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Carl Sagan’s 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney by Ethan Siegel
Tuesday February 10^th, 2026 at 8:29 PM

Big Think

The more informed we are, the more successful we’ll be in our decision-making endeavors. That’s only true up to a point: it’s only true if the information we’ve acquired is accurate and truthful. Making good decisions doesn’t merely rely on how much information we take in, it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we’ve instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation — incorrect information that doesn’t align with factual reality — then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.

This isn’t a problem that’s new here in 2026; this is a problem as old as humanity itself. When someone is compelling to us, and their arguments are convincing to us, we tend to go along with them, lauding both the idea and the one who puts it forth. We’re even more vulnerable if the idea is something that appeals to us emotionally, playing on our fears, hopes, preconceptions, preferences, or ideologies. However, no argument, no matter how well-crafted, can ever turn fiction into fact. It’s with this in mind that Carl Sagan, precisely 30 years ago, put forth what is now known as his “baloney detection kit” in his book, The Demon Haunted World, Science As A Candle in The Dark.

Here are nine timeless lessons we can all take to heart, and apply in our daily lives, when it comes to separating fact from fiction.

Two graphs with yellow spikes are shown on the left over a background of galaxies; both point to a magnified blue patch on the right, highlighting a distant galaxy where JWST has detected oxygen in a region of interest in space. — Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Carniani et al./S. Schouws et al/JWST: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)

1.) Demand independent confirmation of whatever statements are asserted as facts.

In any matter that we consider, we always begin with the common ground of a starting point: with the facts and assumptions that underlie whatever topic we’re investigating. The key to making sure that we’re all on the same page is by stating what those facts and assumptions are up front, and by ensuring that everyone agrees on the truth of the facts being stated. This is only possible if:

the facts are well-supported and/or well-established,
the information underlying those facts has been obtained after a comprehensive and scrupulous analysis,
and that those facts have been independently confirmed, ideally by people or teams who also aren’t stakeholders in the outcomes of those confirmation attempts.

It often turns out, upon closer examination or upon attempted replication, that what was once treated as a “fact” winds up being a much more disputed proposition. A line isn’t always the shortest distance between two points (that’s true only in flat space), black holes don’t evaporate because of particle-antiparticle pairs popping in-and-out of existence, and the far side of the Moon, invisible to all denizens of Earth until the development of spaceflight, doesn’t look similar to the Earth-facing side at all. Facts need to be robustly and responsibly established before they’re used to inform our decision-making process. All too often, especially when we’re eager to reach our preferred conclusion, we accept dubious assertions that are presented as facts without questioning whether this “fact” is actually representative of reality. We must tread cautiously, or we risk fooling ourselves.

Einstein and Bohr — Credit: Paul Ehrenfest

2.) Encourage substantive debate from all points of view by those with substantial, relevant expertise.

This is an extremely important point, but one that we again must be very careful of. There is no shortage of debate happening in our modern world, including about issues that ignite our passions. That’s not necessarily a good thing, however. What we want is:

substantive debate,
where the underlying facts are accepted by everyone involved,
where the proponents of different points of view are all knowledgeable experts,
and where no one is lying, making up facts, engaging in the spreading of misinformation, or attempting to convince an onlooker of an alternative reality.

If Einstein and Bohr disagree over how to interpret our quantum reality, you can have a substantive debate over what it means, because everyone accepts the same facts, everyone involved is a knowledgeable expert, and everyone embraces our shared, measurable reality. However, when we have a widespread expert consensus about an issue, like the safety and utility of water fluoridation, the safety and efficacy of the (2024-era and earlier) childhood vaccination schedule, or the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, debate only serves to sow doubt about well-established facts.

But we don’t want to undermine the best approximation of reality that human civilization can muster; we want to use all that we know and add in our capacity to reason and think critically to make informed decisions about how to have healthy, successful lives where we work together for the common good of all. That includes knowing when to listen to the signal and when to tune out the noise.

maffei 1 2 infrared galaxies — Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

3.) Don’t accept an argument from an authority because that person is an authority. Instead, judge arguments based on the merits of the underlying facts, and how experts scrupulously interpret those facts.

As Carl Sagan noted, even the most vaunted authority you can think of has made many mistakes in the past, and will do so again in the future. But in science, the only authority is the accepted suite of scientific facts and the well-established foundation of everything we’ve learned by applying those facts to our physical reality. There is no one authority figure we can go to and find out whether something is true or not based on what they say; we have to look at the merits of what is being argued and how well the facts support that argument.

Then we have to examine it and scrutinize it across a broad set of criteria.

Does this argument fit the full suite of facts, or are there inconvenient findings that undermine the argument?
Is this argument the only game in town, or are there alternative hypotheses that explain at least a large fraction of the agreed-upon facts just as well or better?
Do the overwhelming majority of experts, independently, all draw and/or accept the same conclusions, and are their reasons for accepting those conclusions well-supported by the data?

It’s vital to remember that in science, all truths about reality are only provisional, representing the state of knowledge at the time. As we learn more, as we uncover new evidence, and as we enhance the full suite of data that we currently possess, a new, superior truth may yet emerge. It’s happened many times in the past, and will inevitably happen again.

4.) Spin as many hypotheses as you can that are consistent with the data. Every possible explanation that isn’t ruled out or contradicted by the already-existing data should be considered, and each hypothesis should be tested and examined as rigorously as possible.

That’s how we do it: how we arrive at our best approximation of a scientific truth. We don’t choose our preferred idea and then look for evidence to support and defend it; although this is a common tactic used when we attempt to convince others to share our point-of-view, it has no place in the scientific enterprise. Instead, we attempt to be as neutral as possible, subjecting all hypotheses to the same strict scrutiny, attempting to falsify or poke holes in any idea by testing it as rigorously as possible.

In science, the key question that we always ask ourselves, when it comes to explaining any physical phenomenon, is “how?”

How did this happen?
How come this outcome or set of outcomes occurred, as opposed to any other possibility?
How did a physical process, step-by-step, lead to the observations and measurements that we made?

