ELUCIDATING THE TWO 'CIVIL WAR PTERODACTYL' THUNDERBIRD PHOTOGRAPHS

 

The two so-called Civil War Pterodactyl thunderbird photographs: the PTP photo (top) and the AP photo (bottom) (both photos © FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Over the years, I have documented on ShukerNature a number of alleged thunderbird photographs (some of them even being claimed on various online sites to be THE infamous, missing thunderbird photograph – click here for the latter's fascinating if highly frustrating history), and I have exposed each one of them either as an intentionally deceiving hoax perpetrated by creator(s) unknown, or as a pastiche deliberately intended as a tribute to the missing thunderbird photo that has been openly and unequivocally identified as a pastiche by its creator(s). Click here, here, here, and here to access these cases. Yet the photographs from this particular cryptozoological category that have elicited the most queries sent to me by readers, and continue to do so, are the two that form the subject of this first ShukerNature blog article of mine in 2021 – namely, the so-called Civil War Pterodactyl thunderbird photos.

Before I go any further, however, I must point out that their full details were first revealed online elsewhere (see later for a clickable link to that source). Consequently, this present concise article of mine is intended merely as a summary, an elucidation, for anyone who has not seen that very comprehensive original coverage and is therefore checking ShukerNature for information concerning them instead.

First and foremost, setting the scene: as my article's title and opening illustrations clearly demonstrate, there is not just one Civil War Pterodactyl thunderbird photograph (as is sometimes mistakenly assumed), but two. Although superficially similar, each depicting a group of men in American Civil War uniforms standing around a large seemingly-killed pterodactyl-like mystery beast lying on the ground, and therefore corresponding with some claimed recollections of the missing thunderbird photo (in turn explaining why they have been popularly dubbed the Civil War Pterodactyl thunderbird photos), a closer look readily shows that the two beasts are in fact quite different, as are the men.

Both photos look very old and tattered, their existence ostensibly indicating that at some stage during the American Civil War (1861-1865), a group of soldiers somehow managed to kill a living, modern-day pterodactyl, or something extraordinarily like one. As a result, the two images have variously appeared separately and together on many online sites and elsewhere as evidence that these winged reptiles did not become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period approximately 65 million years ago as currently indicated by the fossil record, but have somehow survived into the present age, at least in North America.

In fact, the reality is very different. As will be seen, both Civil War Pterodactyl thunderbird photographs have the same origin, and are completely artificial, but were created for two very different, entirely separate purposes.

One of these photos is commonly dubbed the PTP Photo online, and sometimes even the PTP Pterodactyl Photo, although the latter is decidedly tautological, bearing in mind that PTP is short for Pterosaur Photo (and as pterodactyls constitute a major taxonomic group of pterosaurs, this means that if referred to in full it would be the Pterosaur Photo Pterodactyl Photo!). Here it is:

 

The PTP Photo (© FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

The other photo does not seem to have a specific name. Consequently, for reasons that will shortly become obvious, I shall refer to it hereafter as the AP Photo, with AP being short for Advance Publicity. Here it is:

 

The AP Photo (© FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Originally screened from October 2000 until June 2001, FreakyLinks was a single-season, 13-episode science fiction TV show originating in the USA. It was created by American film producer Gregg Hale (best known for producing the movie The Blair Witch Project) and David S. Hoyer (an American film-maker, novelist, and comic book writer, with many superhero movie screenplays to his name, most notably those for the trilogy of Blade movies and the Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies). The production companies responsible for bringing FreakyLinks to the small screen were Haxan Films, Regency Television, and 20^th Century Fox Television

The focus of FreakyLinks is a mysteries-obsessed geek named Derek Barnes (played by Ethan Embry), who has a website entitled FreakyLinks through which he channels his investigations and findings relating to a wide range of unexplained phenomena, and he is assisted in his endeavours to uncover the truth by a couple of friends. Each episode deals with a different case investigated by them, and the subject of Episode 4, which is entitled 'Coelacanth This!', is a series of recent attacks upon people by some huge winged mystery beast. Derek believes that this may be a living pterodactyl (i.e. a prehistoric survivor, hence the coelacanth reference in this episode's title) and, in turn, the origin of cryptozoological thunderbird reports dating back more than a century.

