This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Legend has it that a giant elfin, owl-like creature called the chickcharney haunts the islands of the Bahamas. Those who encounter this cryptid on cordial terms are said to be blessed with good luck.
Those who disrespect the chickcharney, however, don't fare as well. "If you see one shoe in the field, it means that chickcharney came, picked up this person and took them away," said Jessica Oswald, recounting a story she was told in the Bahamas. Oswald visited the islands while she was a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History in 2017 and 2019.
There, she and her colleagues found fossils of what they believe to be the original inspiration for the chickcharney legend. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Tyto pollens lived in Cuba and the Bahamas, and it was huge, about a meter (3.3 feet) tall.
Humans encountered this species or other giant Tyto species at some point," she said. "In the Lesser Antilles, there's evidence of a giant owl species at an archaeological site, showcasing the overlap of humans and these island giants." Tyto pollens and a closely related owl of similarly considerable size, the Hispaniolan giant barn owl (Tyto ostologa), both probably went extinct within the last 1 million years, either in the Holocene or late Pleistocene Epoch. Because many of the prey species these giants depended on did not disappear until humans arrived in the region in the mid- to late Holocene, it is plausible that the owls themselves persisted until that time as well.
Barn owls live on every continent except Antarctica, but a new study coauthored by Oswald shows that the region where barn owls were immortalized as a cryptid was also once their center of diversity. "Looking at their modern distributions, barn owls are widespread across continental America but not so much in the Caribbean. So, you would assume that the Caribbean barn owls came from the continent, right?
But actually, based on genetics, we found that the most divergent lineages are in the Caribbean," said the study's lead author, Min Zhao, who conducted the research while working as a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum. Barn owls are a familiar fixture of biodiversity in North, Central and South America, but for many years, paleontologists suspected that they only arrived there recently, within the past 2 million years. "There aren't pre-Pleistocene fossils of any barn owls anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I suspect they weren't here or in the West Indies until the Pleistocene or the Pliocene at the earliest," said David Steadman, study co-author and curator emeritus of ornithology at the Florida Museum.
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