Strange Creatures Research Articles

Sex, drugs, and sea slime: the oceans' oddest creatures and why they matter

When viewed from a quiet beach, the ocean, with its rolling waves and vast expanse, can seem calm, even serene. But hidden beneath the sea's waves are a staggering abundance and variety of active creatures, engaged in the never-ending struggles of life - to reproduce, to eat, and to avoid being eaten. With Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, marine scientist Ellen Prager takes us deep into the sea to introduce an astonishing cast of fascinating and bizarre creatures that make the salty depths their home. From the tiny but voracious arrow worms whose rapacious ways may lead to death by overeating, to the lobsters that battle rivals or seduce mates with their urine, to the sea's masters of disguise, the octopuses, Prager not only brings to life the ocean's strange creatures, but also reveals the ways they interact as predators, prey, or potential mates. And while these animals make for some jaw-dropping stories - witness the sea cucumber, which ejects its own intestines to confuse predators, or the hagfish that ties itself into a knot to keep from suffocating in its own slime - there's far more to Prager's account than her ever-entertaining anecdotes: again and again, she illustrates the crucial connections between life in the ocean and humankind, in everything from our food supply to our economy, and in drug discovery, biomedical research, and popular culture. Written with a diver's love of the ocean, a novelist's skill at storytelling, and a scientist's deep knowledge, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime enchants as it educates, enthralling us with the wealth of life in the sea - and reminding us of the need to protect it.

Crocodile Hunt

Crocodile Hunt

Huntress (review)

Reviewed by: Huntress Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Lo, Malinda. Huntress. Little, 2011. [372p]. ISBN 978-0-316-04007-5 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9–12. For centuries, the border between the Kingdom and the land of the Fairy Queen has been closed, keeping the magical race of the Xi folk on one side and mortals on the other. Now, however, strange creatures have been spotted in the Kingdom and the land has been locked in a perpetual winter for years, leaving many to believe the treaty has been broken. As apprentice sages at the insular Academy, Taisin and Kaede know little of this struggle, but when the Council sends them to accompany the Prince on his journey to Tanlili, the Fairy Queen’s home, the two girls are thrown into an adventure that will have them risking their lives for the security of their people. Traveling across a barren landscape fraught with danger and magic, Taisin is forced to reconcile her feelings for Kaede with her ultimate goal of becoming a sage while Kaede must learn to move beyond her physical self if she is to save the Kingdom. Lo expands from the lush, foreboding backdrop of the Wood found in her debut Ash (BCCB 10/09) to the rest of the Kingdom while offering up a compelling history and two cleverly conceived new heroines. Taisin’s pious, astute demeanor provides a perfect foil to Kaede’s almost reckless physicality, and as the third-person narration shifts focus between the two, readers become aware that the girls are essentially each other’s perfect complement. Subplots occasionally feel extraneous, paling in comparison to the heartbreaking sensuality that blossoms between the female leads. Beyond romance, however, stunning action sequences abound, including one literal cliffhanger and a breathtaking confrontation with the villain. Fans who found themselves entranced by Lo’s previous work will be pleased to know that the magic has returned to the Wood. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and His Museum (review)

Reviewed by: Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and His Museum Elizabeth Bush Judge, Lita . Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and His Museum; written and illus. by Lita Judge . Hyperion, 2011. [36p]. ISBN 978-1-4231-1389-8 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs. Lionel Walter Rothschild, in 1868 one of the richest kids in England, was expected to step smoothly into his illustrious father’s business of banker to the Queen. Plagued by shyness and a speech impediment, Walter preferred to spend his time investigating nature on his family’s expansive estate, and upon witnessing a circus parade at age seven, he formulated quite a different plan for his life: he would open a zoological museum. Although his parents acceded to some exotica from Down Under, and he found a personal mentor in the head of Zoology at London’s Natural History Museum, his father persisted in directing his reluctant son into banking. By age twenty-four, Rothschild had relinquished dreams of becoming a field naturalist, but he used his own income to finance expeditions and ultimately built a museum to house his collection on the family’s grounds. There’s much in Walter Rothschild’s story for a tyke to like, particularly the timid boy’s end run around his father’s ambitions, and Judge makes the most of the battle of wills in her humor-tinged watercolors. Wild animals pop up all over the swanky estate while portraits of ancestors glare down from their frames in disapproval of the family ado. A final note comments on Rothschild’s contribution to the burgeoning field of zoology and on the way collection practices and wildlife study have changed over the past century and a half. Primary-grade children who are encouraged (assigned?) to read a biography will find Rothschild to be one of the most engaging guys they’ve never heard of. [End Page 281] Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Search for Wondla (review)

