LISTING THE FULL CONTENTS FOR FORTEAN STUDIES - THE ERSTWHILE SISTER SCHOLARLY JOURNAL OF FORTEAN TIMES

 

Front covers of Vols 1-4 of Fortean Studies (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

I recently received an enquiry from Facebook follower Mike Robe, asking if I knew of anywhere online that contained a complete list of contents for each of the seven published volumes of Fortean Studies – the scholarly journal published annually-ish from 1994 to 2001 inclusive by John Brown Publishing of London for the long-running monthly British magazine Fortean Times, which is famously devoted to all matters of a mysterious, inexplicable, and truly Fortean nature. After spending some time checking online, I was very surprised to discover that such listings were indeed conspicuous only by their apparent absence there.

Having been fortunate enough to contribute to virtually every Fortean Studies volume an article of my own (each of which I have subsequently expanded, updated, and included as a chapter in one of my books), I'm very familiar with this journal's contents and their outstanding scholarly merit, collectively constituting a very sizeable corpus of in-depth, extensively-researched  contributions too lengthy and specialized for publication in Fortean Times, thus explaining why Fortean Studies was established. It's a great pity that it ceased publication after just seven volumes, but at least many copies of each of these still exist, offering an authoritative, highly-informative, fascinating read for everyone interested in Fortean phenomena.

Consequently, as a response both to Mike's enquiry and to what I feel to be a necessity that the contents of Fortean Studies should, very deservedly, be brought to the widespread attention of online readers, I am presenting herewith a series of scans of the front cover and, on the back cover, the list of contents for each Fortean Studies volume from my own library.

NB – Please note that Vol. 1 does contain an article of mine, 'A Belfy of Crypto-Bats', positioned directly after Michel Raynal's giant octopus article, but for some unexplained reason it was omitted from the list of contents.

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 1, 1994 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 2, 1995 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 3, 1996 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 4, 1998 [for 1997] – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 5, 1998 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 6, 1999 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

Fortean Studies, Volume 7, 2001 – click to expand for reading purposes (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

Exceptional pressures of work meant that I was unable to contribute an article to Vol. 6, whereas the article on winged cats that I was planning for Vol. 7 proved so arduous in terms of length and required research that I couldn't complete it in time to meet its publication deadline (it finally appeared almost a decade later, in my book Dr Shuker's Casebook). Nevertheless, I did still contribute to Vol. 7, inasmuch as I was nominated as a reviewer by its editors to evaluate Darren Naish's sea serpent article in manuscript form and offer my opinion as to whether it should be published in Fortean Studies. After reading it, I stated that it should be, so it was.

Second-hand copies of Fortean Studies still appear for sale quite frequently on online auction and bookstore sites, but such listings rarely provide full details of these publications' contents. So I hope that this present ShukerNature post will be of benefit to readers who are thinking of purchasing any Fortean Studies volumes but until now have been deterred from doing so by being uncertain of what they contain.

I wish to thank most sincerely my longstanding friend and fellow cryptozoology enthusiast Mike Playfair for very kindly gifting me his spare copy of Fortean Studies Vol. 7 after learning that this was the one volume that I hadn't been able to track down.

I also wish to pay tribute to the memory of the late Steve Moore, who edited all but that final, seventh volume, for encouraging me to contribute to Fortean Studies and also for being another longstanding friend of mine within the Fortean community.

 

Front covers of Vols 5-7 of Fortean Studies (© Fortean Times/John Brown Publishing – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

PERUVIAN BANDICOOTS, UNDISCOVERED TAPIRS, ZEBRA-STRIPED CARROT CREATURES, AND OTHER NEOTROPICAL NOVELTIES, COURTESY OF LEQUANDA & THIÉBAUT

 

Is this a bilby I see before me – in Peru?? (public domain)

In my previous ShukerNature blog article (click here to access it), I documented two unexpected creatures depicted in a magnificent mural-format pictorial encyclopaedia entitled Quadro de Historia Natural, Civil y Geografica del Reyno del Peru ('Painting of the Natural, Civil and Geographical History of the Kingdom of Peru'), or QHNCGRP for convenience hereafter in this present article. Consisting of numerous miniature oil paintings and accompanying text on a wood panel, it measures a very impressive 128 x 45.25 inches (325 x 115 cm).

Completed in Madrid, Spain, in 1799 and now on display at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid (Spain's national museum of natural history), which has produced an exquisite,  lavishly-illustrated website devoted specifically to it (click here), QHNCGRP was authored by Basque-born but (for three decades) Peru-based scholar José Ignacio Lequanda, who commissioned French artist Louis Thiébaut to produce the 194 paintings illustrating it. As noted above, most of these are miniatures, with tiny but voluminous text by Lequanda accompanying all of the 160 miniatures depicting fauna and flora of Peru or its South American environs.

