Cryptids, Ranked by Plausibility

Every cryptid starts the same way. Somebody sees a thing, the thing matches nothing in the field guide, and the story goes out into the world with no carcass attached. A few of these eventually walked into a laboratory and left with a Latin name. Others left as a coyote with a skin condition.

So we ranked them, most plausible to least.

First, the Control Group

The coelacanth had been extinct for 66 million years until 22 December 1938, when Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer of the East London Museum in South Africa hauled a 1.5-metre blue fish out of a trawler’s catch. The okapi was folklore, the African unicorn, until Sir Harry Johnston got two skulls and a hide out of the Congo in February 1901 and it turned out to be a short-necked forest giraffe. The giant squid was the kraken until Japetus Steenstrup named Architeuthis in 1857, and nobody photographed a living one at home until Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori hooked an eight-metre animal 900 metres down off the Ogasawara Islands in 2004. It just lived somewhere inconvenient.

1. The Thylacine

The thylacine is the only entry here whose existence was never in doubt. Thylacinus cynocephalus was a striped marsupial predator that could open its jaws to roughly 80 degrees. Protection arrived on 10 July 1936, fifty-nine days before the last known captive animal died at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. Its remains then went missing for eighty-six years, until Kathryn Medlock and Robert Paddle followed an unpublished taxidermist’s report to an uncatalogued skin and skeleton in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, unlabelled because the animal had been snared illegally in 1933.

Here is why it ranks first. Barry Brook and colleagues analysed 1,237 quality-rated sighting records from 1910 to 2019 for Science of the Total Environment, and their models returned median extinction dates of 1999 and 2008. Restrict the data to physical specimens and the date snaps back to 1941. The open question is a date. The animal is on film.

2. Bigfoot

The word dates to 1958, when the Humboldt Times reported 16-inch tracks near Bluff Creek in northern California, found by a crew working for a man named Ray Wallace. Wallace died in 2002 at 84 and his family produced the carved wooden feet. That leaves the Patterson-Gimlin film, roughly 950 frames shot at Bluff Creek on 20 October 1967. Bob Heironimus said in 1999 that he wore the suit, Philip Morris said in 2002 that he sold one, and their accounts contradict each other.

Inventory is the killer. Hundreds of large primates across generations would leave hair, dung and skeletons. Not one bone. When Bryan Sykes sequenced 30 hair samples attributed to anomalous primates in 2014, every identifiable one came back as a known animal or a human. The photographs also get blurrier as cameras improve, which lands differently now that a convincing forest monster takes nine seconds to generate.

3. The Yeti

Third place, and the cleanest result here. In 2017 Charlotte Lindqvist’s team sequenced nine samples of hair, tooth, bone, skin and dung collected as yeti material. One was a dog. The other eight were bears: Asian black, Himalayan brown, Tibetan brown. They also revisited two odd samples Sykes had flagged as a possible unknown lineage and found brown bears. The Himalayan brown bear is rare, understudied and quietly better than a snowman.

4. The Loch Ness Monster

Nessie has the worst founding document in the business. The Surgeon’s Photograph ran on the front page of the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934, credited to a gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson. The prologue is better. In 1933 the same paper hired big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, whose huge footprints the Natural History Museum traced to a dried hippopotamus foot, then fashionable as an umbrella stand. In 1994, shortly before he died at 90, Wetherell’s stepson Christian Spurling admitted building a serpent head onto a toy submarine.

Sequencing finished it. Neil Gemmell’s team took 250 water samples in 2019 and found no reptile, no plesiosaur, no shark, no sturgeon. Eel DNA turned up nearly everywhere they looked. People keep searching anyway, and good. The Loch Ness Centre still runs organised hunts, and a 2023 weekend with 200 volunteers, thermal drones and a hydrophone logged four unexplained noises. A very large eel is the one idea the DNA cannot rule out.

5. The Chupacabra

The chupacabra has a birthday. In March 1995 eight sheep were found dead in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, each reportedly with three chest punctures and drained of blood, and roughly 150 animal deaths were blamed on it before the year was out. That August a resident named Madelyne Tolentino described a three-foot biped with grey leathery skin, huge slanted eyes and spines down its back. Benjamin Radford spent five years on the case and found the description tracks Sil, the H.R. Giger creature from the 1995 film Species, a resemblance Tolentino acknowledged herself.

The carcasses are tidier. The Cuero, Texas specimen that rancher Phylis Canion recovered in 2007 tested at UC Davis as a coyote crossed with a Mexican wolf, and biologist Barry O’Connor pins the American wave on sarcoptic mange, the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which strips a canid bald and thickens its skin. Canóvanas mayor José “Chemo” Soto ran armed search parties and weekly hunts with a caged goat as bait. He was re-elected.

6. Mothman

Between November 1966 and December 1967, people around Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported a winged humanoid six or seven feet tall with red eyes. On 15 December 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed during rush hour and 46 people died. The two facts got welded into prophecy, which is what grief does when nothing better is on offer. The bridge has an answer, and it is small and horrible. A single fractured eyebar, component 330, where a crack a tenth of an inch deep spread by stress corrosion until the chain let go. Sandhill cranes stand nearly as tall as a person, carry a seven-foot wingspan, wear bare red skin on the face, and are scarce enough in West Virginia to ruin your week. Point Pleasant leaned in. Bob Roach’s 12-foot steel statue went up in 2003, the Mothman Museum opened in 2005, and the September festival drew a record crowd in 2025.

7. The Jersey Devil

Legend says that in 1735 a Pine Barrens woman called Mother Leeds, pregnant with her thirteenth, said something she regretted, and the child sprouted wings and left by the chimney. The documented event is one week in January 1909, when hundreds of reports poured out of South Jersey and Philadelphia. A trolley car in Haddon Heights. Police who fired and hit nothing. The Philadelphia Zoo posted a $10,000 reward, whereupon Norman Jefferies, a publicist for Philadelphia’s Arch Street Museum, bought a kangaroo, glued on artificial claws and bat wings, and exhibited it as the captured Devil. Historian Brian Regal traces the root to a colonial grudge against the Leeds family, whose crest bore a wyvern, a bat-winged dragon.

8. The Mongolian Death Worm

Last place, honestly earned. The olgoi-khorkhoi, meaning large intestine worm, reached the West through Roy Chapman Andrews and his 1926 book On the Trail of Ancient Man, which relayed a 1922 account from Mongolian prime minister Damdinbazar. Shaped like a sausage about two feet long, no head, no legs, poisonous enough that touching it kills instantly. Andrews noted that nobody in the room had ever seen one. Later versions handed it venom spray and an electrical discharge. The electricity is where it collapses, because biological current at killing strength is expensive and, in every real case on record, aquatic. Water conducts. Dry Gobi air emphatically does not.

Czech engineer Ivan Mackerle mounted expeditions in 1990 and 1992 and built a motor-driven thumper lifted straight out of Dune, setting off small explosions to coax it up. Nothing. In 1983 locals who reported sightings were shown a Tartar sand boa, Eryx tataricus, and identified it as the olgoi-khorkhoi. It is a blunt-nosed, harmless, roughly two-foot snake that spends most of its life underground.