This is where the two Civil War Pterodactyl photos come in, because the PTP Photo had been created specifically (and digitally) by a VFX company hired by the production design team at FreakyLinks to appear (as indeed it did) in 'Coelacanth This!', which was first screened on 27 October 2000. At the time of my writing and uploading this blog article of mine onto ShukerNature, 'Coelacanth This!' can be watched for free here on YouTube, so you can readily confirm for yourself that the PTP Photo does indeed appear in this episode. Moreover, below are three screen shots of this photo's presence in it that reveal precisely when it first appears (it does so more than once in this episode – see the end of this present article for a screen shot of its reappearance).

 

Three screen shots of the PTP photo's first appearance in 'Coelacanth This!' – Episode 4 of FreakyLinks - please click each one to enlarge it for viewing pueposes (© FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

The PTP photo should not be (but very often is) confused with an earlier, visually inferior Civil War pterodactyl photo. This latter picture is none other than the AP Photo, which features different actors as the Civil War soldiers, plus a different pterodactyl, in the form of a physical model. The AP Photo had also been created for FreakyLinks but, crucially, was used by them solely for advance publicity purposes, being included (together with a specially-created back story for it) in their FreakyLinks website (which in turn had been launched two years prior to the show's actual screening in order to promote it), but never actually appearing onscreen in the show itself.

Two decades later finds the FreakyLinks website now archived within the website of Haxan Films, but if you click here you can still access the page from it containing the AP Photo. Moreover, the pterodactyl model from the AP Photo is now housed at veteran cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's famous International Cryptozoology Museum at Portland, in Maine, USA.

 

Screen shot of the relevant section of the page from the original FreakyLinks website (now archived within the site of Haxan Films) that contains the AP photo - please click it to enlarge for reading purposes (© FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

But why do two different Civil War Pterodactyl photos associated with FreakyLinks exist? Why wasn't just one created, to appear both onscreen in the show itself and online in its publicity website? The reason is as follows.

The AP Photo was created first, but apparently there was subsequently a problem in obtaining talent releases for the actors featured in it, which would be needed if it were indeed to be shown onscreen in the episode. Also, the show's production designer allegedly didn't think that the AP Photo's pterodactyl was very impressive.

So Haxan Films hired the visual-effects company E=MC² Digital to create a second, more spectacular Civil War Pterodactyl photo (which would then be shown in the episode), and signed up new actors to appear in it. The result was the PTP photo, with the pterodactyl in it being a digitally-added image this time, as far as I'm aware, rather than a physical model.

So, to reiterate the key fact here: it was the PTP photo that was used onscreen in the actual FreakyLinks episode, not the AP Photo, which appeared instead in the show's online publicity website.

All of this and more concerning the two different FreakyLinks Civil War Pterodactyl photos was first revealed by Brian Dunning in a fascinating Skeptoid podcast and accompanying online transcript of 9 January 2018 that finally and comprehensively dispelled the confusion that had hitherto enshrouded these two images for so long online. Consequently, I strongly recommend that you click here to listen to his podcast and/or read his transcript for full details concerning this now fully-resolved but still very interesting cryptozoological case. (A detailed analysis of the PTP photo within the context of putative living pterosaurs can also be accessed here.)

 

A screen shot showing the reappearance of the PTP Photo near the end of the 'Coelacanth This!' episode of FreakyLinks (© FreakyLinks/Haxan Films/Regency Television/20^th Century Fox Television – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

 

SCRUTINIZING THE SHOEBILL – THE BIRD WORLD'S INCREDIBLE WHALE-HEADED KING

A close-up of a taxiderm shoebill's head, highlighting its extraordinary beak (left) and a vintage portrayal of a shoebill first published in 1901 (right) (© Dr Karl Shuker / public domain)

One of the bird world's oddest-looking species is unquestionably Balaeniceps rex, whose scientific name translates as 'whale-headed king' – but as its head bears little resemblance to a whale, this is a somewhat strange name, even for as strange a bird as Balaeniceps. Standing up to 5 ft tall, its general appearance is that of a large, round-shouldered stork with slaty blue-grey plumage and an untidy crest, but distinguishing it instantly from any genuine stork is its enormous, grotesque beak.