Reviewed by: The Search for Wondla Karen Coats DiTerlizzi, Tony . The Search for Wondla; written and illus. by Tony DiTerlizzi. Simon, 2010. [496p]. ISBN 978-1-4169-8310-1 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7. Eva Nine has never seen the world outside her underground bunker. Instead, she learns about the world through immersive holographic environments, guided and nurtured by her Multi-Utility Task Help Robot, or Muthr for short. Muthr's goal is to help Eva acquire the skills to survive in the outside world, but when Eva's Sanctuary is attacked, she and Muthr realize how limited their training has been. In a trip that's the reverse of Alice in Wonderland's famous fall down the rabbit hole, Eva is thrust upward into terrain that is unrecognizable to any of the databases contained in her Omnipod, full of strange creatures and a wicked queen who wants Eva as a specimen in her freeze-dried menagerie. From there, her journey is more reminiscent of Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz, as the multiple capture-and-escape episodes serve to consolidate warm friendships among an odd band of travelers who, charmed by Eva Nine's resourcefulness, commit to helping her find others of her kind on this alien planet. Imaginative, accessible technologies combine with fanciful creatures to create perpetual wonder in this fast-moving narrative; plentiful illustrations provide visual referents to the oddities as well as contributing an animated-movie vibe to the action. The journey plot is straightforward enough for nascent fantasy buffs, unencumbered by any political or emotional complexity. Eva's search for a far-off family of like beings is sweetly buffered by her awareness that she is well loved by the family of alien creatures along the way. An accompanying website features a book trailer and an interactive 3-D map; full interactivity requires a software download and a webcam. Reviewed from an unillustrated galley. [End Page 71] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Boy Who Could Fly (review)

Reviewed by: The Boy Who Could Fly Kate Quealy-Gainer Norcliffe, James. The Boy Who Could Fly. Egmont, 2010. [320p.] Library ed. ISBN 978-1-60684-097-9 $18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-60684-084-9 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys M Gr. 5-8. The Great House is a place for abandoned kids—not just orphans, but rejects, misfits, and those whose parents simply forgot about them. Michael is one such child, leading a rather miserable existence until he meets a strange creature who refers to himself only as "the loblolly boy" and who offers Michael a chance at freedom. The two boys trade places (an "Exchange," in the book's parlance) and Michael is transformed into a feathered, green-clad being who can fly vast distances and who is invisible to all other humans. Initially thrilled with his newfound independence, the new loblolly boy soon discovers, however, that such an existence is as good as being dead and that his inability to communicate, especially after he locates remaining members of his family, is simply too high a price to pay for a freewheeling lifestyle. The clear allusions to Peter Pan and Neverland fail, unfortunately, to bring any sense of magic or wonder to what is, at its heart, a stern lecture on the dangers of running away and the importance of appreciating what you've got. Both the plot and the setting lack any real structure, mainly due to the heavy-handed emphasis on Michael's existential crisis, and thus readers see only snippets of a potentially fascinating world filled with people called Sensitives, Collectors, and Inquisitors, while plodding through this loblolly boy's repetitive emotional turmoil. As a mentor to Newborn loblolly boys, Captain Bass is a rather intriguing character, but his appearance is frustratingly brief to make way for Michael's ultimate realization [End Page 35] that he would like to be human again. Those looking for a more nuanced look at the ideas of escape, independence, and mortality would be better served by Neal Shusterman's Everlost (BCCB 12/06). Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Micro: Region, History, Literature

Cave creatures in Thailand are a fine introduction to the multiple roles that the micro plays in region, history, and literary study. In 2006 the BBC released the award-winning documentary series Planet Earth across the UK, and a year afterward the Discovery Channel showcased it for cable viewers across the US. With over twelve hours of footage narrated by Sir David Attenborough (and subsequently Sigourney Weaver), the series spanned eleven episodes to include almost any taxonomy that Linnaeus could have imagined. A lengthy paean to global environments, it swept from panoramas of Venezuela’s Angel Falls to close-ups of Costa Rican tree frogs. Planet Earth, my Netflix DVD sleeve states, “transports nature lovers from the Himalayan Mountains to the depths of the ocean and everywhere in between.” This emphasis on “everywhere in between” is especially true for scenes from the second disc of Planet Earth, one that includes segments entitled “Caves,” “Deserts,” and “Ice Worlds.” In “Caves,” the fourth episode of the series, viewers tour subterranean life-forms from Mexico to Borneo to the state of Texas to Southeast Asia. We are informed that “many caves are like islands, cut off from the outside world and from other caves. This isolation has resulted in the evolution of some very strange creatures. They are the cave specialists—troglobytes—animals that never emerge from the cave or see daylight.” Planet Earth then introduces us to the pink-hued cave angel fish, a vertebrate which attaches to cave walls via a series of hooks. Attenborough informs us that “these troglobytes from Thailand are possibly the most specialized creatures on Earth for they live only in cave waterfalls. The entire population of these cave angel fish seems to be restricted to just two caves.” A few scenes later we are transported

Foe: A Ghost Story

This article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) may be read as a ghost story, in which Coetzee writes back to Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal”. The ghostly character of Coetzee’s novel derives from the silences and secrets pervading the narrator Susan’s story, among which Friday’s mute and enigmatic presence is the most overwhelming, and from the presence of strange creatures that seem to come from various Defoe’s literary works. Hence Susan begins to doubt her own ontological status and to consider herself, and also Friday and Foe, as ghosts, a notion which is explored in relation to Freud’s analysis of the uncanny and the double. Foe, thus, highlights an intimate relation between literature and secrecy, an idea that is developed in relation to the thinking of Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller and Frank Kermode, this secret and indecipherable dimension of the literary work demanding, in turn, a position of blindness and lack of authority from both writer and critic.

"To Look upon Thousands": Cherokee Transnationalism, at Home and Abroad

"To Look upon Thousands":Cherokee Transnationalism, at Home and Abroad Daniel Heath Justice (bio) "They are welcome . . . to look upon me as a strange creature. They see but one, and in return they give me an opportunity to look upon thousands." — Oukanekah/Ada Gal'kala1 Remembering Our Strengths The last few years have been trying ones for the Cherokee Nation, which has seen an alignment in its political orientation toward the troubling exclusivist politics of the United States: racially, through the disenfranchisement of the Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of black slaves held by Cherokee citizens and granted citizenship through a coerced treaty following the U.S. Civil War; and sexually, through the banning of same-sex marriage and the rhetorical erasure of queer Cherokees through evangelically inspired historical revisionism. (Recently there has been movement toward the surveillance of and punitive action against nonenrolled people who assert [End Page 169] Cherokee ancestry.2) In spite of various arguments affirming the "traditional" foundation of these various shifts toward neoconservative social mores and the ethnic essentialisms of the multicultural, neoliberal state, the shared supposition between these politics is one of shrinking perspective, the closing off of difference through the imposition of an imagined cultural uniformity.3 Such moves sadden me for many reasons, but one of the most significant is the fact that they seem to undermine what has historically been one of our most important traditions: a perspective that is inclusive of difference through the active engagement of our diversity. In other words, our nationhood and tribal specificity has, in many ways, been built upon a transnational foundation that has incorporated difference to assert more firmly and powerfully our distinctiveness as a people. Through the invocation of a specific event in Cherokee history, these comments offer a historical reminder of that tradition of Cherokee transnationalism, with the hope that such a reminder invigorates the confidence and compassion at the heart of Cherokee people-hood rather than the limiting and sometimes resentful anxieties that seem to undergird our current political atmosphere. Strangers in a Strange Land On June 5, 1730, seven young men were the first Cherokees to set foot upon English shores. Brought to England by Sir Alexander Cuming, an erratic, social-climbing aristocrat who sought to curry favor with King George II by presenting the Cherokees as ambassadors who offered homage (and land rights) to the Crown, the visitors were a fascination to gentry and commoner alike. Yet, as the above passage notes, it wasn't only the English who took the opportunity to observe the customs, costumes, and manners of strangers. The visit was perhaps more educational for the Cherokees than for the English, to whom the Cherokees were a curious spectacle of savage finery that reinforced their own sense of superiority. For the Cherokees—and especially for the youngest member of the group, Oukanekah, who would become famous in later years as Ada Gal'kala, or the Little Carpenter—this three-month visit would be an opportunity to observe the diversity and divisions of English [End Page 170] life from a unique and theretofore unparalleled perspective.4 The experience would have a profound influence on subsequent politics and diplomatic efforts in the Cherokee lands of southeastern North America, and it offers an instructive perspective on "transnational" questions of today's "shifting world order" as they relate to the Indigenous nations that still endure in the lands claimed by the United States. It's important to note that indigeneity—the constitutive lived relationship and kinship of a people to a particular land, its histories, and its other-than-human inhabitants—is, in many ways, inextricable from definitions of the transnational, even though both categories are often assumed to be oppositional. Placing indigeneity and transnational at opposite ends of relationality is, in large measure, a Rousseauian inheritance of fossilized noble savages trapped in atemporal isolation from both change (cultural and biological) and other peoples.5 Whereas Christopher Columbus heralded a dramatic (and catastrophic) level of transnational and intercultural interaction between Indigenous American and European peoples, Native realities in the Americas were, by necessity, transnational, for vast and complex relations of diplomacy, trade, conflict, and kinship connected diverse Native peoples long...

From myth to science.

is a familiar story of a countryman visiting Zoo for first time. After stating at giraffe in astonishment mingled horror, he exclaimed, There ain't no such animal! We can hardly sympathise this countryman over giraffe, which is too familiar to be doubted, but we are staggered from time to time when science draws for us a new portrait of some prehistoric creature. We feel occasionally, in a gallery of prehistoric monsters, like countryman at Zoo. Polite incredulity, at least, seems most fitting when a creature more than forty feet long, even if its length is mostly neck and tail, is said to have behaved like a hen and laid eggs, If we were removed to a desert island where only men lived, deprived of our memory of all other members of great community of life and then suddenly introduced into Noah's ark, we would shrink in terrified horror from a world so apparently alien to our own. extraordinary diversity of animal species, even now, when familiarity momentarily disappears in contemplative reflection, suggests a mingling of many worlds instead of a world which is really one. If we could see, in succession and for first time, a jelly-fish, a sea-urchin, a lobster, a tortoise, an eagle, a shark, a giraffe, a butterfly, a whale, an ant, an armadillo, an elephant, and many others, we should agree old opinion that each species was specially and separately created, and add that many different worlds must have been shuffled together. Yet world of life, all its diversities, is one family. doctrine of transformism, doctrine that all species have grown out of other species, is too well grounded to be refused. Mr. Balfour, in a presidential address to British Association, spoke of aesthetic thrill which insight of science into unities of universe often bestows upon us. concept of evolution, of transformism, affirmation that one continuous process of development has produced myriad forms of life gives such an aesthetic thrill as we realise that all infinitely varied creatures around us are united as roots, trunk, branches, and foliage of a tree are united. Thomas Fuller found in genealogy of his Saviour that Rehoboam begat Abiam; that is, a bad father begat a bad Abiam begat Asa; that is, a bad father a good Asa begat Jehosaphat; that is, a good father a good Jehosaphat begat Joram; that is, a good father a bad son. One fundamental plan, one common relation of parentage, ran through many different situations. So in world of life many species, at first sight so diverse as to belong to different worlds, are manifestations of one fundamental plan. world of human mind, when surveyed as various animal species are surveyed in a museum, produces same impression of a bewildering collection of beings brought into a world to which they do not really belong. The which early societies present us are not easy at first to understand, remarks Maine, because they are so strange and uncouth. (1) beliefs and practices of our primitive forefathers, as of our primitive brothers to-day, often seem to us as strange, uncouth, and alien as strange beasts which once peopled earth. Though phenomena which early societies present us with are difficult to understand at first, Maine thinks they become and simple enough to patient thought, (2) but Sir James Frazer insists that the savage does not understand thoughts of civilised man, and few civilised men understand thoughts of savage. (3) Now this mental separation between primitive and civilised men may be compared to biological separation which divides species of animals like elephant and ant. philosopher Reid thought that differences between human minds were greater than any other differences between members of same species: all swallows, or even all queen, worker, or drone bees, are more alike than men are alike mentally. …

The Real Jurassic Park: Joseph Leidy's Heirs Reconstruct the Anatomy of Dinosaurs