The vast majority of these miniatures depict readily-recognisable Neotropical species, including a large spotted rodent named the paca, a South American zorro or 'fox' (actually a species of Dusicyon canid), an otter, tapir, manatee, various monkeys, trumpeter bird, cock of the rock, spoonbill, hummingbird, Humboldt's penguin, skunk, caiman, giant anteater, fulgorid lantern-fly, llama, vicuna, armadillos, coati, and opossum, to mention but a few.

 

View of QHNCGRP in its entirety – click to enlarge for viewing purposes (© Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Also present, however, are certain decidedly mystifying zoological portraits, such as that of a dramatically out-of-place Madagascan black-and-white ruffed lemur and one of a putative living ground sloth, both of which I documented in my previous QHNCGRP article.

Since writing that, I have been paying further close attention to this marvelous pictorial menagerie, and I've spotted several additional examples included within it that are nothing if not curious or controversial, for various differing but equally interesting reasons. So here they are – make of them what you will!

Take, for instance, the very distinctive creature portrayed in the QHNCGRP miniature that opens this present ShukerNature article. Whereas I am not aware of any South American mammal matching its morphology (Lequanda claimed it to be a vizcacha, and others have suggested the latter rodent's relative the chinchilla, but these bear little – in the case of the chinchilla – or no – in the case of the vizcacha – resemblance to it, I am aware that it does bear a remarkable similarity to a certain species of exclusively Australian marsupial. Namely, the lesser bilby (aka lesser rabbit-eared bandicoot) Macrotis leucura.

 

Mystery big-eared, long-snouted, plume-tailed QHNCGRP mammal (above) and a painting of a lesser bilby from English zoologist Oldfield Thomas's Catalogue of the Monotremes and Marsupials in the British Museum (Natural History) (below) (public domain)

Certainly, its long snout, lengthy plumed tail, and very sizeable ears all correspond very closely to those of the latter species. True, its forelimbs are much the same size as its hind ones, whereas those of the lesser bilby are shorter, and its fur is white rather than brown like the bilby's. However, the limb discrepancy may simply be an error on Thiébaut's part, especially if his subject's preserved skin had become distorted via shrinkage. Moreover, preserved skins frequently blanch if exposed too long to light (the taxiderm thylacine that was on public display in London's Natural History Museum when I visited in 2014, for example, was so faded, predominantly cream in colour all over, that its diagnostic stripes had vanished).

Deriving its English name from its very large, slender, rabbit-like ears, and characterized by its tail's long white hairy plume, the lesser bilby was once native to the deserts of central Australia, but has not been conclusively sighted since the 1950s, so is now deemed extinct. Back when QHNCGRP was created, however, it was still in existence, with preserved specimens in museums.

As apparently happened with the ruffed lemur, is it possible, therefore, that Lequanda and/or Thiébaut saw a museum specimen of the lesser bilby at Madrid's celebrated Royal Natural History Cabinet (founded in 1771, opened to the public in 1776, and whose contents were very familiar to Lequanda), or even elsewhere, and mistakenly assumed that it was a Neotropical species? Or might Thiébaut have based his miniature upon some pre-existing artwork by another artist? There is a notable QHNCGRP–linked precedent for this latter possibility.

 

Thiébaut's zebra-striped QHNCGRP mystery monkey (top left), Compañon's earlier artwork upon which Thiébaut's was based (top right), and a South American tree porcupine (below) (public domain / public domain / (© Eric Kilby/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

One of the several monkeys depicted as miniatures in QHNCGRP by Thiébaut is the extraordinary-looking striped example shown above. Its bold zebra-like body and limb markings instantly set it apart from any currently-known monkey species, as does the mid-dorsal row of spines running down its back. These are also alluded to by Lequanda, in his accompanying text. He referred to this fascinating fasciated creature as a casacuillo, and also mentioned that it lived upon fruit.

Rather than basing his illustration of this casacuillo upon first-hand observations of a living or preserved animal, however, Thiébaut used as his inspiration a pre-existing 18^th-Century illustration. Namely, a water-colour prepared some years earlier with 1,410 others for inclusion in the Codex Martínez Compañon, a sumptuous nine-volume manuscript made by Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañon, Bishop of Trujillo, Peru. This water-colour is also shown here, for comparison purposes alongside Thiébaut's oil painting.