Roughly 8 in long, with a sharply hooked tip, this incongruous structure greatly resembles a clog-like shoe, earning Balaeniceps a much more apt and more commonly used name - shoebill. Similarly, the Arabs call this bird Abu-markub, 'Father of the shoe'.

Vintage illustration of the shoebill's head (top) and a shoebill skull readily demonstrating its beak's disproportionately huge size compared to the rest of its skull (bottom) (© Huub Veldhuijzen van Zanten/Naturalis Biodiversity Center – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

A peculiar but characteristic behavioural attribute of the shoebill is its tendency to stand perfectly still for lengthy periods of times. Recalling this, several years ago a correspondent informed me that when she was a child visiting her first zoo, she saw what she initially assumed to be a statue of some strange dinosaur-bird, because it was completely immobile. Fascinated, she stood and looked at it unsuspectingly for a time - until, without warning and in best Talos tradition (fans of the classic Ray Harryhausen film Jason and the Argonauts from 1963 will know exactly what I mean here!), this 'statue' slowly turned its head until it was staring directly at her! Its steely gaze peering down its huge beak into her face totally petrified the poor little girl, who was convinced that she was about to be torn apart and devoured!

Happily, the shoebill is in reality a shy, inoffensive species, inhabiting the relatively inaccessible papyrus marshes and floating swamps of the Upper Nile and its central East African tributaries, where it uses its massive beak to catch and extract prey such as fish, water snakes, and frogs (possibly even small mammals, and young crocodiles too) from the surrounding vegetation. It was once believed that its shoe-like shape was a specific adaptation for scooping lungfishes out of the mud, but as lungfishes do not form this species' principal diet, that idea seems unfounded - just as unfounded, it would appear, as many of the assumptions put forward over the years regarding this species' taxonomic affinity to other birds.

Section from an 1870s chromatolithograph depicting a pair of shoebills in their natural swampland habitat (public domain)

Science first became aware of the shoebill in the early 1840s. In his Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile, in the Years 1840, 1841 (1849), German explorer Ferdinand Werne reported that on 15 December 1840 his party saw a remarkable bird that seemed to them to be as large as a young camel, with a huge pelican-like beak, but lacking the pelican's characteristic pouch. This was undoubtedly a shoebill; sadly, Werne was asleep at the time and his party was unwilling to wake him, so he never observed it himself.

Eight years later, however, German ornithologist-explorer Baron Johann W. von Müller was more fortunate, catching sight of two shoebills. Moreover, upon his return to base at Khartoum, Sudan, he saw a pair of dead specimens for sale offered by a slave-dealer. The price that he was asking was too high to interest Baron von Müller, but not long afterwards they were purchased by a traveller from Nottingham named Mansfield Parkyns, who brought them back to England when he returned with various other animal specimens collected during his African sojourn. These were studied by the eminent bird painter John Gould, who prepared a formal scientific description of the shoebill, presented on 14 January 1851 at a meeting of London's Zoological Society and published later that year in its Proceedings. And in 1860, Britain's first pair of living shoebills arrived at London Zoo, courtesy of Welsh traveller John Petherick.

Another pair of shoebills in their natural habitat, this time painted by okapi discoverer Sir Harry Johnston and published in 1902 (public domain)

Meanwhile, the controversy concerning this species' relationship to other birds had begun in earnest. Gould had classified it as an aberrant, long-legged pelican; but other ornithologists did not agree with that, and tended to ally it either with the herons or with the storks. Today, the shoebill is generally categorised as the sole living occupant of its own family, discrete from both the herons and the storks. The reason for the phenomenal difficulty in satisfactorily classifying this bird rests with its anatomy and behaviour, which embrace a perplexing potpourri of features drawn from at least three different bird families - and two different orders.

Powder-downs are pairs of strange feathers that are never shed, but perpetually fray at their tips to yield a powder that the bird rubs into its other feathers. Herons have three pairs, and the shoebill has a single pair, but storks have none. Also in common with herons, the shoebill's rear toe is held at the same level as its three forward-pointing toes (the rear toe is raised in storks); and when it flies, the shoebill tucks its head and neck backwards, like herons once again.

And a smile on the face of the shoebill? (photo by Sengkang - copyrighted free use)

Even so, whereas in herons the stapes (birds' only middle-ear bone) is primitive in form, avian evolutionist Dr Alan Feduccia showed that it has an identical derived shape in the storks and the shoebill (Nature, 21 April 1977). Also agreeing with the storks: the shoebill's middle toe is less than half the length of the tarsus (heel-bone), and it has no webbing between its toes (herons have a partial web between 2-3 of theirs). It displays the storks' beak-clattering behaviour too.

Yet as if all of this were not already sufficient to demonstrate the shoebill's transitional form and conduct, its skull exhibits certain features similar to those of a completely separate order of birds – Pelecaniformes, the pelicans. Furthermore, in true pelican style, it flies with its large beak resting on its breast. Indeed, in 1957 the detailed skeletal studies undertaken by former British Museum ornithologist Dr Patricia A. Cottam on the shoebill convinced her that Gould had been correct all along, that this enigmatic species really was most closely related to the pelicans. However, other researchers (notably Dr Joel Cracraft in the ornithological journal Auk, 1985) dismissed its similarities as examples of convergence, i.e. they reasoned that because the shoebill and the pelicans exist in similar habitats and have similar lifestyles, they have evolved into similar forms, even though they originate from separate ancestral stocks.

An exquisite engraving from 1860 depicting a pair of shoebills (public domain)

Then in February 1986 after having directly compared the shoebill's DNA with that of herons, storks, and pelicans, researchers Drs Charles G. Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist announced in Scientific American that, contrary to all expectations, the shoebill's DNA most closely matched that of the pelicans! They published further data in support of their finds during the 1990s. In 2001, extensive research involving DNA hybridisation as well as nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequence analyses by a team headed by Dr Marcel van Tuinen added further support for the pelicans, the shoebill, and another enigmatic species called the hammerhead or hamerkop Scopus umbretta being of monophyletic (common) origin.

Comparable results were also obtained from a comprehensive osteological study by Frankfurt-based ornithologist Dr Gerald Mayr, published in 2003. Modern studies thus offer persuasive evidence for believing, as Gould had proposed over 160 years ago, that the shoebill is basically an aberrant pelican, and that its cranial affinities with pelicans signify direct kinship rather than deceptive evolutionary convergence.

Shoebills – not singular storks but peculiar pelicans, relatively speaking; painting by Joseph Wolf, 1862 (public domain)

In recent years, the shoebill's classification has also attracted attention because the results of more detailed genetic comparisons (notably the extensive phylogenomic study by Dr Shannon J. Hackett and a large team of co-workers - Science, 12 July 2008), involving many different avian genera and families, have required taxonomists to carry out a major overhaul of the contents of the avian orders Ciconiiformes and Pelecaniformes. These changes can be summarised as follows.

Traditionally, Ciconiiformes has contained the following families: Ardeidae (herons, egrets, bitterns), Balaenicipitidae (shoebill), Scopidae (hammerhead), Ciconiidae (storks), Threskiornithidae (ibises and spoonbills), and Phoenicopteridae (flamingos). Pelecaniformes, meanwhile, has contained Phaethontidae (tropic-birds), Fregatidae (frigate-birds), Sulidae (gannets and boobies), Anhingidae (anhingas or darters), Phalacrocoracidae (cormorants and shags), and Pelecanidae (pelicans). However, modern genetic studies have shown fairly convincingly that Pelecaniformes is polyphyletic, i.e. its families do not all originate from a single common ancestor, but in reality seem to constitute three entirely separate evolutionary lineages. One of these lineages consists of the tropic-birds, which therefore are now housed within their own separate order, Phaethontiformes. A second lineage comprises the gannets and boobies, cormorants and shags, anhingas, and frigate-birds. So these have all been grouped together within their own new order too, Suliformes. This means that only one original family remains within Pelecaniformes – the pelicans, constituting a third separate lineage.

Facing up to some taxonomic tribulations (© Leyo/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

However, genetic studies have also shown, somewhat unexpectedly, that within the order Ciconiiformes are certain families – namely, the herons, bitterns, and egrets; the shoebill; the hammerhead; and the ibises and spoonbills – that are more closely related to the pelicans than they are to the remaining ciconiiform families. In short, Ciconiiformes is also polyphyletic. Consequently, these pelican-allied families have now been removed from Ciconiiformes and placed alongside the pelican family within Pelecaniformes. And the flamingos have been allocated their own separate order, Phoenicopteriformes. This means that the only family now remaining in Ciconiiformes is the storks.

Having said that, however, some taxonomists believe that the New World vultures' family, Cathartidae, and the extinct teratorns' family, Teratornithidae, are actually more closely related to the storks than to the Old World vultures or any other birds of prey. Consequently, they have duly included Cathartidae and Teratornithidae alongside the stork family Ciconiidae in Ciconiiformes. Meanwhile, the shoebill is nowadays back to where it began when first formally described during the 1800s, as a member of the pelican order. However, it is seen, along with the hammerhead, as a taxonomic link between Pelecaniformes and Ciconiiformes.

Shoebill showing off its powerful pinions (© Pelican/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

Even the shoebill's fossil antecedents have stimulated taxonomic turmoil. Until its reclassification in 1980 by Dr Pierce Brodkorb as an ancestral shoebill (based upon the finding of a tarsometatarsus that revealed this taxonomic affinity), Goliathia andrewsi had been classed as an aberrant heron. It was first described in 1930 by Hungarian palaeontologist Dr Kálmán Lambrecht, following the discovery of an ulna bone dating from the early Oligocene, which had been obtained in the Jebel Qatrani Formation within Egypt's Fayum Province. The only other widely-accepted fossil relative of the shoebill is Paludavis richae, with remains found in Tunisia and Pakistan, but these are more recent, from the Miocene.

Of cryptozoological interest is the shoebill's implication in a very curious case of mistaken identity. From time to time, reports emerge from various remote regions of Central Africa describing alleged sightings of large, macabre-looking creatures soaring through the skies and bearing an impressive resemblance to those long-extinct flying reptilians, the pterosaurs. However, it is more than likely that many of these involve shoebills, as noted by zoologist Dr Maurice Burton (Animals, 18 February 1964 – click here to read more about his comments on ShukerNature) and subsequently explored in greater detail by me within my books In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995) and Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016) – click here for coverage on ShukerNature of my books' documentation. There is no doubt that this strange bird has a distinctly prehistoric appearance, especially when viewed in flight, and anyone unfamiliar with the striking spectacle of its huge, 8.5-ft wingspan and giant beak could certainly be forgiven for thinking that they had spied an aerial anachronism, a cryptic creature supposedly dead for more than 64 million years.

This ShukerNature blog article is adapted from my book The Menagerie of Marvels.

Awe-inspiring sight of a shoebill in flight (© Tom Tarrant/Wikipedia – CC BY SA.30 licence)

PHONEY PHOTOS OF THE THUNDERBIRD AND BIGFOOT KIND - SHOOTING DOWN ANOTHER TWO EXAMPLES

A fake 'shot thunderbird' photo (above) and a fake 'shot bigfoot' photo (below) (creator unknown to me / © Kryptomaniacle – included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

I recently noted on Facebook that I consider it very important to publicly expose and debunk fake cryptozoological photographs, because in doing so it not only  prevent them from cluttering the archives of cryptozoology in the future but also prevents cryptozoological sceptics from using them as evidence for claiming that the subject is credulous and not scientifically rigorous. So with that in mind, here are another two such photos that I have recently been able to shoot down as phoneys.

The first of these came to my attention on 12 October 2016 while I was browsing online – I first spotted it in the forums section of the Taurusarmed.net website, where it had been posted by someone with the username Moondawg on 5 June 2015, but I subsequently discovered that it had been posted by various other people on a number of other sites too. As seen here, it is a typical example of the 'shot thunderbird photograph' motif (click here for the saga of this ostensibly real but elusive image), of which numerous confirmed fake versions are still doing the rounds online, and which consist of what appears to be a vintage photo of hunters posing alongside an enormous dead winged creature, the thunderbird (aka 'big bird'), fastened with wings outstretched to a wall or barn door. In some such photos, the thunderbird is avian, in others it is pterosaurian – it is the latter in the version under consideration here.

The fake 'shot thunderbird photograph' (creator unknown to me)

As soon as I saw the photo, it seemed obvious to me that it was yet another fake. I freely confess that I am no photographic expert, but in terms of both contrast and edges the pterosaur was far sharper than anything in the remainder of the photograph. Moreover, as a zoologist I was readily aware that the pterosaur's morphology was consistent with the typical reconstruction of the American pterodactyl Pteranodon that was preponderant in books and magazines dating from the 1960s and 1970s, as opposed to ones from present-day publications and considered by present-day palaeontologists to be accurate.

With this in mind, I decided to conduct an online image search in the hope of tracing the original vintage photograph that had evidently been utilised by the unknown creator to produce this fake 'shot thunderbird' photo, and within only a very short time I succeeded in doing so. Here it is:

The original vintage hunters photograph that formed the basis for the fake thunderbird photo (public domain)

I discovered it on the Viewsofthepast.com website, on a page entitled 'Superior View Hunting & Wildlife' (click here to visit it), which contained a lengthy series of vintage hunting photos. The example that had been used as the basis for the fake thunderbird photo was listed as 'H-CAMP07 Log Cabin Hunters', and clearly dated back to at least the early 1930s, and quite possibly even earlier than that.

Here is the original vintage hunters photo and the fake thunderbird photo alongside one another, confirming that except for the Pteranodon presence in the latter the two are identical:

Fake thunderbird photo (above) and original vintage hunters photo (below) (creator unknown to me / public domain)

But what about the Pteranodon image used in the fake thunderbird photo – where had that come from? Again, it didn't take long for me to track that down online. It turned out to be a photo of a Pteranodon model available by various companies as a plastic model kit during the early 1970s (thus explaining why the reconstruction was so dated). I was first alerted to this model kit's existence via the following photograph of its box from the Revell-issued version that I found online:

Box containing 1970s Pteranodon model kit released by Revell (© Revell – included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

As can be seen, the image of the Pteranodon on the lid of this model kit's box is almost identical to that of the Pteranodon in the fake thunderbird photo, and I could readily imagine that if a photo of the fully-assembled model Pteranodon were taken from slightly above the model so that its head, neck, and beak appeared slightly lower down over its body than they do in the picture on the model kit's lid, it would then correspond precisely with the fake thunderbird version.

The Revell Pteranodon picture, the fake thunderbird photo, and the original vintage hunters photo (© Revell – included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only / creator unknown to me / public domain)

Moreover, Facebook colleague Robert Hodge kindly brought to my attention the following photo of an early 1970s version of the same Pteranodon model, fully assembled, that had been released by Aurora as part of its 'Prehistoric Scenes' series:

The fully-assembled Aurora-released version of the Pteranodon model (© Aurora - included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

(As a noteworthy BTW: whereas the picture on the lid of the Revell version of this model is based directly upon the fully-assembled Pteranodon model itself, the picture on the lid of the Aurora version of this same model is merely a generic Pteranodon image.)

After I had made public on Facebook my findings documented here, another Facebook colleague, Joseph McKee, then used the box-lid picture of the Revell Pteranodon model to recreate via Photoshop the fake thunderbird photo, and as can be seen here his recreation confirms beyond any doubt that this plastic model was indeed the source of the Pteranodon in the fake thunderbird photo:

The fake thunderbird photo (top) and Joseph McKee's recreation of it using the Revell Pteranodon model's picture (bottom) (creator unknown to me / Joseph McKee)

Another case of crypto-photographic forgery well and truly closed!

Moving from 'big birds' to bigfoot: yesterday (21 October 2016), I was once again browsing online when I came upon the following image, purportedly a vintage photograph showing a shot bigfoot and the hunters who had dispatched it. I had been browsing various bigfoot-related sites, and had found it under discussion on several of them. Here it is:

FAKE shot bigfoot photograph - no bigfoot was harmed in the creation of this FAKE photo!! (© Kryptomaniacle – included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

Looking at it, it seemed to me to be another vintage American hunters photo into which something foreign had been introduced – on this occasion some form of animal montage creating the supposed bigfoot, the body possibly being that of a bear, with what may be a gorilla's head (or a model of one?) superimposed on top of it, because the head and body do not appear to be continuous (and the body not very gorilla-like anyway). For what it's worth (pardon the forthcoming pun!), however, there was an additional (and totally unequivocal) clue readily visible in this 'shot bigfoot' picture that confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that this was indeed a phoney photograph. And that was the presence of a certain inscription in its bottom left-hand corner, reading 'Worth1000.com' – because this just so happens to be the name of a former website that specialised in competitions for producing the best photoshopped images.