It’s by considering all plausible answers to these questions, no matter how absurd they may seem, that we steadily improve our picture of reality and how it works. Many ideas that were rejected in the past receive new life upon a surprising new observation; many ideas that are accepted today will be overthrown when a key experimental result demonstrates its insufficiency. What passes for a “scientific truth” today may later be demoted to a crude and limited approximation that only applies under special circumstances, just as Newton’s laws are approximations to Einstein’s. That is not a failure of science; that is an essential part of the process.

intracluster galaxy cluster starlight — Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)

5.) Whatever your favorite, most preferred hypothesis is — especially if it’s your original idea — be its harshest critic. By attempting to knock it down or poke holes in it as hard as you can, you’ll determine how well it stands up under the steeliest of scrutiny. (And if you don’t, others will.)

This is one of the hardest aspects for non-scientists (and many low-quality scientists) to engage in: working hard to undermine your own work. “Why would anyone do that,” you might wonder. And the answer is simple: because the more invested you are in an idea being true, the stronger your instinct is to:

overlook its flaws and faults, including all the ways it fails to explain reality,
while overemphasizing and pointing to its strong points, especially in the ways it does align with reality.

If we ever hope to get at the truth and avoid succumbing to our prejudices — or, in this example, avoiding falling prey to baloney — we have to be skeptical of every idea, including and especially our own preferred idea, and subject it to the blindingly harsh light of reality.

Particularly in the era of LLM chatbots, which will flatter us and every one of our thoughts in conversation, self-inflicting this type of harsh criticism upon ourselves and our cherished ideas may seem especially unnerving. From a scientific, truth-seeking perspective, however, it’s an absolute mind-killer. If you can’t fathom abandoning your most preferred, cherished, deeply-held beliefs about the world because the evidence might contradict it, you’ve already fallen victim to the most insidious kind of baloney: the baloney that arises when we attempt to convince ourselves that we couldn’t possibly be wrong or mistaken. As Richard Feynman warned more than two decades before Carl Sagan’s book:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

6.) Don’t settle for a qualitative analysis of the issue. Be quantitative: ask and answer the key question of “by how much?”

This is something that a lot of non-scientists often overlook, particularly when it comes to scientific issues. If there are multiple possible explanations for something, and multiple contributing factors, how do you proceed? If you want to arrive at your preferred conclusion, you’ll talk in flowery terms about how massive or large an effect is, but you’ll avoid a comprehensive quantitative analysis. For example, the Earth has warmed over the past 250 years, and continues to warm even today. If you wanted to sow doubt about the cause of that warming, or to support an alternative-to-the-mainstream conclusion, you might point to a long list of contributing factors:

the fact that we’re in the process of exiting an Ice Age,
the fact that the Sun is variable and provides most of Earth’s energy,
the fact that clouds trap heat, as do the natural gases in our atmosphere,
and the fact that volcanoes not only cause cloud seeding, but contribute to heat-trapping through the greenhouse effect.

However, if you have sufficient expertise in the relevant areas (climate science and atmospheric science, for instance) and are approaching the problem scrupulously, you’ll ask the key question of how much each effect contributes. That also includes quantifying from the effects you might hope to downplay, such as the effect of human-created greenhouse gases due to the emission of fossil fuels and/or agricultural practices. It’s only by predicting both what happens and the amount that it’s going to happen by that we reach a physical understanding of what’s actually going on. Over a full century before Sagan’s writings, it was Lord Kelvin who said,

“…when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”

7.) If there’s a chain of argument being put forth, then every link in the chain, from the premise to the final conclusion, must be sound.

They say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that’s just as true in the chain of logical reasoning as it is in the chains tethering a battleship to its anchors. A single weak link, including:

assuming a single untrue assumption,
relying on a discredited or fraudulent study,
a logical error in reasoning,
presenting an unsubstantiated assertion as an established fact,
or ignoring an overlooked or omitted fact that undermines one of the key points,

can lead to an invalid conclusion being drawn.

This is why we must be careful not to misuse our ability to think critically or reason logically; if we misapply our toolkit — whether because of our own cluelessness (where we fool ourselves) or due to deliberate manipulation (where we purposely fool others) — we will wind up hiding, rather than highlighting, the points of evidence that contradict our narrative. If your goal is to get at the truth, or at least our closest approximation of it at the present time, the way to do that is to be scrupulous and forthright about the strengths and weaknesses of every link in your chain of argument. If one of today’s assumptions (or chain links) turns out to later be contradicted or overthrown, that is no failure on anyone’s part. That is how our understanding of the world improves and advances: one new fact and one additional piece of information at a time.

geocentric geocentrism heliocentric heliocentrism retrograde — Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy

8.) The convenient rule of Occam’s Razor: to choose the simplest explanation among multiple hypotheses that explain the data equally well.

Also known as the principle of parsimony, Occam’s Razor is often paraphrased as, “all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best.” However, this too can be misapplied (and often is) in many ways, and we have to be aware of what those misapplications are in order to guard against them. They include:

when multiple hypotheses have different levels of predictive, explanatory power (in which case, one of them will usually have the most such power),
when multiple hypotheses that do explain one class of data equally well have non-equivalent instances that conflict with reality in some other fashion,
or where one explanation is hailed as “simpler” despite actually requiring additional unproven assumptions as compared with another.

If multiple hypotheses do not explain the data equally well, then the one that explains the data more accurately and comprehensively is superior. If multiple hypotheses work to explain the data equally well but one conflicts with reality in some other realm (and the other doesn’t), the one that’s valid across the widest range of applicability is superior. And if two rival explanations each declare that they’re the simplest one, the way to tell is by looking at the number of additional assumptions that each one needs to invoke to be true; the one with fewer additional assumptions is simpler. (For example, “dark energy exists but evolves over time” is more complex than “dark energy exists and is a constant,” because it requires a greater number of parameters to model dark energy in that fashion.)

When all else is equal, the simplest explanation is usually best, but only if all else is equal, and only if we are careful with how we apply the notion of “simple” to the problem in question.

existence of God — Credit: adimas/Adobe Stock

9.) Ask whether the hypothesis, at least in principle, can be falsified. Non-falsifiable and untestable hypotheses cannot be checked out, and hence those ideas are incapable of disproof.