Moreover, according to writer Carmen Martínez, writing in an online article from June 2021 devoted to QHNCGRP (click here to access it), this creature is not a monkey at all, but is instead a South American tree porcupine or coendou, of which there are many species, all sporting a prehensile tail. However, to me it looks no more like a tree porcupine than it does a monkey! Coendous are not striped and their fine spines are present profusely over their entire body, not merely along their back. So I am unconvinced by this identification.

 

A striped carrot on legs!! Another of Triébaut's bemusing mystery beasts included by him in QHNCGRP (public domain)

And speaking of zebra-patterned mystery beasts depicted in QHNCGRP, what are we to make of the example shown above? It looks for all the world like a striped carrot on legs! It seems to be furry, eared, and whiskered, and is included in the left-hand block of 30 mammal miniatures (according to Lequanda, moreover, it is, once again, a coendou!), so we must assume that it is indeed mammalian – or should we?

After all, also included in this same block of miniatures is the following bizarre beast, popularly if improbably(?) deemed to be a portrait of an iguana according to various sources consulted by me

Yet this latter beast is itself a major mystery. For it seems to possess a stiff pointed tail wholly unlike the highly flexible tail of an iguana, as well as long curved fangs emerging from its jaws, and what looks like a pair of wings pressed tightly against its flanks! Apparently, like the striped monkey/coendou illustration, Thiébaut based his miniature upon one from the Codex Martínez Compañon that was labelled as an iguana. Really??

 

A supposed iguana depiction by Thiébaut in QHNCGRP (above) and the original version in the Codex (below) (public domain)

Most improbable of all, however, must surely be the next example presented here. What on earth (or in the air!) is this extraordinary squirrel-like entity that sports not only two pairs of limbs and a bushy tail but also a pair of wings – and which are clearly functional, given that Thiébaut has portrayed it flying above a somewhat larger, rodent-like mammal in the same miniature?

Might it be the inaccurate result of Thiébaut painting not from direct observation of some physical specimen, but instead merely from a verbal description of a flying squirrel? True, the name of these rodents is something of a misnomer, seeing that they become airborne not with the assistance of wings but instead via a pair of gliding membranes (patagia), linking their wrist and ankle on each side of their body. But if a verbal description of such a creature does not make this distinction clear to an artist seeking to depict it, the result might well be an illustration of a squirrel-like creature boasting a pair of bona fide wings.

Yet even if that were true, there is still a fundamental problem in applying it as an explanation for this aerial anomaly as portrayed here, because although flying squirrels are widely distributed in North America, they do not occur anywhere in South America. So why would Thiébaut have depicted one in QHNCGRP? Yet another instance of someone wrongly assuming that a given creature is Neotropical when it definitely is not? Having said that, Thiébaut's illustration is yet again a copy of one from the Codex Martínez Compañon, but in that version the flying entity looks far more like a bird than a mammal, so why did Thiébaut convert it into one in his copied version? Conversely, at least according to Lequanda's accompanying description of it in QHNCGRP, it is indeed a rodent with wings, and is referred to by him as a mutmut. All very strange!

 

Thiébaut's bewildering winged squirrel in QHNCGRP (above) and the original bird-like version in the Codex (below) (public domain)

My concern with the ostensibly unidentifiable mystery creatures from QHNCGRP documented by me here is that, as already noted, most of the animals depicted in it by Thiébaut are readily recognisable. So as those were all accurately represented by him, why should the mystery beasts here not be too, unless he was indulging in some sly humour at Lequanda's expense, perhaps? Yet if they are accurate representations, why can we not identify them?

Might at least some of them not have arisen through misapprehensions regarding the origins of specimens utilized as subjects, or even as a result of poor verbal descriptions of such, but instead be bona fide native Neotropical species that have become extinct before ever becoming known to European scientists, so their morphological appearance is wholly unfamiliar to us?

The last anomalous animal to be considered here may provide key evidence that some of Thiébaut's miniatures depict significant creatures that were still unknown to science at the time when he depicted them.

 

The supposed lowland tapir depicted in QHNCGRP (public domain).

Just a few hours after I posted my previous QHNCGRP-themed ShukerNature article, on 22 December 2022, I received a very interesting, thought-provoking comment from a reader with the Google username Andrew, and which I duly posted beneath my article. It concerns the QHNCGRP miniature of what is officially assumed to be a specimen of the lowland (Brazilian) tapir Tapirus terrestris, the largest species of native mammal known to be alive today in South America, and occurring widely here, including in Peru. Here is Andrew's comment:

Thiébaut's depiction of the tapir looks like it could have been based on descriptions of the then-undiscovered mountain tapir, rather than the lowland species. It has no crest, its coat is almost black with a slight chestnut tint, and it seems to have white lips.

