What Is a Cryptid? The Complete Beginner's Guide

In the summer of 1983, in the newsletter of a small scientific society, a man named J. E. Wall proposed a new word.

He was tired of one that already existed. "Monster," he argued, was sensational and misleading — it prejudged the thing before anyone had looked at it. He wanted a term that described the status of a creature rather than its character. Something neutral. Something you could put in a paper.

His suggestion: cryptid. "A living thing having the quality of being hidden or unknown."

The word is younger than the personal computer. Everything it describes is thousands of years older.

That gap — a very old idea wearing a very new word — is the best way into this whole subject. Here's what a cryptid actually is, where the term came from, what counts and what doesn't, and the uncomfortable fact that a handful of them turned out to be real animals.

The short answer

A cryptid is an animal whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated — the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "an animal whose existence or survival to the present day is disputed or unsubstantiated; any animal of interest to a cryptozoologist."

The word was coined in 1983 by cryptozoologist J. E. Wall, in the newsletter of the International Society of Cryptozoology, explicitly to replace "monster." The field it belongs to, cryptozoology — "the study of hidden animals" — was founded in the 1950s by zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson.

One thing to be clear about from the start: mainstream science classifies cryptozoology as a pseudoscience, because it doesn't follow the scientific method and is a branch of neither zoology nor folklore studies. That's the honest starting position — and it sits alongside the equally honest fact that several animals once dismissed as legends are now in museums.

Where the words come from

Cryptozoology is built from Greek: kryptós ("hidden"), zōion ("animal"), logos ("study"). The term dates to 1959 or earlier; Heuvelmans credited its coinage to Ivan T. Sanderson.

The field's founding texts are Heuvelmans's Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées (1955; published in English in 1958 as On the Track of Unknown Animals) and Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961). Heuvelmans himself traced the discipline's ancestry further back, to Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, who argued that sea-serpent reports could be explained by a large unidentified species of seal.

Cryptid arrived later, in 1983, and Wall's reasoning is worth quoting because it explains the field's ambition:

"It has been suggested that new terms be coined to replace sensational and often misleading terms like 'monster.' My suggestion is 'cryptid,' meaning a living thing having the quality of being hidden or unknown."

That's the whole project in one sentence: treat the thing as an unresolved zoological question rather than a campfire story.

What counts as a cryptid

Sort the famous ones by what they're described as, and a workable classification appears. (We use this same taxonomy across the American field guide.)

1. Hominids — ape-like, bipedal, biologically ordinary. Bigfoot / Sasquatch, the Yeti. The claim here is straightforwardly zoological.

2. Winged humanoids — Mothman, the Jersey Devil. Human-shaped, winged, and usually described as meaning something.

3. Canine and predator forms — Dogman, the Chupacabra. Distorted versions of familiar predators.

4. Amphibian and water-adjacent humanoids — the Loveland Frogman.

5. Aquatic cryptids — the Loch Ness Monster, sea serpents. The category that produced cryptozoology in the first place.

6. Visitor-types — the Flatwoods Monster, described in terms closer to a UFO occupant than an animal.

What is not a cryptid (and this matters)

Two important exclusions, both of which the internet gets wrong constantly.

Spirit-origin beings from Indigenous traditions. The Wendigo in Algonquian tradition and the skinwalker in Navajo tradition are not cryptids in origin. They are moral and spiritual concepts inside living cultures — the wendigo a figure of famine and insatiable greed, the yee naaldlooshii a harmful witch. Filing them as monsters is a modern re-labelling that flattens the traditions they belong to. We cover both, carefully, and say so on the page.

Paranormal entities. Ghosts, apparitions and portals aren't cryptids either, because a cryptid is by definition a claimed biological animal — something with a diet, a habitat and a potential Latin name. That distinction decides what evidence could ever count, and it gets genuinely blurry in the famous cases. (That boundary is its own file.)

The scoreboard: the ones that were real, and the ones that weren't

This is where the subject earns serious attention, and it cuts both ways.

Confirmed. A striking number of catalogued animals spent time as dismissed legends: the okapi (confirmed 1901, mocked as the "African unicorn"), the coelacanth (believed extinct for 65 million years until 1938), the mountain gorilla (1902), the Komodo dragon (1912), the giant squid (first photographed alive in the wild in 2004), and the saola, a large mammal unknown to science until 1992. (The full list, and what it proves.)

Debunked. The Loch Ness "surgeon's photograph" was confessed a hoax in 1994. The Feejee Mermaid was a monkey sewn to a fish. Countless "sea monster" carcasses have resolved into decomposing basking sharks. (The hoaxes, in full.)