This is not a benefit; this is the hallmark of all ideas that aren’t worth very much. There are plenty of ideas that one can concoct that cannot be disproven, but that also don’t predict anything that can be tested. When I was a child, I had one such idea: the idea that the Universe was created for me at the moment of my birth, with no one else actually existing. All historical records, photographs, written texts, everyone else’s memories and experiences, etc., were created along with the Universe at the moment of my birth, so that no one would be aware of this. Certainly, this idea cannot be disproven — not by me and not by anyone else with a similar idea about themselves — but it lacks the power to explain anything as well.

If it cannot be falsified by any sort of evidence, and it lacks explanatory power to quantitatively describe reality, then it isn’t worth very much to others. As Thomas Henry Huxley put it long ago,

“The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”

Although we do not yet live in a world exclusively governed by rationality, skepticism, and critical thought as envisioned by Sagan, Huxley, and many others, these nine lessons remain vital tools in the eternal war against misinformation, grift, and fraud. The entire scientific enterprise remains the most meaningful method for obtaining factual knowledge about reality, and it’s by following these lessons that we’ve achieved all that we have as a civilization. To go further still, these lessons must never be forgotten.

This article Carl Sagan’s 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney is featured on Big Think.

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The Last Yak Herder Of Ladakh by Sajad Hameed
Tuesday February 10^th, 2026 at 8:21 PM

Philosophy & Culture Archives - NOEMA

LADAKH, India — High on the wind-swept plains of the Changthang plateau, in Ladakh, along the northern tip of India, the world seems untouched by time.

Changthang, Tibetan for “Northern Plateau,” stretches across Ladakh into western Tibet, a seemingly barren expanse of stone, salt and sky. It is a high-altitude desert where life has adapted over centuries to harsh winds, scarce water and extreme cold.

Yaks lumber across the dusty mountain earth, their breath rising in clouds. Behind them, Thinlay Nurboo, a yak herder, holds a handmade rope with a small stone tied to its end in his hand. Nurboo throws the stone forward to startle approaching wild animals and keep his yaks safe.

For generations, the people of Ladakh have shaped their lives and cultural practices around the mountains, farming barley on limited arable land and managing increasingly scarce glacial water that relies on once-regular snowfalls.

“Today, those rhythms are broken,” Nurboo says.

Ladakh, often romanticized for its stark beauty and Buddhist monasteries perched on cliffs, is now a frontline in the global climate crisis. In just the last few decades, villagers speak of winters that arrive late and leave early. Glaciers that fed entire valleys have shrunk into bare rock. Streams that once ran through the summer months dry up by mid-June. In most places, the land is turning to dust.

Local Ladakhi communities, supported by engineers and environmentalists, are building artificial glaciers and reviving ancient water systems to sustain water for agriculture. But the future remains uncertain. A high-altitude desert that once depended on the stability of seasons is now caught in the chaos of a warming world.

Beyond environmental challenges, the march of modernity is changing how people view their own lives. Education, urban jobs, tourism and new technologies offer opportunities, but they also shift values, creating subtle pressures that make traditional practices seem outdated or less respected.

“In Tibet, under Chinese occupation, the erasure of Tibetan culture was violent,” Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer and environmentalist known for his work on Ladakh’s water systems, said. “But in Ladakh, it is different. Here, traditions like yak herding are vanishing quietly, without force.”

The traditional semi-nomadic way of life herders like Nurboo live — a delicate balance of reciprocity with land and animals — is quietly unravelling under the pull of modernity and the pressures of climate change and militarized geopolitics.

In Changthang, yak herders are increasingly viewed as backward, their dialects ridiculed, and this makes getting married difficult, explained Nurboo, who looks younger than his 35 years. The stigma is often a stronger force than economics. People abandon herding not because it cannot sustain them, but because they begin to feel inferior about their way of life.

“Once that happens, a culture can disappear without a single act of violence,” Nurboo tells us.

Thinlay Nurboo, 35, a yak herder, waits as the yaks graze the high-altitude pastures. Photo by Sajad Hameed for Noema Magazine.

Thinlay Nurboo, 35, a yak herder, waits as the yaks graze the high-altitude pastures. (Sajad Hameed/Noema Magazine)

Left: Urgan Thistop, a yak herder, lifts the bucket of milk placed on the stone-walled structure known as a lekha, a shelter for yaks. Urgan works for his uncle Thinlay Nurboo to care for the yaks. Right: Yaks inside a lekha in the Durbuk area of Changthang. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

A Vanishing Way of Life

On the high-altitude plains of the Himalayas, wind gusts, and the air is sharp with cold, even though it is mid-June. Nurboo follows a moving herd of yaks a couple of miles from his nomadic farm. His boots are wet with yak dung from traversing the higher mountain peaks in search of grazing land.

Unlike other livestock, yaks require specialized care, high-altitude grazing and seasonal migrations across rugged terrain. While goats, sheep and cows are still herded at lower altitudes, yak herding is increasingly rare. Local elders believe Nurboo is one of the last practicing yak herders in the region, keeping the centuries-old tradition that has quietly structured life in the upper Himalayas.

“Not everyone today wants to live this way,” he says, sitting inside a tent he and his father made. His home is a traditional rebo, crafted from hand-woven yak hair and wool by Changpa nomads. Durable and insulating, it serves as shelter during seasonal migrations.

“In recent years, some families have added simple side sheds, semi-permanent stone or tin structures, or modern canvas tents for storage and daily chores,” Nurboo tells us, continuing to live in the traditional style. “They call it backward, and the people, especially the younger generations, [don’t] want to follow this tradition.”

These days, Nurboo cares for 90 of his own yaks and around 100 yaks belonging to villagers who have left herding.

The government has worked to support herding communities by resettling them in more strategically located border villages under the Vibrant Village Programme. Meanwhile, promises of salaried work have drawn people to Ladakh’s capital, Leh, roughly 130 miles away, or to the town of Srinagar, about 260 miles away.

“Ladakh, often romanticized for its stark beauty and Buddhist monasteries perched on cliffs, is now a frontline in the global climate crisis.”