Smaller and darker in colour than the lowland tapir, the mountain tapir T. pinchaque is a very distinctive species that is indeed uncrested and white-lipped. It is also noticeably woolly, and looking at the tapir miniature in close-up its body surface does appear to be hairy. Moreover, of particular historical note is that this species, which is indeed native to Peru (occurring in its far north's montane cloud forests), was not formally described by science until 1829 – 30 years after the creation of QHNCGRP.

 

A lowland tapir (top) and a mountain tapir (bottom) (© Dr Karl Shuker / (© Richard Sifry/Wikipedia – CC BY 2.0 licence)

In short, if the tapir miniature in QHNCGRP actually depicts a mountain tapir rather than a lowland tapir, this means that Thiébaut had portrayed a major mammalian species three decades before its official discovery. This in turn begs the question: what specimen was utilized by Thiébaut as the subject for his illustration?

Whichever it was, and wherever it was, its taxonomic significance as representing a dramatic new species had clearly not been recognized or appreciated by scientists of the day.

As I have revealed many times in my trio of books on new and rediscovered animals, this is a sad situation that has occurred countless times down through the centuries, with obscure museum specimens having been long overlooked before belatedly receiving serious attention, only for them then to be revealed as extraordinary new species whose existence had never previously even been suspected, let alone confirmed. So the potential example documented above has plenty of precedents, that's for certain!

 

My three books on new and rediscovered animals (© Dr Karl Shuker/HarperCollins/Stratus Publishing/Coachwhip Publications)

 

A SOUTH AMERICAN LEMUR AND A MODERN-DAY GROUND SLOTH? A PAIR OF PUZZLING ANIMAL PORTRAITS IN AN 18TH-CENTURY ARTISTIC MASTERPIECE

Madagascan black-and-white ruffed lemur (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Down through the years, I've investigated a number of mystifying animal artworks, depicting species before they were officially discovered by science, or in locations far removed from where they are officially known to exist. Examples from the former category include various anachronistic representations of kangaroos (one of which I documented in my book The Unexplained, 1996); and the following case is a prime example (but one hitherto undocumented by me) from the latter category. So I am greatly indebted to correspondent Cristian Nahuel Rojas Mendoza for very kindly bringing it to my attention, on 17 December 2022, and which I lost no time in subsequently investigating – thanks, Cristian!

The work of art containing the portrayed out-of-place animal in question is a magnificent yet surprisingly little-known pictorial encyclopaedia in the form of a spectacular mural, entitled Quadro de Historia Natural, Civil y Geografica del Reyno del Peru ('Painting of the Natural, Civil and Geographical History of the Kingdom of Peru'), or QHNCGRP for convenience hereafter in this present ShukerNature blog article of mine. Consisting of numerous miniature oil paintings and accompanying text on a wood panel, it measures a very impressive 128 x 45.25 inches (325 x 115 cm).

QHNCGRP was authored by Basque-born but (for three decades) Peru-based scholar José Ignacio Lequanda, who commissioned French artist Louis Thiébaut to produce the paintings illustrating it, and it was completed in Madrid in 1799 (click here for an extensive article by Daniela Bleichmar documenting its history and contents).

Today, this unique creation is held and displayed at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain (constituting Spain's national museum of natural history), which has produced an exquisite,  lavishly-illustrated website devoted specifically to it (click here to visit the website). I strongly recommend that you access this site while reading my article here, in order to appreciate fully the nature, context, content, and visual beauty of this truly extraordinary, combined work of art and scholarship, and in particular the two items from it under consideration here.

 

View of QHNCGRP in its entirety – click to enlarge for viewing purposes (© Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Containing a grand total of 194 individual images, QHNCGRP presents a picture-driven history of the peoples, animals, and plants of Peru (or, in a few cases, Peru's South American environs). At its centre there is an annotated map of the country, depicting, describing, and delineating its various administrative divisions in different colours, as well as a picture of the mine of Hualgayoc or Chota, emphasizing the significance of mining to Peru at that time.

Constituting the outermost border or frame of QHNCGRP is a series of 88 miniature paintings, each depicting a different Peruvian bird and plant, plus four corner miniatures portraying Peruvian insects and reptiles. And running horizontally directly below the uppermost edge of this ornithologically-themed border is a row of 32 miniatures portraying various human forms, including indigenous peoples and Western couples in various costumes.

