In my mind, where I imagine people are so interested in what I
do that they hang on every carefully chosen word I write, I
imagine some unspecified mob of readers looking over my I
*heart* cryptozoology post and going “Whoa now, pardner!” (yes,
you all sound like cowboys in my mind) “You just said there was
a difference between cryptozoology and real zoology, but you
deal with cryptic species all the time! What’s up with that?”
Cryptic species and cryptid species are two very different
beasts. Cryptids are the mysterious, unidentified creatures that
cryptozoology deals with. They haven’t been studied in depth by
virtue of the fact that they haven’t been tracked, captured, or
even well documented. In contrast a cryptic species is one that
is morphologically and ecologically indistinguishable from
another species, but is genetically distinct. A cryptic species
has been under our microscopes the whole time, but has been
studied as if it were one species when it is really another. A
perfect example of this was a