Así creamos monstruos

Many stories have been told about monsters such as the yeti, the bigfoot, the chupacabra or the Loch Ness monster, which that parascience called cryptozoology considers real animals. In many books the arguments for and against and the supposed proofs of its existence have been exposed. What is certain is that these and other mysterious creatures have become legends of our time. Beyond valuing the scientific evidence, in this book a history of the events that generated these legends is made, the evolution of beliefs is observed and the cultural framework in which they arose is analyzed. Rereading the ancient chronicles, we can understand where the sailors' stories about the kraken, the mermaids and the great sea serpent started. Reviewing the myths about the monstrous races, the giants, the wild man and the ape-man, we see the figure of the hominid monster emerge, like the Asian yetis or the American sasquatch and bigfoot. Contemporary legends tell us of visions of creatures like the black dog, the ghost feline and, of course, the millennial monster that is the chupacabra, born with the internet age. Unlike cryptozoologists and skeptics, Ignacio Cabria has sought to understand the cognitive, sociological and cultural mechanisms that have operated in each case to make the monster an icon of our time and a symbol of a new way of seeing the natural world, because as a cultural construction that it is, the monster is a concept more than a living being.