Yak herding in Ladakh has always been harsh, but it was also once richly communal, with families migrating together in loose caravans, setting up winter camps in valleys and summer tents near alpine meadows.

Here, like in Tibet and the higher parts of the Himalayas, songs marked seasons; grazing rhythms aligned with star charts and snow patterns. Children grew up learning to read the wind by listening to silence, to find medicine in plants and to stitch wool without waste. It was a way of being that trained people to be patient and observe deeply.

Yak herding, from the perspective of modernity, appears inefficient. Why move with animals across frozen plains when trucks can deliver feed? Why live in tents when cement houses are subsidized? Yet in its so-called inefficiency lies its genius.

Herders like Nurboo leave a minimal carbon footprint. They use every part of the animal — its meat, hide, milk, dung and even its horn. Their movement prevents overgrazing.

Traces of snow on a mountain in Ladakh, India. Photo by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine

Traces of snow on a mountain in Ladakh, India. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Left: Mountain with snow coverage at Changla Pass, a high-altitude mountain pass in Ladakh, India. Right: Tents of Changpa nomads in high-altitude pastures. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Where Ecology is Sacred

At an average elevation of nearly 15,000 feet, Changthang is one of the highest inhabited regions on Earth. Temperatures drop below minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit in winter; air pressure at this altitude is significantly lower than at sea level, meaning each breath contains far less oxygen.

Despite its extremes, it has long sustained semi-nomadic herders like Nurboo, who have adapted to the plateau’s rhythms over centuries by collaborating with it. But sustaining those rhythms has required a lot more work lately.

“We never used to climb this high,” said Sonam Dogree, a herder we met just above Satto village, a small hamlet high on the Changthang Plateau, her goats trailing behind her on a mountain path. “The lower pastures were enough. But now the grass is disappearing down there. The weather no longer follows the seasons we knew. We have no choice but to keep moving upward. Ladakh is changing, and we feel it at every step.”

But the effects of climate change here are more subtle to the eye than in other regions where you see droughts or floods, Dogree explains, “that’s because Changthang has no great rivers — only wide plains.”

High up in the mountains, a stream that typically freezes during the harsh winter months now flows freely in June. “What we notice is less snow in winter and more rain in summer,” Dogree continues. The high-altitude land means Changthang has a short growing season, and most vegetation relies on spring moisture to germinate and grow.

The shift to less snow in winter and more rain in summer means that, by the time spring arrives, there is not enough moisture in the soil for crops and vegetation to germinate properly. Although summer brings some rain, it is often too late or too little, leaving crops short of water by autumn.

The Indian Himalayas, part of the greater “Third Pole” region that includes the Tibetan Plateau and holds the largest ice reserves outside the polar regions, are warming at nearly twice the global average.

According to a 2023 study by the intergovernmental International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the larger Hindu Kush-Himalaya — which includes Ladakh — is experiencing significant warming-triggered extreme weather events, including floods, landslides and erratic rainfall, which have become more frequent and severe in recent decades.

“These are ecosystems that evolved under predictable cycles. The glaciers are melting, the weather patterns are changing, and we can see it with our naked eyes,” said Sonam Lotus, the director of Ladakh’s meteorological department in Leh and a famous climatologist.

These erratic conditions mean calves are born in awkward months, out of sync with pasture availability. Grasslands dry up faster. Snow comes late and sometimes all at once.

“Some years there is too much snow, burying the grasses so that animals cannot graze,” Dogree says. “Starvation follows. Whether this is climate change or a cycle that has always existed is difficult to say.”

Army convoys near Durbuk in the Changthang region. Photo by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

Army convoys near Durbuk in the Changthang region. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Left: A river flows through the Himalayas of Ladakh, India. Right: Indian army vehicles move in a convoy near the border with China. Photos Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

Left: A river flows through the Himalayas of Ladakh, India. Right: Indian army vehicles move in a convoy near the border with China. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Sacred Geography Meets State Logic

Over the past two decades, the Changthang has become increasingly entangled in the geopolitical anxieties of modern states, particularly as tensions along the disputed India-China border remain unresolved despite decades of diplomacy.

Since the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the Line of Actual Control (LAC), an ambiguous, contested border between India and China, has sliced across traditional herding corridors. Unlike formal borders, the LAC that demarcates the India-China border is unmarked and often contested, shifting with patrols, perceptions and politics.

“The traditional semi-nomadic way of life herders like Nurboo live — a delicate balance of reciprocity with land and animals — is quietly unravelling under the pull of modernity and the pressures of climate change and militarized geopolitics.”

In 2020, deadly clashes between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley brought global attention to this desolate region. But for locals like Nurboo, the consequences of these clashes have had a cumulative impact on daily life.

“Every time tension rises, we lose more land,” Nurboo says. “They say it is for our safety. But who asked us?”

Satellite surveillance, bunkers, airstrips and newly paved roads have turned open range into a militarized landscape. “Entire migration routes must be redrawn,” Dogree explains. “Life for herders is harder, not only because of nature, but because of borders closing in.”

Since the mid-2000s, the Indian government has invested heavily in road-building along the LAC. Projects like the Durbuk-Shyok-DBO road that connects Ladakh’s capital, Leh, with the Daulat Beg Oldi military post near the China border, and improvements along the north bank of Pangong Tso Lake, have turned what were once mule tracks into asphalt arteries, enabling faster troop movement, logistics support and year-round access to remote border areas.

Nurboo points to a road near the Pangong Tso Lake. “We used to take the yaks there during the summer. Now it is closed — the army says it is sensitive.”

The land, once mapped by grass and stars, is now coded in red zones and restricted access points. The result is not only physical displacement, but an erosion of memory. Younger herders no longer walk the full length of traditional routes; some don’t even know them.

“Our ancestors moved like the wind,” Nurboo says. “Now even the wind cannot pass without permission.”

The transformation of the landscape is also symbolic. Researchers note that state conservation and protected‑area policies — including the establishment of conservation zones, wildlife sanctuaries and other conservation measures — have often restricted pastoralists’ access to lands they have stewarded for centuries, reflecting broader tensions between conservation objectives and traditional land use in mountain regions.