JEFFREY T. LAITMAN*Associate Editor, The Anatomical RecordLocust Walk at the University of Pennsylvania isamongst the most beautiful college streets in America.As I strolled there a few weeks back with Peter Dodson,the Guest Editor of this Special Issue and one of thegreat professors of that venerable institution, I could nothelp but imbibe the energy of the students around usmixed with the sweetness of the late spring air. As I hadsince we first met at Yale around our Anatomy dissect-ing table in the fall of 1973, I listened attentively toPeter, enraptured by his energetic wealth of knowledge.As anyone who has taken anatomy knows, you alwaysremember your dissection tablemates, and Peter isindeed memorable. At the time we met, I was a trem-bling, beginning graduate student and Peter an alreadywizened warrior finalizing his dissertation. As heshowed me how to correctly load the scalpels (andalways helped me with the band-aids I would need whenI missed) he would wax eloquently about ceratopsiandinosaurs, interpreting fossil remains, and reconstruct-ing phylogenies all interspersed with our more mundanedaily chores around the cadaver. He was both a rolemodel and a mentor, and I appreciatively followed along.Now, as then, I followed his lead, and that led to areddish building just off the Walk known as The WistarInstitute of Anatomy. ‘‘Why are we stopping here?’’ Iasked, a little perturbed, an ever-compulsive New Yorkereager to get to our work, the precious trove of manu-scripts waiting on us in his lab. ‘‘I’d like to see if we canvisit Professor Leidy,’’ Peter answered, ‘‘it would be mostappropriate.’’ ‘‘Wow, Joseph Leidy has a descendant nowat Penn?’’ I asked incredulously. ‘‘No,’’ he answered, ‘‘hisbrain is here.’’As it turned out, while the great Professor’s brain wasindeed in residence, we had not made an ‘‘appointment’’and so he (it?) could not receive us, we were dulyinformed by the guardian who came to explain. AlthoughPeter implored that we were his academic ‘‘relatives’’and I chimed in to suggest he (it?) would be pleased tosee us (I should have been quiet as this didn’t help; wegot a stern and odd look), she was adamant that wewould need to make an official request much further inadvance. The Professor did not receive ‘‘drop in’’ visitors.Although our pilgrimage was not successful on thatday, we are making our plans to return, and will requestan appointment appropriately far in advance (just aswell, as I’d like to be better dressed than I was to meetThe Professor.) But, you may ask, why the visit in thefirst place, why was the brain of this man preserved,and who was Joseph Leidy, anyway, and what were histies to anatomy, dinosaurs, or this Special Issue,‘‘Unearthing the Anatomy of Dinosaurs: New insightsinto their Functional Morphology and Paleobiology’’(Dodson, 2009a)? All this needs a little explaining.In our world today, dinosaurs are again kings of theplanet, at least in terms of which beasties fascinate thepublic. Who amongst us did not as a child have a plasticT-Rex or Brontosaurus (I know, I know, it’s the wrongname now, but Apatosaurus just won’t work for anyonewho doesn’t live in a museum)? Whenever I work at theAmerican Museum of Natural History here in New York,I have to push through the throngs of school childrenclamoring to see our assortment of Jurassic meat-eatersand Cretaceous vegetarians with names they gleefullytry to pronounce with a combination of amazement andjoy. If one looks carefully, one can even see how differentpersonality types radiate to different dinosaurs: theaggressive kids run to Tyrannosaurus; the mischievousones love Velociraptor; the thoughtful ones ponder thehorned dinosaurs; the kids with the pocket-protectorslove the odd-looking duck-billed hadrosaurs; the vegeta-rians, gentle souls, and chubby kids, make a direct pathto the brontos (I loved the brontos; indeed, my first timebeing ejected from the museum was due to climbing onone.) Dinosaurs are part of our 21st century culture, asalive today as when they thumped across the earth mil-lennia ago.It is a little difficult to fathom a world in which dino-saurs were not part of our imagination. They are, how-ever, actually a relatively recent part of our vernacular.Indeed, the ‘‘Dinosauria’’ (meaning ‘‘terrible lizards’’)were only first named as such in 1842 by the great Brit-ish anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1842).He included in this the few extinct ‘‘reptile-like’’ fossilsthat had been found previously, notably the ReverendWilliam Buckland’s Megalosauraus (arguably, the first‘‘dinosaur’’ discovered in 1824) and the remains of Igua-nodon and Hyaeosaurus, described by Gideon Mantrellin 1825 and 1833 (Buckland, 1824; Mantrell, 1825; seeDodson, 2009b, for discussion). So, with the insight andwisdom of the great anatomist Owen, dinosaurs tooktheir first thunderous steps. A little over a decade later

