Cryptozoology is full of examples of cryptids that once their existence was finally confirmed officially by science were shown to have been long since known to the world anyway, but had somehow been overlooked, veritably rendered invisible – in other words, they had remained hidden in plain sight. So here are two recently-revealed additional examples.
MAPPING A CRYPTO-SPECIMEN
Cryptozoological specimens are notorious for being almost as elusive as the cryptids themselves, with a worrying tendency to vanish out of sight, never to be recorded again. So it is always a pleasant albeit rare surprise if such a specimen reappears somewhere, as was the case recently with one that has apparently been hidden in plain sight for quite some time.
On 26 August 2025, I was startled but delighted to learn from Florida resident and longstanding Facebook friend Adam Naworal that he had recently encountered a sample of tissue from the famous St Augustine globster. The sample was preserved and on public yet wholly unpublicised display in the map room at the St Augustine Historical Society – Oldest House Museum Complex – in Florida.
As revealed in the above photograph snapped of this remarkable specimen by Adam's wife Aimee and included here with her and Adam's kind permission, it consists of several chunks of whitened flesh preserved in fluid (formalin?) inside a large vertical glass jar, labelled and firmly stoppered. The St Augustine globster is – or was – the huge rotting carcase that washed ashore on a beach near St Augustine during November 1896. Eminent cephalopod (octopus/squid/cuttlefish) expert Prof. A.E. Verrill from Yale University deemed it to be the remains of a hitherto-unknown species of truly gigantic octopus, but since then there has been a long-running dispute among scientists as to whether this is indeed what it was or whether, alternatively, it was simply the partial, highly-decomposed carcase of a whale, composed largely of blubber, and assuming an amorphous mass nowadays referred to as a globster.
Samples were taken from it at the time, and analysed, yielding contentious, contradictory results, but most of these samples were thought to have been lost or discarded. So this confirmed example at the St Augustine Historical Society is of special interest and scientific value, and now, thanks to keen-eyed Adam and Aimee, is duly documented here for cryptozoological posterity. Also, they have asked me to note here that they are making their photograph of this specimen freely available for all researchers to use at no charge, only a credit to Aimee is required – thanks guys! Incidentally, Adam has since informed me that the sample has now been taken off display, so it was extremely fortuitous that he and Aimee were visiting during the time when it was accessible for viewing by the public and were therefore able to place its existence on record.
AN INFERNAL FIND!
And staying with crypto-discoveries hidden in plain sight: Just two days before I learnt from Adam and Aimee about the St Augustine globster sample, another longstanding Facebook friend, Robert Schneck, had drawn my attention to an illustration that he'd lately discovered and had now uploaded to his Facebook page 'Historian of the Strange'. Prepared by German artist Hermann Wöhler (1897-1961) in c.1930, it was an exceedingly detailed line drawing entitled 'Inferno', depicting all manner of hideous monsters and other terrifying entities envisaged by him to be inhabiting Hell. But what had attracted Robert's particular attention was the creature depicted almost at the very centre of the illustration, because as he pointed out, it looked more than a little reminiscent of a certain alleged cryptid depicted in a notorious photograph during the early 1920s.
The cryptid in question was the so-called Loys's ape, reputedly encountered in the jungles on the border of Colombia and Venezuela by Swiss geologist Dr François de Loys while leading a party of explorers through this difficult, inhospitable terrain. The official narrative as provided by Loys was that they'd encountered two such creatures walking together on their hind legs and lacking tails. Threatened by them, the explorers shot one, the female, causing the male to flee. Taking the creature's lifeless carcase back to camp, they sat it on a crate, propped it upright with a long stick placed vertically beneath its chin, and photographed it. The carcase did not survive but the photo did, and for decades led to supposition that it portrayed one of the mysterious bipedal ape-like entities long reported from many different regions of South America, and inducing French/Swiss anthropologist Prof. George Montandon to formally dub their scientifically-undescribed species Ameranthropoides loysi.
Ultimately, however, long after Loys himself had died, one of his team's still-living members confessed that it had all been a hoax – the creature in the photo was nothing more than their pet spider monkey, which, after eventually dying, had been propped up and photographed (with its long tail either hidden or cut off) to yield the famous, but now infamous, Loys's ape picture. (The entire sordid saga of this hoax has already been documented by me in full here, here, and here on ShukerNature, so check it out.)
Bearing in mind that Wöhler's illustration had been created no more than ten years after Loys's photograph had first been published and had duly hit the headlines, it does indeed seem likely that this eyecatching image had directly inspired Wöhler to include a representation of it within his line drawing. For there is no doubt that the facial expression of Loys's ape as captured in the photo, with mouth agape and eyes staring widely, is certainly more than a little hellish, positively infernal, in fact! So, many thanks indeed to Robert for alerting me to a fascinating yet previously unrevealed and undocumented cryptozoological connection concealed within the art archives.
This ShukerNature article originally appeared in the form of one of my regular Alien Zoo columns for the famous long-running British monthly magazine Fortean Times.
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