In some areas, herders are not allowed to access ancestral pastures. The logic of militarization and its requisite infrastructure, unlike the logic of herding, does not bend to seasons or ecology.

“It is ironic, because herders are among the few people who still know how to live within ecological limits,” Nurboo notes. “But development models do not value that kind of knowledge.”

One of the most profound losses facing Changthang’s pastoral culture is the disappearance of its oral cartography.

During Nurboo’s childhood, the landscape was alive with names. Each boulder, hillock, or watering hole had a name, a story or a warning to go along with it. This was not just folklore but guidance anchoring people to place.

Today, fewer young people can recite these placenames. Many of the stories remain undocumented. When elders pass away, so do their maps. The land becomes, in the bureaucratic sense, “empty” again: easier to rename, redraw or repurpose.

Militarization has also brought unintended ecological consequences. Roads increase erosion and runoff, altering water patterns. Construction crews disturb migratory paths of snow leopards and Bharal (Himalayan blue sheep). The growing number of diesel-powered vehicles has brought pollution into once-pristine valleys.

Yet for some in Ladakh, the military also offers opportunity. A regular income, health care and housing, things the pastoral life cannot reliably provide. Youths from herding families now sign up as porters, road workers or even low-ranking soldiers.

“My brother is in the Army,” said Sereen Dolma, a teenage girl from Sultak, a remote village on the Changthang plateau. “I am thinking of leaving herding, too.”

She stood in a vast open grazing ground, surrounded by over 200 Pashmina goats. Her face was partially hidden behind a scarf, part shyness, part habit.

Dolma had returned home for the summer, helping her family tend their herd as generations before her had done. But her dreams, like many among the younger generation of Changpa nomads, now stretch beyond the high-altitude pasturelands.

“I’m studying in Leh,” she said quietly. “I want to be a pilot one day.”

The city of Leh, the administrative capital of Ladakh, India. Photo by Sajad Hameed for Noema Magazine.

The city of Leh, the administrative capital of Ladakh, India. (Sajad Hameed/Noema Magazine)

The Lure Of Modernity

On an evening in Leh, we met Lukzi Tsering, a woman who appeared to be in her 30s, sitting cross-legged near the Leh market, absorbed in a mobile game on her smartphone.

Her father was a herder. So was her grandfather. But Lukzi has no intention of following that path.

“I run this jewelry stall in the Ladakh market, and I love what I do,” she said, adjusting a display. “I also take photos and post on my Instagram and YouTube channels. That is just my thing.”

“Calves are born in awkward months, out of sync with pasture availability. Grasslands dry up faster. Snow comes late and sometimes all at once.”

In Leh, high-speed internet, cafe culture, and Instagram-ready landscapes offer a seductive counter-narrative to pastoral hardship. There are government jobs, gig work with trekking agencies, driving tourists to Pangong Lake. There is also a little nightlife, music and visibility.

There is also education, long seen in society as the ladder to progress. In many remote parts of Ladakh, children often travel to towns such as Leh and Kargil for schooling, supported by initiatives like the 17000 ft Foundation to improve conditions in isolated hamlets. Some families send their children further afield to study, with scholarships helping students attend institutions in places such as Jammu, Delhi, or even abroad, through government scholarship programs. And while this opens doors, it also widens the gap between generations — and often leads to more exits from pastoral life.

At a secondary school in Choglamsar, just outside of Leh, we interviewed six students from herding families. None intended to return. “My parents don’t understand what I do,” said one girl, a senior secondary school student. “They talk about goats and winds, and I talked about mobile phones and books.”

Still, many parents want their children to have more stability and seasonal certainty, especially given the changing climate. “Even I don’t want my son to herd,” said a 40-year-old former herder in Durbuk, a village nearly 86 miles northeast of Leh. “It is too hard. Too lonely. And it gives you nothing.”

Thinlay Nurboo’s nomadic tent. Photo by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

Thinlay Nurboo’s nomadic tent. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Left: Thinlay Nurboo sits inside a rebo, a traditional nomadic tent made of yak wool, used by the Changpa tribe, offering cultural significance and shelter in the harsh climate. Right: A yak crosses the road in the Durbuk area of Chanthang region. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

A Culture Without Heirs

In one of the villages of the Changthang plateau, one-storied houses sit beside nomadic tents. Alongside them, couples manage herds once maintained by five or six families.

Many of the families we spoke to recalled sending their children to larger towns and cities for better opportunities or to join the army for a stable income, and the prevalence of empty houses in the region underscored this trend. Others chose to sell their livestock altogether.

In Hanle village, we met a 62-year-old woman, Yangdol Dolma, who now treks the pastures alone. “One of my sons works at a resort in Leh, and the other is in the army,” she told us.

Herding had become increasingly difficult as once-thriving grazing lands have vanished, Dolma said, her voice quiet with resignation. Yaks and sheep have succumbed to the unforgiving impacts of a changing climate.

“Yaks prefer cold climates,” she said. “But Ladakh’s cold desert is warming, and they are being forced to climb higher in search of colder pastures and grazing grounds. Sadly, many don’t survive.”

In Phyang village outside Leh, we met Wangchuk, the engineer and educator best known for his “Ice Stupa” innovation — an artificial glacier designed to store winter meltwater and release it slowly in spring, helping farmers irrigate their fields when water is scarce. But Wangchuk is more than an inventor. He is an environmentalist shaped by Ladakh’s fragile ecologies.

Over tea, he reflected on the disappearing pastoral way of life. “One of the beauties of Ladakh is how people live in total harmony with nature, whether shepherds, herders or farmers,” he said. “Few means, high contentment.”

For him, the erosion of grazing traditions is not just an economic loss; it is the loss of a way of life that has lasted thousands of years. Displaced herders end up in cities, uprooted from the very support systems that sustained them. And once disconnected, it is hard to return.

Wangchuk sees this shift as spiritual, not just social. “Buddhism teaches us to live simply, without harming nature. That’s now being challenged by a development model driven by economy and commerce.”