And tested. When modern genetics is aimed at famous cryptids, it returns known animals: Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes's 2014 study of 30 alleged Bigfoot and Yeti hairs found bears and other ordinary mammals; the 2019 environmental-DNA survey of Loch Ness found no reptilian DNA but a great deal of eel. (How the science actually works.)

Why science calls it a pseudoscience

State this plainly, because a page that dodges it isn't worth reading.

Cryptozoology is classified as a pseudoscience by mainstream science: it doesn't follow the scientific method, and it isn't a branch of zoology or of folklore studies. Scholars note that the subculture rejected mainstream approaches early and that its adherents frequently express hostility toward mainstream science. There's also a documented overlap with Young Earth creationism — a well-funded segment mounting expeditions to find a living dinosaur they believe would invalidate evolution. Historian Brian Regal includes cryptozoology in his Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia (2009).

None of that is a smear. It's the field's actual standing, and any honest introduction has to hand it to you up front.

The Open File: what if the method is the problem, not the question?

The current view, fairly stated: cryptozoology is a pseudoscience. No famous cryptid has ever been confirmed, physical evidence consistently resolves into known animals, and the field's culture often resists the very scrutiny that would validate it.

The open file: notice that the criticism lands on how people look, not on whether anything is there. Those are different claims, and conflating them is the mistake both sides keep making. The okapi wasn't confirmed by cryptozoology — it was confirmed by a colonial administrator shipping skins to London. The coelacanth wasn't found by monster hunters; it was found by a museum curator who refused to let a trawler throw away a strange fish two days before Christmas. The saola turned up in 1992 in forests people had lived beside for millennia.

In every one of those cases, the thing that was wrong wasn't the existence of the animal. It was the confidence of the experts who'd already ruled it out. Cryptozoology as practised may deserve the pseudoscience label. The underlying question it stumbled into — how much is still out there, and how would we know? — is a real one, and the answer keeps being "more than we thought."

So use the word the way Wall intended. Not "monster," which decides in advance. Cryptid — a living thing with the quality of being hidden or unknown. Most of them will stay that way. A few, historically, have not.

A word invented in 1983 for creatures thousands of years older. Our Cryptids collection is for everyone keeping the list open. Hidden, not imaginary.

Where to go next

• The Most Famous Cryptids in America — the regional field guide and creature-by-creature index
• Cryptids That Turned Out to Be Real — the confirmed list, and what it means for the rest
• Cryptid or Paranormal? — where the line blurs
• The Science of Hunting Cryptids — eDNA, camera traps and DNA testing
• Cryptids That Were Debunked — the honest ledger

Frequently asked questions

What is a cryptid?

An animal whose existence or survival to the present day is disputed or unsubstantiated. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as exactly that, or as "any animal of interest to a cryptozoologist."

Where does the word "cryptid" come from?

It was coined in 1983 by cryptozoologist J. E. Wall in the International Society of Cryptozoology newsletter, deliberately to replace the word "monster," which he considered sensational and misleading.

What is cryptozoology?

"The study of hidden animals," from the Greek kryptós (hidden) and zōion (animal). It was founded in the 1950s by zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson, and is classified by mainstream science as a pseudoscience.

Are cryptids real?

No famous cryptid — Bigfoot, Mothman, Nessie — has been scientifically confirmed. But several animals once dismissed as legends were later confirmed as real species, including the okapi, the coelacanth and the saola.

Is Bigfoot a cryptid?

Yes — it's the definitive example, a claimed undiscovered ape. By contrast, the Wendigo and the skinwalker are not cryptids in origin; they're spiritual concepts within living Indigenous traditions.

What's the difference between a cryptid and a paranormal creature?

A cryptid is a claimed biological animal with a habitat and a diet. Paranormal entities are claimed to operate outside natural laws. The distinction determines what evidence could ever settle the question.

Sources

1. Cryptozoology: definition, founding, the 1983 coinage of "cryptid" by J. E. Wall, the OED definition, and its classification as a pseudoscience
2. Bernard Heuvelmans — Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées (1955) / On the Track of Unknown Animals (1958) · Ivan T. Sanderson
3. Brian Regal, Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2009) — the standard scholarly entry on cryptozoology
4. Confirmed-animal record (okapi, coelacanth, saola, giant squid) — full citations in Cryptids That Turned Out to Be Real
5. Genetic testing (Sykes 2014; Gemmell/Otago Loch Ness eDNA 2019) — full citations in The Science of Hunting Cryptids