Your SPE: Updates: Meetings Innovations, India Visit

President's column The world is still in a crisis, and SPE is beginning to see consequences. Some of our conferences and workshops have seen fewer attendees. However, membership growth doesn't seem to be affected much. Financial crises are strange creatures. When I visited the Vietnam Section in April, section secretary Ben Gedge made a very wise observation. He said that most of us can live very happily without buying anything new for the next 2 years. However, if we do that, he said, of course the people who manufacture those new things have less income and they will also delay buying "new things," which will cause the global economy to continue its downward spiral, and there is your crisis. This is exactly what is happening at the moment. Many of our members’ companies are "managing" costs by delaying expenditures, including those for learning/networking events like our conferences and workshops. This is a dangerous path, as it will create a downward spiral in knowledge dissemination, where knowledge and global cooperation is key to our industry if we want to continue to provide the world with energy when demand picks up. SPE therefore is trying to break this spiral in a number of ways and has taken a number of actions, mainly to reduce need for travel for members. One example was piloted in the Gulf Coast Section's recent Digital Energy Conference in Houston, where we held a parallel conference in Second Life. Instead of being there physically, the authors presented their papers "virtually" via the Internet, through their avatars in Second Life. The Second Life conference was presented to the audience in Houston on a big screen. In March, we used Webex and Skype to bring a presenter in Colorado, USA, to workshop attendees in Queensland, Australia. Remote presentations with interactive audience participation were also done at our May workshop on IOR Petrophysics in Cairo. No visitors yet in a "virtual presentation room," but that could be the next step. Second, SPE will also bring meetings/workshops/conferences closer to where the members are. So, we will hold very few conferences in fancy places, and, if practicable, more in major industry centres like Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Houston, and Kuala Lumpur. Third, we will webstream key presentations from large conferences, so that anyone can follow the presentations in his/her own office on the computer screen. More innovations may come, and I am open for suggestions. In the long run, conferences and workshops without real people will not be easy to sustain, as building a network is an important aspect of those events. However, we believe that for the next 1 to 2 years this will work and we will put a lot of effort into finding new ways to bring people together, such as SPE virtual networks, discussion groups, etc.

Out of the Shadows (review)

Reviewed by: Out of the Shadows Karen Coats Singleton, Sarah. Out of the Shadows; Clarion, 2008 [256p] ISBN 978-0-618-92722-7 $16.00 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7–10 It’s 1586, and Elizabeth’s family are the only remaining Catholics in the town of Maumesbury; indeed they are the holders of a sacred trust, handed down through generations after the fall of the Abbey. When Elizabeth goes surreptitiously to the old shrine to keep it tidy, she finds there a strange creature—a girl, certainly, but like no girl she has ever seen, a child who, it turns out, has been reared by faeries and returned to the world after 300 years in the shadowlands. Unfortunately, Elizabeth must soon leave the girl and report to her companion, Lady Catherine, who soon becomes host to a priest-hunter, much to Elizabeth’s dismay as Elizabeth’s family is indeed hiding a priest. As the web draws tighter around the local Catholics, Elizabeth and her new friend, who has been captured and brought to Lady Catherine’s, plot to save the priest, and eventually also to save Elizabeth’s mother [End Page 135] following her arrest. This taut historical fantasy brings into sharp relief the back-and-forth fortunes of Catholics from the time of Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth and the torture that zealots visited upon those out of favor. On the other hand, it reconciles the Catholic characters to older forces than theirs in the world, faeries that priests and hermits rechristen as angels so that they may accept their help and account for the magic around them without ascribing it to devilry. Fans of old world fantasies and historical fiction will enjoy the blend of old faiths and new as well as the fully evoked sense of time and place. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The reading corner

Find out what's lurking in the dark, dark wood! Lift the flaps, search the house and find strange creatures hidden in the furniture. Lose yourself in the colourful contemporary illustrations by letting your curiosity run away with you as you turn each page. A bony hand beckons you onwards towards a spooky surprise, which is guaranteed to get the hearts of your class racing in a fun and exciting way.

