing new people to come along.

So when you get 400 people to go camping together and trot around in the woods with their night vision scopes and walkie-talkies and whatnot, does it become anything other than a kind of group snipe hunt? BFRO contends that their expeditions do, reliably, turn up Bigfoot-related phenomena like vocalizations and wood-knocking. But are they legitimate, or are they some kind of manufactured thrill-experience? Hard to say. My informants tell me some of the participants are quite sincere.

I guess I won’t find out; not this year, at least.

Eugene Parnell: Bigfoot is probably real.

December 3 - 31, 2009

First Thursday reception: December 3, 2009 6 - 8 PM

Gallery 4Culture

101 Prefontaine Place South, Seattle

www.4culture.org/gallery

How do we know what we know about the natural world? Is it possible to deduce the existence of an animal without an identifiable carcass, neatly tagged, stuffed, and taxonomically labeled? If genuine Bigfoot remains were presented to the public, would they even be accepted as such?

Bigfoot is Probably Real is an interactive exhibit where visitors can use large wooden strap-on feet to  recreate the hoax bigfoot tracks which apparently explain the phenomenon; they can read just a small sampling of the thousands of eyewitness reports of Bigfoot sightings, and hear the audio from a genuine 911 emergency call made by an eyewitness.

Bigfoot is Probably Real also allows visitors to experience an actual Bigfoot encounter, as the artist presents the first actual taxidermied Bigfoot specimen available in the United States.

It is estimated that ten thousand first-hand sightings of Bigfoot have occurred since the 1950’s, when the phenomenon first attracted media attention. The most interesting, and some  would say convincing, aspect of these sightings is the consistent visual description of the creature. Is this due to the accuracy of the eyewitnesses’ memories, or is it due to the fact that so many media representations of the creature already exist? In other words, do we remember what we have actually seen, or what we think we should have seen? Is there a large, unclassified primate living in the forests of the Northwest? Many, many people have seen such an animal. Can their stories and descriptions be believed? What exactly is the relationship between the world of real animals in our environment and the animals of our dreams, our memories, our nightmares?

Taxidermied Bigfoot (detail), 2009. Urethane foam, steel, epoxy resin, glass, bigfoot hide, pigment. Photo: Eugene Parnell