Below these, and forming a second, internal frame, is a series of numerous compartments containing Lequanda's tiny but voluminous handwritten text (he also added a descriptive label beneath each animal miniature, and considerable text around the mine picture). Within this second frame are not only four large and four smaller pictures depicting Peruvian aquatic animals but also (split into a left-hand block and a right-hand block of 30 each) a series of 60 miniature paintings, again depicting Peruvian animals. Well, 59 of them are…

As for the 60^th: This is the creature portrayed in the miniature present at the right-hand end of the top row in the right-hand block of 30 animal pictures. It seems to have been painted with especial precision by Thiébaut in comparison with certain other of the animals portrayed by him in QHNCGRP, and was labeled here by Lequanda as a mountain-abounding 'Dominican monkey'.

 

The so-called 'Dominican monkey' miniature painting in close-up; and also shown (arrowed, top row) in situ within QHNCGRP – click to enlarge for viewing purposes (public domain)

In reality, however, as anyone even remotely versed in mammalian identification will readily confirm, this particular creature, its distinctive monochrome form being both instantly recognizable and wholly unmistakable, is actually a black-and-white ruffed lemur Varecia variegata, the species depicted in the photograph opening this ShukerNature article, and which is of course endemic to Madagascar! No lemurs of any kind occur anywhere in the New World.

So why is there a portrait of a Madagascan lemur in QHNCGRP, which is exclusively devoted to Neotropical natural history and culture?

The most reasonable explanation, indicated by Lequanda's accompanying text (and also noted by Bleichmar in her afore-mentioned article), stems from his great familiarity with the contents of Madrid's prestigious – and exceedingly prodigious – Royal Natural History Cabinet, which was founded in 1771 and opened to the public in 1776. For within its collection of zoological specimens was none other than a preserved example of the black-and-white ruffed lemur. As this collection would have been consulted by both Lequanda and Thiébaut during their joint preparation of QHNCGRP, one or both of them presumably assumed mistakenly that the lemur specimen was of South American origin, and thus its striking appearance was incorporated accordingly within QHNCGRP. But that is not all.

There is a second animal miniature in QHNCGRP that also attracted my interest and attention when perusing the latter's artworks. If you want to seek out this picture in QHNCGRP, it's the second miniature along in the fourth row within the right-hand block of 30 animal miniatures. Or, to make things simpler, here it is:

 

The so-called 'Nonga' miniature painting in close-up; and also shown (arrowed, fourth row) in situ within QHNCGRP – click to enlarge for viewing purposes (public domain)

According to Lequanda's accompanying text, the Nonga lives on the banks of the River Huallaga (whose source is in central Peru), and is a nocturnal creature greatly feared by the Indians, but which according to Lequansda seems to be a forest spirit rather than a real entity.

When I first looked at this creature, I thought straight away that it resembled a tree sloth in basic outward morphology. But tree sloths do not stand upright, nor are they greatly feared by natives, and far from being forest spirits they are very familiar members of the corporeal animal community throughout the Neotropical zone.

However, their extinct relatives the ground sloths did stand upright, might well be greatly feared by natives due to their very large size and huge claws, especially if they happened to be ill-tempered creatures, readily becoming aggressive if threatened, and, like many other belligerent beasts, may indeed be deemed by their human neighbours to be supernatural spirits as much as flesh-and-blood animals.

So could this miniature by Thiébaut be a depiction of a modern-day, scientifically-undiscovered ground sloth? Certain South American cryptids, such as the ellengassen and (especially) the mapinguary, are already looked upon by some cryptozoologists and zoologists as potentially constituting surviving ground sloths.

 

Image of a ground sloth (public domain)

Unfortunately for such romantic speculation, however, the depicted creature's tiny tail is much more comparable with that of a three-toed tree sloth (two-toed tree sloths are tailless) than with the fairly long and very sturdy caudal appendage exhibited by bona fide ground sloths, which they used for support and balance when squatting upright.

Consequently, my personal opinion is that this mystifying miniature painting was based upon a preserved three-toed tree sloth, but whose normal behaviour of hanging upside-down from tree branches was not known to Liébaut, so he portrayed it incorrectly as a bipedal beast instead, thereby inadvertently recalling its officially extinct terrestrial relatives.

Nor are a misplaced Madagascan lemur and a suspect sloth of the terrestrial variety the only zoological oddities to be found in QHNCGRP – click here for a continuation of this investigation, in which I reveal all manner of additional animals of the decidedly anomalous kind lurking incognito within its miniature masterpieces!

My sincere thanks once again to Cristian Nahuel Rojas Mendoza for alerting me to QHNCGRP and, in so doing, adding another very intriguing zoogeographical anomaly from the art world to my archive of such examples. For an extremely extensive account of putative living ground sloths, be sure to check out my book Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors.