Two very short pieces on “fringe cryptozoology”, one of them about creationism in cryptozoology. While not wrong, I don´t think it really explains why young earth creationists (YECs) are often interested in cryptozoology.
It has to do with the literalist reading of the Flood story in Genesis.
If Noah brought two individuals of every animal species (or at least “created
kind”) onto the Ark, this number must have included dinosaurs, pterodactyls, bipedal
apes and other animals usually deemed extinct by modern science. I suppose a
YEC *could* claim that they died out shortly after the Flood, but a more intriguing
possibility is of course that they are still around – hence the interest in
cryptozoology. If animals which modern science claims have been extinct for
millions of years are still around, indeed, if animals from all “geological periods”
in Earth history really live together right under our very noses, then “evolution”
becomes a problematic concept. At least from a YEC perspective.
That being said, I also suspect that the emphasis creationist cryptozoologists put on surviving dinosaurs and pterodactyls isn´t a co-incidence. Dinosaurs are sexy, pardon my French, so obviously an expedition to Africa to find a live mokele-mbembe will get more media attention than, say, trying to prove that ground sloths died out only recently (cuz who cares).
Of course, the “cultic milieu” might also be in play here, but the more fundamentalist the Bible interpretation, the less likely it is that “rejected knowledge claims” will be accepted just because they are unacceptable to the Establishment. They must be sifted through the KJV first. UFOs survive the test if they are deemed demonic. Neo-dinosaurs survive the sifting, too, but what about bipedal hairy monsters that are too human-like? But I suppose they could be fitted in somewhere in a “Biblical” worldview, perhaps as Nephilim…
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