By choosing to remain a yak herder, Nurboo embodies a kind of defiance against the growing tide of migration to cities in search of comfort or greener pastures. These herders have also blended their ancestral traditions with their new reality, opening their world to visitors who can experience their animals, their daily lives and the products of their labor.

In doing so, herders are not only able to secure an additional source of income but also reimagine tradition itself, turning it into a pathway not of survival alone, but of thriving, Nurboo explained.

Karma Sonam, a Ladakhi historian, has spent decades documenting the oral histories of Changthang’s pastoralists and frames what is being lost here starkly.

“When we lose yak herding here, we are not just losing an occupation, but we are losing an entire library — written not on paper,” Sonam told us by phone. Those details are in the wind, in the way clouds gather, in the names of stones and streams.

“When elders pass away, so do their maps. The land becomes, in the bureaucratic sense, “empty” again: easier to rename, redraw or repurpose.”

“These are not just grazing lands,” he explained. “They are memory slopes. They hold the instructions for how to live here without destroying it. Once forgotten, those instructions are almost impossible to recover.”

Drawing on both Buddhist philosophy and indigenous Ladakhi thought, Sonam insists that pastoralism is not a relic of the past but a “living treaty” between humans and the non-human world — one that cannot be renegotiated once broken.

Yet what has troubled him most is how unnoticed such a loss would likely be.

“A tradition can die without a funeral,” he said softly. “And when it does, the land may still look the same — but it will no longer know our names, and we will no longer know its.”

Thinlay Nurboo milks a yak inside a lekha, a stone-walled structure that acts as a shelter for the herd in the Durbuk area of Changthang. Photo by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

Thinlay Nurboo milks a yak inside a lekha, a stone-walled structure that acts as a shelter for the herd in the Durbuk area of Changthang. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Left: Kunzis Dolma, 65, Thinlay Nurboo’s mother. Right: Yaks, sheep and goats grazing in the mountains of Ladakh, India. Photos by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

Left: Kunzis Dolma, 65, Thinlay Nurboo’s mother. Right: Yaks, sheep and goats grazing in the mountains of Ladakh, India. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

Archive Of A Disappearing World

When we first met Nurboo, he was wrapping up milking his yaks on his nomadic farm, a task he had started around 6 a.m. He stood among his herd — hundreds of black and brown, long-haired beasts with patient eyes — as each waited its turn. By 9 a.m., he was finished, and they were all released to the pasture.

In Changthang’s high-altitude villages, even stone houses appear to tremble against the winter wind. Nurboo is regarded by villagers with a mixture of reverence for his dedication to tradition and pity for the hardships he endures.

Inside Nurboo’s black yak-haired tent, roughly 15 to 20 feet across, the open space is divided into functional areas. A small desk and a few essentials mark his personal area, a private corner for work and planning.

The smell of dried yak dung drifts through the panels, while his farm lies just beyond the tent. Family members, like his mother or aunt, may sleep in other parts of the tent or in nearby seasonal shelters, but this corner remains Nurboo’s private workspace.

Close by stood his single-story house, where his mother and aunt sat sipping Gur Gur chai — the salty butter tea of Ladakh — from khos, traditional cups.

Beside them, a gas stove hissed as Nurboo, his cousin Ungan Thustop, and his mother, Kunzis Dolma, prepared yak milk to be made into curd, butter and dry cheese.

“This is my routine,” Nurboo explained as he hefted a large drum of milk and poured some into a beaker. His cousin, meanwhile, stirred and extracted the butter with a traditional churn, a hand-operated wooden device common in Ladakhi households.

From morning until noon, he and his family process the day’s yield into butter, curd and hard cheese. Then, packing his lunch, he follows his herd into the mountains, keeping watch for wild animals like snow leopards or wolves that might strike. He carries his handmade slingshot-like rope with a small stone tied to its end.

Years of herding have sharpened his instincts; he can sense danger from subtle cues in the wind or the herd’s restlessness. “Out here,” he says, “you don’t wait to see the animal — you act before it does.”

By 6 p.m., he begins the slow return to the farm. By 7 p.m., the yaks are gathered back into the corral. The night, Nurboo admits, is never easy. “We must stay awake to protect them from wild animals and roaming dogs. It is work that demands us, always, 24 hours.”

Yet though steeped in tradition, Nurboo is not rigid. He is experimenting with reviving ancient products for modern markets. He makes chhurpi (hard cheese), mar-khok (yak butter), and lebu (fermented yogurt), packaging them in hand-made sacks for organic stores in Leh.

Nurboo can’t exactly imagine what the future, or his future, will look like. He’s still unmarried. “Maybe there will be no more herders,” he said softly. “Maybe only tourists with cameras.”

He paused, then smiled, almost bashfully. “I wanted to give all my time to the yaks, to our way of life. If I marry now, I may not be able to love both fully. And maybe the girl I marry won’t understand the way I love the yaks.”

Still, he said with a small laugh, he hoped to get married in a couple of years.

A herd of yaks graze in the morning at a high-altitude pasture in the Durbuk area of Changthang. Photo by Sanna Irshad Mattoo for Noema Magazine.

A herd of yaks graze in the morning at a high-altitude pasture in the Durbuk area of Changthang. (Sanna Irshad Mattoo/Noema Magazine)

The Quiet Violence Of Forgetting

The loss of pastoralism in Changthang is a quiet catastrophe, vanishing without the drama of a nature documentary on species extinction. There are no breaking news alerts when a grazing route is blocked. No international headlines when a 70-year-old herder passes away with no apprentice. No hashtags when the last rebos (traditional yak-hair tent) in a valley is packed away for good.

“The loss of pastoralism in Changthang is a quiet catastrophe, vanishing without the drama of a nature documentary on species extinction.”

This is a slow erasure, a death without spectacle: “We are disappearing without being noticed,” Nurboo told us.

Echoing that silence, Wangchuk, the Ladakhi environmentalist, reminds us of the profound philosophy of slowness embodied in the pastoral way of life.

“In a world that is rushing headlong toward climate change and possible collapse, speed is not progress but peril,” Wangchuk told us. “The faster you go, the quicker you approach your own end.”

