Other cryptic creatures.

As rare as glimpses of giant squid may be, other creatures show themselves so infrequently that many scientists question their existence. Those mysterious animals are the lifeblood of the International Society of Cryptozoology, based in Tucson.

Consider the burrowing Vietnamese sharp-nosed snake, collected by U.S. naval officers in 1968 during the Vietnam war. The specimen was lost before it made it to a museum and is known only from a few photographs, says mammalogist Gwilym S. Jones of Northeastern University in Boston. He and Northeastern herpetologist Van Wallach have named this reptile Cryptophidion annamense. It comes from the same highland region of Vietnam as the newly discovered Du Quang ox and giant muntjac deer (SN: 6/19/93, p.397), they report in the current CRYPTOZOOLOGY.

In that same annual journal, two other researchers describe hairs supposedly from a giant hairy primate called the Yeren, or Chinese wildman. Using the sensitive analytical technique known as particle-induced X-ray emission, the scientists first found three hairs with much higher iron-to-zinc ratios than hairs from humans, other primates in China, or bears, says Frank E. Poirier, a physical antropologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Brown and red hairs collected in two other Chinese provinces were similar, a result later confirmed by a second analysis performed in England, Poirier and J. Richard Greenwell of the cryptozoology society report. Electron micrographs revealed that these Yeren hairs also exhibit an unusual structure and pigmentation. Some scientists suggest the Yeren is a giant ape, previously thought to be extinct, or perhaps a modern descendant of that primate.