03 — The Numbers

Numbers you can defend, with the source for each. Where a figure comes from a hobbyist register rather than an institution, it says so.

The thylacine — 1,237 sighting records, and a modelled extinction date

• The Tasmanian Thylacine Sighting Records Database (TTSRD) compiled by Barry Brook and co-authors contains 1,237 post-1909 observational records, each quality-rated, published with the paper and released publicly (GitHub BWBrook/ttsrd, plus CSV/Excel).
• The 2023 paper Resolving when (and where) the Thylacine went extinct (Science of the Total Environment) models those records and concludes the species may have survived into the late 20th/early 21st century, with a plausible extinction window in the 1980s–2000s rather than the 1936 zoo death. It is the closest thing to a rigorous "survival" result in this whole pack.
• Baselines: last captive animal died 7 September 1936, Hobart Zoo (national Threatened Species Day since 1996); IUCN declared the species extinct in 1982, the Tasmanian government in 1986; pre-colonial population estimated at 2,000–4,000; bounties paid 1888–1909.
• Financial incentive history for a live animal: $100,000 offered by Ted Turner (1983), $1.25m by The Bulletin (2005).
• De-extinction: August 2022, University of Melbourne partnered with Colossal Biosciences to attempt thylacine re-creation using the fat-tailed dunnart; in 2023 RNA was extracted from a 130-year-old specimen, a first for an extinct species.

The yeti — 9 samples, 8 bears, 1 dog

• 2017 study (Lindqvist et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B), nine purported yeti specimens — bone, tooth, skin, hair, faeces — from the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau: 1 dog, 1 Asian black bear, 1 Himalayan brown bear, 6 Tibetan brown bears.
• The monastic "hand/paw relic" skin was an Asian black bear; the Tibetan cave femur was a Tibetan brown bear. The paper says the findings "strongly suggest that the biological underpinnings of the yeti legend can be found in local bears".
• Earlier, weaker work: Bryan Sykes' 2014 analysis reported a sample matching an ancient polar bear, which the 2017 study's more rigorous comparison re-assigned (same specimen as a Himalayan brown bear; others as Tibetan blue bear, Asiatic black bear, domestic dog).
• Reinhold Messner reached the same conclusion from the mountain side in 1986 (Himalayan brown bear / Tibetan blue bear).
• Also on file: hair from a Bhutan expedition that Sykes could not match to any known animal; a 1959 faecal parasite "which could not be classified"; the Pangboche Hand, reportedly smuggled to London by James Stewart in 1959. All Tier C leftovers.

Loch Ness — 250 samples, no reptile, a lot of eel

• June 2018 sampling / September 2019 results (Gemmell et al., University of Otago with Copenhagen, Hull, Highlands and Islands, Bangor): 250 water samples taken around, through the centre and into the depths of the loch; DNA extracted and sequenced against global databases.
• Findings as announced: no evidence of any reptile in the sequence data ("the plesiosaur idea" does not hold up); no shark DNA, no catfish DNA, no sturgeon DNA; and "a very significant amount of eel DNA … found at pretty much every location sampled". The team could not rule out a very large eel, though eDNA cannot show size. Giant eels had already been proposed as an explanation in 1933.
• Scale of the corpus behind it: over 1,000 reported sightings and, per the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, more than 1,165 reports logged under Gary Campbell (registrar for 28 years; the role has passed to Paige Daley). 2024 registered three encounters — two sonar-related, one surface report. First half of 2024 had one.
• Search effort as numbers: Operation Deepscan 1987 (sonar sweep — and the tree stump that looked like the "gargoyle head"); 1954 sonar readings from the fishing boat Rival III; 2003 BBC search using 600 sonar beams plus satellite tracking; August 2023 "Quest", the biggest volunteer search in 50 years — roughly 100 volunteers on 23 miles of shoreline, hundreds more watching online, drones with IR, a sonar boat, first volunteer-led search since 1972.
• Economics: ≈£41 million a year added to the Scottish economy, from chartered accountant Gary Campbell's 2018 study using tourism-board data and local business input (≈$54m at the time). Nessie merchandising, cruises and the Loch Ness Centre are the visible layer; the register is the data layer.
• Contamination history that must be printed: the 1934 "surgeon's photograph" (Marmaduke Wetherell's revenge on the Daily Mail, admitted by co-conspirator Spurling in January 1991); the 1933 "footprints" made with a hippo-foot umbrella stand, again Wetherell; Robert Rines' 1970s "flipper" photos, of which Rines himself conceded the flipper image may have been retouched by a magazine editor; the 1993 Discovery analysis of the uncropped image showing a white object in every version.

Bigfoot / sasquatch (US baseline — one paragraph, honestly)

• Reported-sighting volume by state, from the BFRO database in 2019: Washington >2,000, California >1,600, Pennsylvania >1,300, New York and Oregon >1,000 each, Texas >800 — a distribution that tracks rural population and forest access as much as anything else.
• DNA: the Ketchum "five-year study" was publicised before peer review, published in a journal whose site went up in February of that year with no other content, and independent commentary found samples returning "100 percent human, or fail in ways that suggest technical artifacts". A 2014 Oxford/Lausanne study in Proc. R. Soc. B used cleaned mitochondrial 12S data on purported samples and likewise found known animals.
• Federal file: FBI, 1976–77 hair analysis, answered deer, released 2019.

Chupacabra — DNA answers, repeatedly

• Origin: first widely publicised sightings and descriptions in Puerto Rico, 1995; term coined that year by San Juan radio comedian Silverio Pérez; the first attack later associated with the phenomenon was in March 1995; the Canóvanas sighting was reported in August 1995. There is an earlier local precedent, the 1975 "vampire of Moca".
• Testing: the Elmendorf Beast (Texas) was identified as a coyote with sarcoptic mange by DNA at UC Davis; two further Texas carcasses examined by biologists were coyotes with severe mange; Texas State University (Mike Forstner) reported a carcass sequence "a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote". One specimen returned a wolf–dog hybrid. Investigations in northern Mexico and the southern US have repeatedly resolved to canids with mange.
• Context worth printing: the 1995 Puerto Rican and 1996 Mexican outbreaks followed severe droughts — a mundane driver for both livestock deaths and scavenger visibility.

Japan — bounties, not science

• Tsuchinoko bounties by municipality: Shimokitayama (Nara), 1988 — ¥1,000,000 for live capture and ¥300,000 for a skin sample, launched by village councillor Kazuo Nozaki; Chikusa (Hyōgo) — ¥2,000,000 (ended on merger into Shisō); Yoshii (Okayama) — ¥20,000,000.
• The 1980s sighting wave was concentrated in Shimokitayama, Nara. Higher figures circulate in popular retellings (a "¥100 million" reward) — not supported by the sourced record, so not asserted here.
• Issie, Lake Ikeda (Kagoshima): the lake is known for large eels, some six feet long — the same candidate the Loch Ness work keeps returning to. A 1998 benthic survey found essentially no zoobenthos. Reported 1961 sonar contact during a search for a crashed US jet is Tier D sourcing only.

The one determinable "how many" in Africa: the coelacanth

• 1938, East London, South Africa: a living coelacanth — a lineage presumed extinct for ~66–70 million years — recognised by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. This is why the okapi, not a monster, is the emblem of organised cryptozoology.

Rolls to print in the site's numbers block