New Age hiedelmek cyber-köntösben: az energiavámpír

In this presentation I try to trace the ways and processes how entirely new supernatural beings emerge, and function and at the same time, how old notions gain new interpretations in current popular belief in Hungary. Post New Age discourses on physical and mental health / healing, namely the so-called energy-healing methods form the broader context of my examination. The extremely popular methods of energy-healing are based on three major 'theoretical' principles: 1) in each creature of the universe there exists a certain inner energy of cosmic (or divine) origin; 2) this cosmic energy is in constant flow, since each creature is able to absorb it from and then recycle it into the environment; 3) the fundamental cause of any kind of mental or physical illnesses is the disturbance of acquiring and / or utilizing this energy. Within the above mentioned discourses there exists a psychologising quasi-theory, called ' energy-vampirism', which seems to be a rather effective tool in explaining certain forms and patterns of human behaviour, or special situations or conditions in everyday life (including also illnesses, personal conflicts, etc.). Developing the basic ideas of energy-healing, energyvampirism considers the exchange of energies as ultimate goal of social communication. Furthermore, it differentiates between three types of human behaviour on the basis of energycycling and recycling abilities: 1) energy-supportive, 2) energy-consuming; 3) and neutral (from this 'energetic' point of view) types. Since the shortage of energy may lead to serious mental and physical symptoms, one spontaneously strives against it. There is a strange creature constantly referred in this situation: the energy-vampire, which is charged for blocking the flow of cosmic life-energy. According to relevant narratives energy-vampires are malevolent demonic beings, which possess humans occasionally and like parasites devour their life-energies causing serious illnesses. Its supernatural, non-human characteristics are supported by further synonyms, like 'being', 'astral-body', 'demon', 'üdére', 'spirit'. Not only in the semantic field, but also in the context of beliefs energy-vampires are strongly resembling of certain supernatural beings of traditional Hungarian folk belief, like the above mentioned 'üdére', the devil, the witch, and the malevolent Dead. Merging the characteristics of traditional supernatural beings with post New Age ideas, the figure of the energy-vampire is a typical creature of current popular belief.

Strange creatures: anthropology in antiquity

Traces the anthropological and ethnological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans from the creation of the world to the invention of the Americas. In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in on the way many strange creatures, among them the noble or ignoble savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, Centaurs, Columbus, and the Tupinamba of Brazil.

Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, appeared in 1969. This was the English translation of the revised and expanded second edition of an anthology of fantastical stories he had published two years before in association with Margarita Guerrero (El Libro de los seres imaginarios). According to the author, it was a “handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination,” a topic that was known to fascinate him. In fact, the success of Borges' work shows that such creatures appeared to hold as great a fascination for contemporary society as they had held over other societies many centuries before. Perhaps this brief evocation of Borges' interest in imaginary beings from other times and from all cultures—even if fantasies certainly do not hold an identical value in each historical period and the same significance in every culture—may help to demonstrate how mistaken it is to think that such ‘aberrations’ and ‘anomalies’ have entirely faded as ‘modernity’ has emerged. However, Borges did make it clear that the beings he was dealing with—whether the Indian elephant-headed god Ganesha or the monstrous Kujatha—were ‘imaginary,’ and he took care to distinguish them from other, let us say, ‘real’ entities. Such a clear demarcation has not always been feasible, and it is precisely the changing status of the ‘strange and marvelous’ that lies at the center of this essay.

The quirky files

We are strange creatures, so we must be studied in strange ways, says psychologist Richard Wiseman

Two Strange Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth in Second Temple and Early Rabbinic Judaism – By K. William Whitney Jr

Two Strange Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth in Second Temple and Early Rabbinic Judaism – By K. William Whitney Jr

Echidna: extraordinary egg-laying mammal

The echidna is one of the world’s most extraordinary creatures. It is a living fossil whose relatives were walking the earth over 100 million years ago. Like the platypus, it is a mammal that lays eggs. And, like all mammals, it has fur and produces milk. This book describes the echidna’s lifestyle and the adaptations that have made it so successful. It draws on the latest research into these strange creatures, covering their evolution, anatomy, senses, reproduction, behaviour, feeding habits and metabolism. The authors reveal some fascinating new findings, showing how echidnas are masters of their environment, and not simply some sort of mammal ‘test model’ that went wrong. A final chapter on conservation includes information on captive diet and management.