Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Inventing a cryptozoological mystery species.

My current work in progress, Beings of the Ancient Age, is about cryptozoology.

I spent the last six months trying to invent the perfect cryptozoological animal for my setting in the New England/Acadian forest in Maine. I had to think up a fictional source for an entire body of fictional folklore. Finding an animal that's plausible both as a cryptozoological legend and as a legend specific to Maine -- it was a job of work, let me tell you.

I decided that my make-believe nonexistent species would be the pleistocene-epoch dire wolf. The dire wolf (Canis dirus) was slightly larger than the modern gray wolf, and was a pack hunter like the gray wolf. But its legs were shorter, possibly because it chased other megafauna, not the relatively small and agile animals that the gray wolf preys upon today.

Dire Wolf drawing by Mark Hallett

The idea that the dire wolf didn't go extinct with all the other pleistocene megafauna, that it survived and is now frolicking somewhere deep in the forests in Maine -- I mean, come on. It's not any weirder than the idea of plesiosaurs in freshwater lakes. And the idea that a creature long supposed to be extinct might still be alive -- a lot of cryptozoology is based on that theory.

But a few days ago, I found out that in fact Maine already has a history of dire wolf sightings (or something that some people say they think could in theory possibly be a dire wolf-like animal). So imagine my dismay. Sure, I hit the nail on the head as far as plausibility goes, but the whole fun of it was going to be inventing my own crazy eyewitness reports and blurry photographs. And the real world beat me to it.

But it's National Novel Writing Month, and I'm 10,500 words into my novel. I don't have the leisure of inventing a whole new mystery animal from scratch. And I'm sort of locked into using wolves, whatever their species or epoch of origin. I've come up with some wild, canid-style shenanigans that will happen later on in the story, things that wolves might do, but other kinds of animals, not so much. So dire wolves it is, I guess.

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