The ghost forests

I recently read paleontologist Riley Black's lovely book When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance, which looks at the prehistory of life on Earth through the lens of paleobotany.

While I know the charismatic megafauna like dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers and giant ground sloths garner most of the attention, I've always found ancient plants equally interesting.  Part of that comes from my ongoing love of both gardening and wild plants, something I've experienced since I was about six and discovered F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, with its hundreds of pages of descriptions and range maps and wonderful illustrations.  I can't even begin to estimate the amount of time I spent poring over its pages (and I still own my copy of it).

Once I gained a passing knowledge of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers I saw every day, I was shocked to find out that if I were to go back a few million years, I'd find an entirely different assemblage of plant species.  I know, it shouldn't have been a surprise; if the animals had changed, there's no reason the plants wouldn't have as well.  But I still found it astonishing when I found out that (for example) at the moment, there is exactly one extant species of ginkgo (the familiar, and beautiful, Ginkgo biloba), but in the past there had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species in the family:

A sampler of now-extinct Jurassic ginkgo species [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter R. Crane, Pollyanna von Knorring, Fossil Ginkgoales, CC BY 4.0]

Riley Black does a masterful job of tracing the evolutionary history of plants from their origins to recent times, and her signature lucid writing style makes the subject completely captivating.  One of the chapters deals with an odd period of Earth's history -- the Cretaceous Resinous Interval, a span of about fifty million years during which there was intense diversification amongst gymnosperms, a group that includes not only ginkgos, but the superficially palm-like cycads and the much more familiar conifers.

Anyone who has ever leaned up against a pine or spruce tree knows about their impossibly sticky, golden-brown, aromatic sap.  This glop, so unfortunate for skin and clothing, evolved as a way of sealing wounds and preventing insect damage.  So in a relatively short time, we see the evolution of hundreds of species of plants that produced the stuff -- and, when it met the right conditions, hardening into amber.

Most of the world's amber, whether from Burma or the Baltic region or the highlands of Ecuador and Peru, formed during this time.  Amber has been popular for jewelry-making since the time of the ancient Greeks, and probably before; in fact, an interesting linguistic side-note is that the Greek name for amber, ἤλεκτρον, is where our words electron and electricity come from (due to amber's property of gaining a static charge when rubbed with a silk cloth).  But amber really came into the popular consciousness because of Jurassic Park, wherein some scientists extract dinosaur blood from bloodsucking insects trapped in amber, and use it to clone dinosaurs, with predictable results.

[Nota bene: it's thought that the upper bound for the survival of DNA in amber, even with optimal conditions, is around a million years, not the hundreds of millions required by Jurassic Park.  And even that is likely to be an overestimate.  In 2013, scientists tried -- and failed -- to extract intact DNA from a bee trapped in ten thousand year old copal, an amber precursor.]

That doesn't mean it can't have phenomenal paleontological significance, however, even if we're unlikely to have velociraptors stalking us any time soon.  The reason the topic comes up is a paper that appeared last week in Communications Earth about 112-million-year-old amber unearthed in an Ecuadorean quarry, which contained so many inclusions of insects, pollen, and seeds that it's being called a "Cretaceous time capsule."

A midge from the Ecuadorean amber.  Check out how well preserved those compound eyes and antennae are!  [Image credit: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer]

The number of insect and arachnid taxa represented, as well as the pollen and other plant fossils discovered, paint a remarkably detailed picture of the ecosystem back then.  The authors write:

The new palaeobotanical evidence suggests the presence of a diverse and humid, low-latitude forest in north-western Gondwana during the early Albian...  The strata in this quarry reveal a vertical evolution of various palaeoenvironments, including proximal braided rivers, lacustrine systems, hyperpycnal [high-density, high-sediment] flows, and distal braided rivers during the Albian...  Pollen and plant macrofossils show abundant ferns and fern-allies that likely grew in the understory and/or near water bodies, in a forest dominated by araucariacean resinous trees.  The overall palynological and plant macrofossil association found in the Genoveva quarry, particularly the high diversity of pteridophytes and the presence of moderately thick coal seams in the stratigraphic sequence, indicates a humid environment, similar to previous reports in other but less studied north-western tropical South American sites.

The presence of relatively abundant chironomid flies and one trichopteran as bioinclusions—both insect groups with aquatic larval stages—further supports the interpretation of predominantly humid conditions during resin production and deposition.

Fascinating to think that if you went back there, in that thriving humid lowland forest, you wouldn't see a single modern plant species.  Not one.  Groups, sure -- we still have araucariacean trees around today (the most familiar being the Norfolk Island pine and the monkey-puzzle tree) -- but our modern forests, even in habitats with similar climates, have no species in common with those that produced the 112-million-year-old Genoveva amber. 

Change is always the way of things, but still, it strikes me as sad that all those many forms most beautiful and most wonderful (to swipe Darwin's pithy phrase) are gone.  Last week at the Tompkins County Friends of the Library Used Book Sale -- a twice-a-year, three week long, must-attend event for any bibliophiles within driving distance of Ithaca, New York, and which offers a quarter of a million used books each go round -- I picked up a real prize in a lovely illustrated paleobotany text, with drawings and fossil photographs representing over a thousand different species of plants no longer to be found anywhere on Earth.

I think this morning I'll spend some time flipping through its pages, and dream of wandering through the ghostly forests of prehistory.

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Ghost cities

I just finished reading The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan, and what struck me over and over again was an astonished thought of how we managed to survive at all.

For most of human history (and prehistory), the human species lived in communities of various sizes that were constantly teetering on the brink of mass starvation.  Fagan makes the point again and again; for the majority of humanity, all it took was one bad season to spell complete disaster.  There was no Plan B.  Except for the small number of civilizations that lived in areas with sufficient wild foods to forage, a drought or a flood or a freeze at the wrong time and you were in deep, deep trouble.

Size and power were no guarantors of safety.  The Mycenaeans, the Indus Valley Civilization, the Mayan Empire, the Pueblo Culture, the Tiwanaku People, and the Sumerians all declined and collapsed at least in part due to the vagaries of the climate.  More recently, the Little Ice Age contributed to the Great Famine of 1315-1317 which affected most of Europe and killed millions; and repeated crop failures during the eighteenth century, coupled with the monarchy's seeming inability to deal with them, almost certainly were part of what gave momentum to the French Revolution.

Despite all this, our intrepid ancestors not only survived, but in many places, thrived.  Sometimes even in regions where it's hard to imagine.  For example, consider two archaeological discoveries of hitherto-unknown cities -- one in the desert of northwestern Arabia, and the other in the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador.

A study led by Guillaume Charloux of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique found the remains of a fortified complex surrounding the Khaybar Oasis dating to the fourth and third millennium B.C.E., giving evidence of a permanent settlement that persisted for at least several centuries.

The authors write:

The multidisciplinary investigation carried out between 2020 and 2023 by the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project (CNRS-RCU-AFALULA) demonstrates that the Khaybar Oasis was entirely enclosed by a rampart in pre-Islamic times, like several other large regional walled oases in north-western Arabia (Tayma, Qurayyah, Hait, etc.).  The cross-referencing of survey and remote sensing data, architectural examinations and the dating of stratified contexts have revealed a rampart initially some 14.5 km long, generally between 1.70 m and 2.40 m thick, reinforced by 180 bastions.  Preserved today over just under half of the original route (41 %, 5.9 km and 74 bastions), this rampart dates back to the Bronze Age, between 2250 and 1950 BCE, and had never been detected before due to the profound reworking of the local desert landscape over time.  This crucial discovery confirms the rise of a walled oasis complex in northern Arabia during the Bronze Age, a trend that proved to be central to the creation of indigenous social and political complexity.

A different study that also came out this week looked at the ruins of a city complex with buildings, gardens, streets, and plazas, now buried in the tangle of the Ecuadorian rain forest near the Upano River.  This one is even more mysterious than the Arabian settlement; we knew there were people living in northwestern Arabia back then, even if we didn't know they had built a city.  Here, archaeologists have found the remains of a complex, settled civilization, its beginnings contemporaneous with the Roman Republic and which lasted for a thousand years, and we have no idea who the people were that inhabited it -- neither what language they spoke nor how they were related to other Indigenous groups in the area before and afterward.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons James Martins, Amazon rainforest - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

Sacha Vignieri, writing for Science, commented about the research:

When intact, the Amazonian forest is dense and difficult to penetrate, both on foot and with scanning technologies.  Over the past several years, however, improved light detection and ranging scans have begun to penetrate the forest canopy, revealing previously unknown evidence of past Amazonian cultures.  Rostain et al. describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago.  They describe more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley.  Previous efforts have described mounds and large monuments in Amazonia, but the complexity and extent of this development far surpasses these previous sites.

Of course, the fact that both the Arabian and the Amazonian cities were ultimately abandoned indicates that they too fell prey to the capriciousness that characterizes much of human history.  Whether the cause was war, famine, drought, disease, or some combination -- all too often those come together -- the Khaybar Oasis and Upano Valley civilizations left their intricately-constructed towns, either dispersing into other communities or else dwindling and finally dying.

Whichever it was, all we have are the ghostly remains of cities once inhabited by thriving populations -- a stark reminder of our own tenuous grasp on survival, something we often forget about because of the hubris of modern society.  I'm reminded of Percy Bysshe Shelley's haunting and poignant poem "Ozymandias," which seems a fitting place to end:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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The Lazarus flower

The adage goes, "Extinction is forever."

It's a sobering thought.  There's been talk of "de-extinction" -- using intact DNA from well-preserved fossils to resurrect, Jurassic-Park-style, extinct animals -- but so far, the research in that vein has been tentative and not particularly promising.  Plus, there are the inevitable ethical questions about bringing back woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and dodos into a world where their environment has changed into something they couldn't survive in anyway.  It seems like recreating a few individuals of an extinct species, then having them live out their lives in zoos, is nothing more than generating a handful of entertaining curiosities at a very great cost.

There are, however, a few species that have been declared extinct which have turned out not to be.  The most famous of these is the coelacanth, a weird-looking fish that's one of the lobe-finned fish, the fish group with the closest relationship to amphibians.  It was thought that all the lobe-fins had become extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Extinction 66 million years ago, but then someone caught one in the Indian Ocean.  There are, in fact, two living species of coelacanth -- the West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and the Indonesian coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis).  This long-term survival of a species that was thought to be long gone has resulted in the coelacanth being labeled a "living fossil" or a "Lazarus taxon."

There are also the ones that have been declared extinct, but that a handful of true believers -- and sometimes some scientists, as well -- are convinced are still alive.  The last thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which is neither a wolf nor restricted to Tasmania, died in a zoo in 1936 -- except there continue to be sightings of purported thylacines, both in Tasmania and adjacent South Australia.  In fact, there's a Facebook group devoted to alleged thylacine sightings, which so far, have either been anecdotal, or accompanied by photos of Bigfoot-level blurriness.

Then there's the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campophilus principalis), an enormous woodpecker species that used to live in swampy regions of the North American southeast.  The last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944, but there have been sporadic reports ever since -- most, probably, of the related (but smaller) pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).  But a friend of mine, an employee of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, was part of the team sent to investigate a cluster of alleged sightings, and she was one of the people who say they actually saw one.  Now, let me add that my friend is an accomplished and knowledgeable birder, and knew what she was looking for; she, and the other members of the team, would not mistake a pileated woodpecker for this bird.  Unfortunately, the only video they got was short and of poor quality, and although she and the rest of the team have serious credibility, it still amounts to a single anecdotal report, and a lot of folks are not convinced.

All of this is just by way of introducing a discovery that should give some hope to the thylacine and ivory-billed woodpecker aficionados.  Just last week, a paper in the journal PhytoKeys described the (re)discovery of a plant in the family Gesneriaceae, a tropical group most familiar to collectors of rare houseplants -- the best-known members are the African violet (Saintpaulia spp.),  Cape primrose (Streptocarpus spp.), and gloxinia (Gloxinia spp.).

The recent discovery was in the Centinela region of southern Ecuador, in the foothills of the Andes Mountains.  Centinela has been devastated by deforestation -- by some estimates, 97% of the original old-growth rain forest has been cleared or extensively damaged -- so it's to be expected that any species endemic to the region are gone.  That's what the botanists thought about a glossy-leaved, orange-flowered plant that grew in the humid understory; it was last seen in the 1980s.  By the time it was discovered and catalogued, it was gone.

That's why they named it Gasteranthus extinctus.

And then, a couple of months ago, some botanists studying what's left of Centinela found that it wasn't extinct after all.  Here's the plant:

[Photograph by Riley Fortier]

They took lots of photographs but were careful not to disturb the few remaining plants -- nor are they telling exactly where they found them.  This same strategy was adopted by the folks from Cornell looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker; the last thing they needed was a bunch of overenthusiastic amateurs stomping about the place (and you know they would).  But it is a hopeful thought, that some of the species we thought were gone forever might still be out there somewhere.  (For what it's worth, they're keeping the name Gasteranthus extinctus, and hoping that it doesn't one day become accurate in fact.)

"Rediscovering this flower shows that it’s not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there’s value in conserving even the smallest, most degraded areas," said Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, who was the paper's lead author.  "New species are still being found, and we can still save many things that are on the brink of extinction."

So that's today's optimistic news.  Me, I'm still hoping for the thylacine.  Those things were cool.  While thus far the evidence thus far has been less than convincing, it's certainly still a possibility that it -- and some of the other species most folks have given up on -- are still alive after all.

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Equatorial travelogue

I just got back yesterday from my expedition to Ecuador with the phenomenal birding tour company Wings, an outfit which I cannot recommend highly enough.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I love Ecuador, but with the planning and leadership of a Wings guide, this was a really special trip.

We spent most of the time near the charming town of Mindo, in a lodge called Séptimo Paraiso (Seventh Heaven).   The name is apt.  The lodge was comfortable, the food was great, and the hikes and birding were stupendous.  In nine days I saw 273 species of birds.  (If you want to get an idea of the phenomenal biodiversity of this tiny country, you should know that 37 of the species I saw were different kinds of tanager, and 43 were hummingbirds.  For comparison purposes, here in upstate New York, we have two tanagers -- one of them quite rare -- and only one kind of hummingbird.)

Of course, the birds aren't the whole reason I love Ecuador.  The scenery is amazing, largely due to the steep-sided ridges and rushing rivers of the Andes.  The weather (where I was, at least) was refreshingly mild -- 80 F during the day, down to maybe 55 F at night.

Rio Mindo [all photographs, unless otherwise marked, were taken by me]

Séptimo Paraiso sits at 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 2 seconds south latitude.  That means the front door was, give or take, 200 feet from the Equator.  We used a GPS on one of our outings to find the exact spot -- within appropriate error bars, of course -- and I took a picture of our entire group straddling it.

The four people on the left are in the Northern Hemisphere, the four on the right in the Southern Hemisphere.

Besides the avifauna, the plant life is fantastic as well.  (And the two are intimately connected; the flora are usually specialized to be pollinated by one particular bird, butterfly, moth, or bat, so high diversity in fauna usually implies high diversity in flora.)  I consider myself a fairly competent field botanist, but I was seldom able to identify plants beyond family, and sometimes not even that.  That, of course, didn't stop me from appreciating them.

"Something in the amaryllis family" is the best I could do with this one.  But it sure is pretty, isn't it?

We did have more than a few truly stunning birds, of course.  Three of them that stand out in my mind are the rare Scarlet-bellied Dacnis, which our guide said we were really amazingly lucky to see:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Torrent Duck, which is somehow able to swim upstream in rivers that would easily knock a grown man off his feet:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And a Crimson-mantled Woodpecker that positively modeled for the camera:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the difficulties of birding as a hobby, however, is that it does not cater to late risers.  I consider myself something of a lark, but after six days of getting up at four in the morning, it was beginning to wear on me a little:

Me in the lounge at Séptimo Paraiso, waiting for some kind soul to bring me a glass of wine and rub my aching feet

The altitude was also a bit tricky.  On day trips into the highlands, all of us became breathless after even brief walks uphill.  The highest we went was 14,400 feet, at Papallacta Pass, but it was foggy and spitting rain (and windy and about 35 F), so I didn't get any pictures.  I did get a few nice shots of Yanacocha, at 13,200 feet:

I'm hoping that all of this hiking around up in the mountains will translate to better endurance for running here at home.  We'll see how that goes.

Anyhow, all in all it was a fantastic trip.  To end this, here are a few things I learned about Ecuador on this trip:

• The Ecuadorian people are, by and large, some of the nicest, most generous people on Earth.  Despite my toddler-level Spanish (more on that in a moment), I was greeted everywhere by smiles and waves. 
• That said, if you put your typical Ecuadorian behind the wheel of a car, watch out.  Passing zones, lanes, speed limits, and even stop signs are considered gentle suggestions at best.  Horns are used to communicate a variety of things, such as, "Hi," "Get the hell out of my way," and "My car has a horn."  The last full day of birding, I was with a guide named Jorge, who is a friendly young man who laughs a lot and has an encyclopedic knowledge of South American birds, and who turns into a complete lunatic when he turns the key in the ignition of his truck.  (He crossed himself every time he got into the driver's seat.  I'm not sure if I was supposed to consider this a good sign or a bad sign.)  He was the one who drove us up to the aforementioned Papallacta Pass.  He gave me a big grin as he turned off the highway onto something that barely qualified as a road.  I can say honestly that of the ten scariest things that have happened to me in my life, seven of them happened in the next half-hour.  We drove steadily uphill on narrow dirt roads with potholes the size of lunar craters, large stretches of which had a rock wall on one side and a hundred-foot drop (sans guard rails, of course) on the other.  I think I left permanent finger dents in the door handle of Jorge's truck.
• If you are going to travel in a country with 250 different species of hummingbirds, don't wear a red shirt.  Hummingbirds consider humans in red shirts to be enormous flowers.  You will spend the entire day dodging small, brightly-colored, feathery projectiles, and trying not to scream like a little girl.
• Bring enough cash along.  Neither my credit card nor my bank access card worked in the Ecuadorian ATM machines, for reasons I still have yet to figure out.  (I had called and notified my bank about my trip prior to leaving, so it wasn't that they thought my card(s) had been hacked and put a stop on them.)  This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to purchase things only at places that accepted credit cards, which was about 5% of the places we went.
• The food is amazing.  They have fresh fruits whose names I could barely pronounce, but which are beyond delicious.  I also had ceviche that has my mouth watering just remembering it.
• My one big regret about this trip is that I didn't put some time into learning more Spanish.  I don't ever want to be That Guy -- the American who goes abroad and expects everyone to speak English and do things the way they're done back home.  The Ecuadorians were remarkably gracious about my pathetic mangling of their language, however; my last day in Quito, I got a grinning thumbs-up from a waiter after ordering a surf & turf, a glass of red wine, and a bottle of mineral water at a restaurant, all in Spanish.  I'm sure he was on some level humoring me, but still, it was nice.  So if you go to another country, spend the six months before you go learning some of the language.  It goes a long way.

Anyhow, there you are -- a brief travelogue of a wonderful country.  I know I'll be back.  You can't do justice to a place like this in just one or two short visits.

I'm thinking a few years would do the trick.

Bird is the word

Dave Barry once quipped, "There is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness."

In my case, that line is a little blurry sometimes.  My dad used to say about me that I was the type of person who would test the depth of a river with both feet.  I'm fascinated with genealogy (at latest count, my family tree database contains almost 115,000 names).  Since getting back into running last year, I have done ten 5K races and try to run or cycle every single day.  I've been passionate about music since, no lie, I was three years old.  And then there's birds...

This last-mentioned obsession is what is taking me away from New York (and from Skeptophilia) for ten days.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning for my very favorite place in the world, the highlands of Ecuador, for a hiking and birding expedition into the cloud forests.  Our home base will be Mindo, a little town northwest of the capital city of Quito, which I visited last time I was there (fifteen years ago), and which to this day is the most beautiful place I've ever seen.  I've been a lot of places, but Mindo is one of the only ones that I truly, honestly could happily move to permanently and never look back.

Among the birds I hope to see are the Golden Tanager...

... the Flame-faced Tanager...

... the Violet-tailed Sylph...

... the Masked Trogon...

... and the Purple Honeycreeper.

[all images courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Along the way, I hope to hike through some beautiful places and make some new friends.

So anyhow, I'll see y'all when I return on July 20.  I'll post some of my own photographs -- none, I'm sure, as nice as the ones above -- but at least enough to give you an idea of what this spectacular corner of the world looks like.

Until then, Dear Readers -- keep hoisting the banner of skepticism, and keep sending me ideas and topics for future posts!

Woo-woos and Wawas

Woo-woo ideas, like many things, are subject to fads.  There are a few things that seem to be "in" at the moment (conspiracy theories, mermaids, anti-vaxxer nonsense) and a few that are "out" (Ouija boards, Tarot cards, the Loch Ness Monster).  These fads create a positive feedback effect on the media, both on (supposed) non-fiction documentaries and on movies and television (in fact, a current discussion on the r/skeptic subreddit is, "Were alien hybrid theories popular before The X Files?").

Bigfoot is big now, and has been for quite some time.  This has led to sightings of our alleged hairy cousins, once confined to the Pacific Northwest, a swampy bit of Arkansas, and the Himalayas, coming in from just about everywhere -- there have been reports of Sasquatches (Sasquatchi?  Sasquatchim?  Surely there has to be a better plural) showing up in places as unlikely as heavily-populated southeastern England.  And more new ones come in daily, as other places jump on the bandwagon as having their own version of the world's most popular cryptid.

A recent extension of the range of proto-hominids was brought to my attention last week by a regular reader and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, who sent me an article from Cuenca (Ecuador) High Life called "Another Monster Sighting in the Cajas Mountains: British Hikers and Guide Debating Whether to Release Photos."  In it, we hear about the rather amusingly named "Wawa Grande" -- which translated from Quechua and Spanish, respectively, means "big baby."  Wawas (Wawae?) apparently live exclusively in the high peaks of the Andes, which explains why they're so seldom seen, unless there's another explanation, such as that they don't exist.

Of course, that's not what Cuenca High Life would have you believe.  "A Quito television station reported three weeks ago that two British hikers and their tour guide spotted the elusive creature in Cajas National Park during a three-day trek," the article states.  "The trio claimed to have observed the over-sized humanoid animal for several minutes in a remote area of the park in early April."

We then get to hear from Sean Worthington, one of the hikers who made the report.  "I have no idea what it was other than to say it was quite large, with light colored fur and had human characteristics. It was able to stand on two legs but also came down on all fours," Worthington told reporters. "I am a scientist by training and not prone to make fanciful claims, but I cannot deny seeing the thing."

The return of Blobsquatch.

Apparently, like our own Bigfoots (Bigfeet?  Dammit) of North America, the "Wawa Grande" has been around in legend form for some time -- two hundred years, the article says.  It became more widely known in 1988 when a Scottish hiker, who is named (I am not making this up) Robert Burns, was "mauled by Wawas" when he took shelter in a cave while on a hike.

If I ever start an alternative rock band, I'm going to name it "Mauled By Wawas."

And of course, you can't have a cryptozoological claim without allegations of a coverup.  An unnamed "retired park service biologist" is quoted in the article as stating that the powers-that-be in Ecuador are engaging in a policy of denial.  "It does not exist," the biologist said, when asked about the official policy regarding the Wawa Grande.  "That is what we told anyone who asked about it.  There was a U.S. television show called Monster Quest that kept asking for help, but we refused.  We told them there was nothing up there and no reason to do a TV show." Nevertheless, the biologist said, he knows the Wawa exists -- because he's seen one.

The current popularity of Bigfoot probably explains why he's made his way not only onto shows like Monster Quest and Finding Bigfoot (which, thus far, has not lived up to its title), but onto commercials.  Jack Link's beef jerky, in particular, has made use of the hirsute hominins in its advertisements, using the tag line "Messin' With Sasquatch," in which humans play various practical jokes on Bigfoot (all the while eating beef jerky).  The practical jokes never end well, and in various iterations of the commercial, the jokers end up thrown through the air, having their cars and boats smashed, having their arms ripped off, and getting pissed on.

Despite the fact that the Sasquatch always gets the last laugh in the commercials, last week this series of ads was roundly criticized by a Canadian anti-bullying group as "promoting bullying."  Because, presumably, children who are dumb enough not to notice that the practical jokers in the commercials always get violently dismembered are also dumb enough not to know that Sasquatch doesn't, technically, exist.

So, anyway.  That's the latest on our furry family members, who are apparently damn near everywhere.

A coincidence?  I think not.  (And I have to point out for the record that this store is in Mahwah, New Jersey, making this the "Mahwah Wawa," which is fun to say.)