there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.
like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
THE BOY
Rabbirds, by the amazing @tkingfisher/Ursula Vernon (source).
The lack of skvaders is particularly frustrating when you realize it forms the third point of a wonderful cryptid trifecta.
You got the jackalopes, which are rabbits with antlers.
And you got the wolpertingers, which are rabbits with antlers and wings.
And then… what? Do you escalate? That’s unbalanced, those two rabbit cryptids don’t have the same number of extra things, the wolpertinger is clearly the jackalope But More.
BUT with the skvader on the other side, balance is restored. Antler rabbit, winged rabbit, winged antler rabbit. It’s a classic Venn diagram of imaginary lapine beasts, and it’s only complete if you acknowledge the fucking skvader.
Good thing Ursula’s got our back, at least.
This is a really excellent point and I applaud your advancements in Cryptid Theory.
I love animals that are, like, the opposite of cryptids: we know for a fact they exist and have a clear idea of what they look like because we have photographs and individual specimens, but we haven’t the faintest idea where they’re coming from – they just keep showing up out of nowhere, and the locations of their actual population centres are a complete mystery.
I so want examples. anyone who knows of any should post them in notes
You know, like giant squid and such. We know the bastards exist, we have credible first-hand accounts stretching back thousands of years and dead specimens washed up on shore and such, but in centuries of searching we’ve managed exactly one well-documented encounter with a giant squid in its natural habitat. We have no idea what their native range is or what their life-cycle looks like, let alone how many of them are out there.
Are there any reverse-cryptids that /aren’t/ at the bottom of the ocean?
The red-crested tree rat, for one. There have been only three well-documented encounters since 1898, and they just plain disappeared from the zoological record for over a century. The only reason we know they’re not extinct is that one walked right up to a couple of wildlife research interns at a Columbian nature reserve back in 2011, apparently out of pure curiosity, and allowed itself to be photographed and observed for several minutes before disappearing again.
That’s genuinely pretty cool and all, but I absolutely need to talk about how the picture in that Wikipedia article looks like a tiny eldritch horror disguising itself as a peach.
To be fair, based on the actual photos from the 2011 encounter, they really do look like that:
Steel Phoenix Studios 