Slowness, on the other hand, offers a chance to reflect, to correct course, Wangchuk explained. “The seemingly inefficient pace of yak herders may in fact be a lesson for the industrialized world: When danger lies ahead, the wisest choice is to slow down.”

Yangdol Dolma, 62, treks the pastures alone now that her sons have left home for other work. Photo by Sajad Hameed for Noema Magazine.

Yangdol Dolma, 62, treks the pastures alone now that her sons have left home for other work. (Sajad Hameed/Noema Magazine)

Ethical Collapse

The disappearance of yak herding in Ladakh is often described as a cultural loss. But this framing is insufficient. What is vanishing is not just a tradition or way of life. It is an ethical system with a code of conduct toward humans, animals and the land that offers an alternative to the dominant logic of modernity.

“We learned from the yaks,” said Tashi Dolkar, a Changthangi goat herder we met in Hanle village. “How to be patient, how to be grateful, how to take only what we need.”

And so Nurboo herds not because it is easy, but because it is meaningful: “When I walk with the yaks, he explains, “I feel calm and complete.”

He is not nostalgic for what was; he is simply refusing a future that he feels refuses him.

During our time in Ladakh, the silence surrounding the decline of yak herding was haunting. Not a single policymaker among the half a dozen officials and development officers we spoke to had plans to preserve nomadic pastoralism as a cultural livelihood; most discussions focused on technical support for yaks, such as scientific husbandry programs, rather than sustaining the nomadic way of life itself.

Local institutions have largely focused on tourism. National discourse treats yak herders as a curiosity. And beyond Ladakh, yak herding rarely figures in national or international policy discussions on climate or biodiversity, even though elders warn its loss could affect fragile mountain ecosystems and traditional land stewardship.

At the heart of this is the fact that societies are constantly deciding what counts: What is worthy of preservation, funding, documentation and defense? Nurboo’s way of life, embodied, oral, seasonal and land-dependent — fits none of the current models.

It is too slow for digital timelines. Too place-bound to scale globally. Too spiritual for technocratic policy. And yet, its disappearance marks a civilizational defeat.

One of the most insidious effects of these converging disruptions is a form of cultural displacement that is hard to quantify. There are no refugee camps for yak herders.

For the yak herders, what disappears is not just their livelihood but their identity. Their skills honed over lifetimes carry no formal certification. Their stories find no echo in school textbooks.

Efforts to “save” yak herding have often failed because they turn it into performances. These well-meaning festivals, tourism photo-ops, and curated cultural showcases ultimately strip pastoralism of its philosophical and ecological substance, reducing it to content rather than to traditional continuity, in ways similar to those that many indigenous populations have suffered.

Research on yak herders shows that they want tangible support, such as improved rangeland management, infrastructure, health services and livestock insurance, to sustain yak herding as a viable livelihood, rather than symbolic preservation alone.

While this story takes place in Ladakh, its implications are global. Across the Andes, traditional llama and alpaca herders face similar pressures. In the Arctic, Sami reindeer herders are fighting mining and other extractive projects that threaten grazing lands and migration routes. In Kenya, Maasai herders face prolonged droughts and erratic rainfall that disrupt grazing and livelihoods.

In each case, pastoralism is not just a livelihood but a worldview under siege. By listening to Nurboo, we are, in some ways, listening to them all.

“It pains me to say it,” Nurboo tells us, his voice just louder than the mountain wind, “but maybe I am the last yak herder.”

As we packed up to leave the Changthang plateau, Nurboo walked with us to the ridge. From that vantage point, the valley unfolded below us like an open book — marked by hoof prints, prayer flags and silence.

Pastoralism, as practiced by Nurboo and his ancestors, is a system that knows how to yield, adapt and respect limits. Nurboo’s disappearance will not just mark the end of a culture, but of a wisdom the world no longer pauses to hear.

On the ridgeline, the evening sun was setting. Nurboo stood silently, watching his yaks disappear over the ridge, their bells echoing softly into the vastness. “I don’t know how long I can keep doing this,” he said, voice low, almost to himself. “But as long as I can walk, I’ll walk with them.”

The post The Last Yak Herder Of Ladakh appeared first on NOEMA.

Monster Hunter: an evolutionary story by JGS editor
Sunday February 8^th, 2026 at 11:32 PM

Journal of Geek Studies

Christopher Sevin

Independent scientific educator, France.

Email: c-sevin (at) live (dot) fr

Download PDF

Monster Hunter is a fantasy-themed video game franchise created by the Japanese company Capcom in 2004, with the first game Monster Hunter. The player embodies, in the third person, a hunter who accomplishes quests, assigned by an organization called the Guild, by killing or capturing creatures. Since then, twenty-seven other games have taken shape, developing the lore. Each game provides its new set of ecosystems, with items, maps, flora, and bestiary.

The world of Monster Hunter, although a fantasy universe, presents a scientific dimension. The games explore the concept of trophic chain, with prey, predator, and apex predator monsters. These creatures live in many different and complex ecosystems, from volcanic areas to desert plains, through tundra, tropical forests and grassy plains, each possessing its own climate, vegetation, and geology.

A form of taxonomy is also present in-game. Some monsters have subspecies generally defined by alternate skins and, sometimes, abilities. Monsters are also grouped in families, a superior clade based in the general overall aspect of creatures. Sometimes, evolutionary explanations are given to explain links between some of these taxa, like trophic partitioning, host-parasite coevolution, or allopatric speciation. All these arguments lead us to see the bestiary of this universe as a group of taxa, linked to one another by an evolutionary history.

Two books, Hunter’s Encyclopedia 4 (2015) and Monster Hunter Rise, Official Setting Document Collection – Rampage Disaster’s Secrets (2021) present a classification tree called “Ecological Tree Plots”. However, this tree doesn’t rely on a scientific approach. Phylogeny of Monster Hunter creatures is also a recurrent topic in the fan community, with many posts on Reddit, Discord and Steam, for example. These fan-made attempts rely more on an overall morphological similarity comparison and are not based on any scientific protocol.

