As I've mentioned before, Mississippi has her fair share of people claiming to see things. That's not abnormal. Many people see things they cannot explain daily. I myself was surrounded by men with tentacle eyes requesting gluten-free cereals just the other day.
But we all must maintain certain stories, lest we go mad, though there are certain stories more indicative of madness than of coping with it.
One such story is the tale of Big Muddy. We've hinted at the existence of this Pearl River Monster, gleaned what we could from a single photograph that surely was not just a bird flying in front of the camera.
Part of being a cyptozoologist is adhering to the idea that your quarry is somehow different than normal animals. Otherwise, you'd just be a zoologist, some random schmuck investigating the near infinite diversity of arthropods, or other important animals, like tardigrades, or molluscs.
One of the lesser branches on the tree of life is the vertebrates. Our editors have a debate on if the planet rightfully belongs to the insects or the bacteria, with a third lobbying for coral reefs, but we feel that option three will be an evolutionary dead end in a matter of decades. Nevertheless, human beings feel that vertebrates are somehow important, no doubt in some sort of kinship display.
But amongst these oddities of nature, these creatures with a backbone (statistically speaking, they all live in the water, with a few in the jungle) - one is rare enough to perhaps not even exist, though this has not in any way dampened my enthusiasm for it.
BIG MUDDY.
Big muddy was last spotted just North of I-20, just South of Highway 80, in the iconic photography seen HERE.
New sightings have been reported near the Silas Brown Bridge. We present you with the evidence.