Bioparanoria

 On the rarest of occasions there comes into existence a specific organism that can truly be said to be genetically one-of-a-kind, possessing a unique attribute or history that we can say with near confidence has never occurred before and might never again. All the more surprising is when this occurs despite what we had assumed to be impossible. This is the story of a wee elephant like none other, who stunned the zoological community with his mere existence. Chester Zoo in England, founded in 1931, has long been called one of the greatest zoological gardens on Earth, with an impressive plethora of exhibits and a world-class conservation program. Dozens of elephants have called the zoo home over the decades since the opening of the elephant exhibit in 1941. One of these was Motty, the only known hybrid being an Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) and an African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta Africana). As the two species are in different genera, it was presumed that the two could never pro...

 Note that some of this text is adapted from an earlier writing of mine, published elsewhere on the internet. The 70s and 80s were a golden age of cryptozoology, something that is unlikely to be ever replicated again. The notion that these animals of folklore could still be existing in some remote tropical forest or mountain range was actually getting a fair amount of press, not just from the mainstream media but from a few academics as well. The superstars of the art of researching “hidden animals”, Tim Dinsdale, John Green, Bernard Heuvelmans, Grover Krantz, Roy Mackal, and John R. Napier were all active, bitten by that wonderful and childlike belief that monsters do exist not just in our imaginations. “Yes Virginia, there is a Loch Ness Monster and we’ll find him any day now!” Those hopeful days are long gone. The cryptids were all no-shows, so society had no choice other than to stop daydreaming and face the unfantastic reality of it all. But it’s certainly worth it to look bac...

There’s a funny phenomenon we have of adding artificial darkness and mystery to artists, insisting that wild rumors we hear about their sordid private lives are true. Consider the long-running urban legends of Walt Disney freezing himself or of Mr. Rogers being a Korean War sniper. Perhaps when we see a person create genuine innocent art we are intimated and assume that more is at work here, a shadowy side being loosely hidden from public view. In the case of today’s post, we’ll be looking at an unusual hypothesis about Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Carroll was a mathematician but wrote fiction as well. Today the only works of his that are widely known are the Alice in Wonderland books, far from a poor literary legacy. In 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book promoting an alarming theory about Carroll being none other than Jack the Ripper, quite a scandalous claim to pin against the creator of the White Rabbit! Wallace’s book, ...

As you might've heard, author J.D. Vance is running for Ohio's 2022 Senate seat as a Republican. He has not been doing hot lately, coming in fourth place in primary polling. This is in spite of such glowing endorsements from the likes of Peter "Actually A Vampire" Thiel, Tucker "The Metric System Is Communist" Carlson, and Josh "Storm The Capitol" Hawley. Vance is the kind of man the populist wing of the GOP backs, hoping to attract the working class with his substanceless culture war rhetoric. Little does he know that placing lipstick on an anti-working pig doesn't make it any more attractive, except to voters who still live in houses coated with lead paint. Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling book that got everybody gawking at Vance for a few months, and lead to a forgettable film directed by Ron Howard, is a befuddling text in how its author suggests we take on class in America. Few issues bring such strong, passionate emotions to the surface a...

The "mammoth" (or is it?) in the tomb of Rekhmire On many occasions, there have been times in which unusual animals are depicted in ancient artwork, often leading to lengthy conversation and debate in the zoological literature. While we can handwave these illustrations as being stylized or inaccurate in their renderings of fauna (the notion that ancient peoples didn’t have imaginations or bad artists is such an untrue and bizarre idea), there is as well the possibility that they are meant to show actual oddities of nature that are lost to time. Each instance should therefore be considered on a case-by-case basis. One famous example, the subject of today’s post, is of a figure seen on the tomb decorations of Rekhmire , a nobleman from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt the time period in which the North African empire was at the height of its power and influence. Rekhmire was an extremely minor figure in the long history of Egypt, but his tomb was recovered in great preservatio...

     I quite like zoological gardens and aquariums, for reasons that I hope to properly outline in this text. True, zoos can be noisy and crowded, but upon rare days in which it's just you and the animals, the experiences can be fantastic, allowing one to form a better appreciation of wildlife. I credit frequent trips to zoos as a young child as a key factor in my respect for the natural world. There's a lot of controversy surrounding zoos, some justifiable and some not. Unfortunately, I can't help but find those who write off all zoos as being "bad" are uneducated on the history of zoological gardens and their many conservation achievements. A Komodo Dragon at Singapore Zoo      As a better understanding of both the philosophy of animal welfare and the science of zoology has developed over the past few decades, the important question has arisen on if zoological gardens and aquariums are to be considered useful or ethical institutions. Many defenders claim ...

Welcome to Bioparanoria, the blogsite of Aiden Kinerk. Here I post articles on a myriad of topics, from zoology and history to politics and the arts. I'm a man who's intensely interested in every that is, and this site allows me an outlet to use my passion for writing to explore countless fascinating subjects. So long as it catches my special interest and I deem it worthy of a post, it will eventually become one. As for the curious title of this blog, it references a term developed by the obscure paleoartist John McLoughlin, evolutionary bioparanornia. It's defined as "an acute, often immobilizing sense of dread generated by fatigue in persons interested in both the current state of world affairs and the evolutionary history of life on Earth." It's not a psychiatric disorder, so much as a state of mind (one that's quite familiar to me) that the world-weary often have, and it ties into some of the issues that will be addressed over the course of this blog...