Coelacanth documentary clip

As a follow-up on my earlier post on cryptozoology, I had to post this - a clip from a Japanese documentary:



40 seconds into the clip, you will be granted an underwater view of the coelacanth, the fish known as the "living fossil," presumed 200,000 years extinct until it appeared in a fishnet off the coast of California. The gracefulness of this fish that time forgot is accented by the musical score for the documentary, an almost outlandishly sweeping romantic melody: suggestive of the nostalgic and heroic overtones of the "lost world" or "land that time forgot" myth.

One further contemporary cryptozoological cultural phenomenon: the wild success of the art galleries - and later the books (I believe there are now four) - of James Gurney's Dinotopia:


Despite contemporary discourse about the shrinking of our world into a "global village" (or perhaps partly because of it?), and even though we no longer draw maps that have white spaces (which is probably a fallacy of our chartography), our artists, writers, and journalists continue to wonder about the white spaces on the map.