Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, ...
Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words, so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend.
The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates.
🔦 In This Episode
- Why the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era.
- How Darwin and the Monsters almost became a doctoral dissertation, and why Brian wrote about Henry Fairfield Osborn instead.
- Brian's journey from student to author.
- The publish-or-perish treadmill: every new contract pushed the Darwin book back another few years.
- What the book is not: it is not a Bigfoot book, and Brian has notes for the critics who wanted more Bigfoot.
- Too many werewolves? Brian's 2009 paper for the British Society for the History of Science on how Darwinian thinking killed off the wolf-man - and how anomalous primates moved into the vacancy.
- The dogman problem - the most popular cryptid going is arguably a werewolf, which is arguably a medieval dog-headed man, which is arguably not an animal at all.
- Why the coelacanth is a bad advertisement for cryptozoology: no folkloric background, nobody was looking for it, and "living fossil" is not as accurate as people seem to think.
- Grover Krantz, missing Bigfoot bones, and the Pennsylvania records of bears that died without being hunted.
- Writing for an audience of one, and Brian's cheerful refusal to take criticism personally.
- What is next: a long-gestating novel about a historian of science who gets into wacky trouble, and the real-life model for its main character.
- Retirement, luck, and the case for going to a smaller school that will let you study monsters.
- The origin of The Monster of Newark, which started as notes toward an examined life and turned into an autobiography.
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