Pursuing this lead, I was able to confirm that the 'shot bigfoot' had indeed been submitted for one of Worth1000's competitions – specifically, its 'Monster Hoaxes 6' contest, held in early 2012; that it was Worth1000 Design #8830992; and that the person who had submitted it was based in the USA and had the username Kryptomaniacle. Click here to see this photo's official submission page. Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain further information because Worth1000.com has been taken over by the graphic design website DesignCrowd, and only its members can obtain more specific details regarding Worth1000 submissions, usernames, etc (and because this site's members need to be graphic designers, which I'm not, I'm not a member).

However, Kryptomaniacle did state alongside this bigfoot-inspired photo that he/she had photoshopped it as an April Fool's joke. It came 15^th out of the 27 submissions in the contest (click here to see all of the entries). Some entrants provided the original sources used in creating their submissions, but unfortunately Kryptomaniacle didn't do so.

What I needed to do, therefore, was to do what I'd done with the fake thunderbird photo – i.e. trace the original vintage hunters photo that had evidently been used as the 'shot bigfoot' photo's basis. Once again, it wasn't long before I succeeded in doing this – and here it is:

Original vintage American deer hunters photograph used as the basis of the FAKE shot bigfoot photo (public domain)

I found it on the Wideopenspaces.com website, on a page entitled 'The Good Old Days@ 30 Historic Hunting Photos [Pics]' – click here to view this page (the vintage deer hunters photo used as the basis for the 'shot bigfoot' photo is Photo #26). It had originally appeared in Canada's Ottawa Sun newspaper.

As shown below, when the original vintage hunters photo and Kryptomaniacle's fake bigfoot photo are viewed alongside one another, it can be readily seen that except for the shot deer in the former photo and the ropes-suspended 'shot bigfoot' in the latter one (plus the image of an ungulate skull positioned over the body of the 'bigfoot'), the two are identical. Moreover, even the ungulate skull is a composite, combining the antlers of the deer in the original vintage hunters photo with the skull from some entirely different individual (and which may actually be a cow skull rather than a deer skull anyway).

FAKE shot bigfoot photo (top) and original vintage American hunters photo (bottom) (© Kryptomaniacle – included here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only / public domain)

All that remains to be done now in order to complete the full exposure of this 'shot bigfoot' photo's origins is to trace Kryptomaniacle's sources for the 'bigfoot' head and body, and for the ungulate skull placed over the body. Yet even if this isn't achieved, what I have already revealed here in relation to it is more than sufficient to verify the photo's fake nature.

Indeed, the 'Worth1000.com' inscription should have been enough for anyone to have realised straight away that the 'shot bigfoot' photo was a phoney, which is why I was so surprised to find it the subject of serious discussion as to its possible authenticity on various websites. Having said that, I must make a clear differentiation regarding this photo between its being a fake and a hoax. Yes, it IS a fake, created by Kryptomaniacle using photoshopping techniques; but it is NOT a hoax, because it was submitted openly by Kryptomaniacle for a public photoshopping competition, with no intention to deceive, having been clearly identified by him/her as a photoshopped image. It is only because it has subsequently been uploaded by others onto various sites where it has mistakenly been thought to be real that cryptozoological confusion concerning its true origin and nature has occurred.

My sincere thanks to Robert Hodge and Joseph McKee for their much-appreciated assistance in relation to my researches documented here.

From bear to bigfoot - another FAKE bigfoot photograph that I debunked - click here to read all about it.

NB: For any potential/former advertisers who may be mistakenly assuming that this page contains photographs of real, dead bigfoot specimens - it does NOT! As fully revealed here, all photos under consideration on this page are FAKE, as are the bigfoot specimens themselves that are depicted in them. No bigfoot specimens were used or harmed in the creation of these photographs!