Answer: Animals Unrecognized By Science

If you’ve found yourself watching cable television late at night, you’ve likely come across a show or two focused on people obsessed with finding Big Foot, the Loch Ness monster, or other creatures that exist in folklore but have never been formally observed, cataloged, or recognized by the scientific community.

In such cases, you’ve seen cryptozoologists at work. The practice, not a formal branch of zoology or a recognized scientific discipline, is centered on the premise that there are many creatures in the world that, despite no concrete proof of their existence, do in fact exist (and we must merely find and catalog them).

Unlike zoologists or biologists (who would readily agree that there are certainly species of insects and even mammals that we haven’t discovered and cataloged yet), cryptozoologists don’t search for totally undiscovered creatures and catalog them for science, but instead tend to focus on searching for creatures purported to exist.

These purported creatures are referred to as “cryptids”, a category that includes everything from the very improbable to the less improbable, but still completely unsubstantiated.