A slide from a presentation with the heading “Witness the Plesiosaurus”. At right is an image of a plesiosaur-like creature with a long neck and four flippers, alongside human figure for scale, taken from the book "Loch Ness Monster" by Tim Dinsdale. At left are two quotes: "Imagine an animal of the lizard tribe, three or four times as large as the largest crocodile… witness the Plesiosaurus, which only required wings to be a flying dragon.” (Gideon Mantell, 1827, quoted in Jylkka 2018) “To ’witness the Plesiosaurus,’ as Mantell directs, is an act of imaginative speculation framed, through the legitimizing word ‘witness,’ as part of a normative scientific process."--Jylkka 2018
A slide from a presentation depicting two stills from the movie "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." The heading reads "The moment of epistemological break." The image at left shows a group of dockworkers excitedly pointing at something in the water. The image at right shows the enormous stop-motion head of a dinosaur emerging from the ocean.
Getting ready to present on "Some Narrative Aspects of Cryptozoology" at #NEPCA , which looks at major works of cryptozoology by Sanderson and Heuvelmans alongside creature films of the 1950s (especially "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms"). Here are a couple of my favorite slides from the talk!