This article is an attempt to reconstruct a speculative phylogenetic tree by using Cladistics, observing the external anatomy of monsters. The topology of the tree will be discussed in this article. The bestiary of Monster Hunter lore contains hundreds of species presented as huntable creatures, but also items coming from fishing, insect harvesting and farming. However, cladistic is inappropriate for such a sizeable of data set (Darlu & Tassy, 1993). Thus, I only studied taxa from the first generation of Monster Hunter games, which are Monster Hunter (2004), Monster Hunter G (2005), and Monster Hunter Freedom (2005).

METHODOLOGY

To determine links between taxa and imagine a plausible evolutionary story, we decided to use the cladistic approach. By observing morphological characteristics shared by studied species, this classification method allows the creation of relative taxa groups with their hypothetical common ancestor, called clades, based on shared characters (synapomorphies). Created in the beginning of the 20th century, this methodology became popular with the work of Willi Hennig after the Second World War.

Thirty-nine taxa were morphologically analyzed. Twenty-four of them are huntable monsters. We also analyzed seven fishes obtained in-game by fishing: Burst arowana, Bomb arowana, Golden fish, Sushifish, Shringnight carp, Speartuna and Knife Mackerel. As they are very inspired by real-life counterparts (arowana, carp, tuna and mackerel), I used this close inspiration to describe internal anatomic characteristics invisible in game to the naked eye. A similar reasoning was applied to humans and pigs, present in the game and in the real world. Three insect-like creatures, Godbug, Flashbug and Thunderbug, were studied and came from collecting actions. To conclude, we incorporate wyverians, a humanoid lifeform, into the data set.

In total, eighty-five characters were studied, concerning morphology, physiology and reproduction. Character states were polarized using their repartition on the Earth (i.e. real-world) evolutionary tree; states were unordered. The character matrix was built on Nexus Data Editor (v.0.5.0; Page, 1998) and the heuristic search of the most parsimonious trees was made on PAUP (v.4.0; Swofford, 2003). To root the strict consensus tree, I decide to create two hypothetical outgroups. To test the robustness of the consensus tree, the Bremer support was calculated. The matrix used in the analysis is available as a Supplementary File to this article [1].

RESULTS

The heuristic search calculated 214,958 trees. Among them, 12 trees are the most parsimonious with a length of 165. A strict parsimonious tree was calculated, with a length of 167 steps (Fig. 1). The Consistency index (CI) is 0.623, the Rescaled consistency index (RC) is 0.556, and the Retention index (RI) is 0.899. These indexes, greater than 0.5 but close to is (except for the Retention index) indicate some cases of convergence in the consensus tree. The Bremer support was calculated to check the robustness of nodes: 16 nodes have a value of 1 and are considered weak, unsupported by a lot of character states. These weak nodes are mostly situated in the ichtyan and the insectoid clades. Among the other nodes, 15 have a value of 2 and 9 have a value of 3 or more, considered strong and supported by several character states.

**Figure 1.** Consensus tree obtained on PAUP. The color of nodes represents their robustness according to the Bremer Index (red=1, yellow=2, green=3+).

DISCUSSION

The topology of the consensus tree (Fig. 1) shows some similarities with the real-world tree of life, as expected given the real-life inspiration of the monsters. A first division is made between “invertebrates”, represented by insectoid lifeforms, and “vertebrates”. The latter represent the major part of the dataset. Inside this clade, we observe a dichotomy with an ichtyan clade formed by fishes and “fish wyverns” called piscine wyvern in the Monster Hunter franchise. All fish taxa are the sister group of a tetrapod taxon (i.e. creatures with four limbs). Two other characters resulting from terrestrialization, the lacrimal canal and the atlas vertebra, are visible on real-world frog, human and pig. In the continuation of the article, I will present the details of each clade.

Insecta clade

A first basal group appears in the consensus tree. This clade groups Vespoid, Hornetaur, Flashbug, Thunderbug and Godbug (Fig. 2). All possess a chitinous exoskeleton, a pair of antennas, ribbed wings and six legs. These characters are similar to Earth’s insects and more precisely to the subclass Pterygota (Misof et al., 2014).

**Figure 2**. Detail of the insect clade.

Vespoid has a social behavior evoking hymenopterans. Hornetaur, by having strong jumping legs and wings overlapping the abdomen at rest, looks like orthopterans such as locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. Flashbug, Thunderbug and Godbug formed by the occurrence of moniliform antennas and the presence of elytra, modified hardened forewings distinctive of the order Coleoptera. To conclude, Flashbug and Thunderbug also share a bioluminescent abdomen, similar to real-life fireflies from the lampyrid family.

“Ichtyan” clade

Within the large vertebrate group, we observe a first clade formed by Speartuna, Knife Mackerel, Shringnight carp, the family of the Arowana (Burst arrowana, Bomb arowana and Golden fish), Cephadrome, and the two species of Plesioth (Fig. 3). These taxa share a lateral line, scale-covered skin, and fins formed by lepidotrichs. They also have opercula to protect their gills.

This clade is divided into two subunits. The first one groups Speartuna, Knife Mackerel, Shringnight carp and the family the Arowana species. All of them are closely based on real animals. They all possess ray fins, a characteristic of the real-world actinopterygian clade. The occurrence of premaxillary mobility allows us to refine the comparison with the Teleostei (Betancur-R et al., 2013).

In opposition, Cephalodrome, Plesioth and Green Plesioth form a group that I call Ambulichtyii (“walking fishes”). They present lobe fins, pelvic fins transformed and erected in back legs similar structures, a prograd biped posture and terrestrial locomotion, hence their name. This capacity to live out of the water during long periods can evoke mudskipper fish from the genus Periophthalmus (Steppand et al., 2022). It also represents, in the case of Cephalodrome who live constantly on land, a second episode of terrestrialization in in-game vertebrates. Plesioth species and Cephalodrome also have a pressurized pocket inside their body, allowing them to produce sand projectiles (Cephalodrome) and a water beam (Plesioth species). The head is fixed to the body by a neck and doesn’t show visible nostrils, suggesting a partial or complete loss of olfaction. Finally, these three taxa possess neurotoxin glands in their fins, allowing them to defend against predators.

An important point to develop in light of this consensus tree is the position of fishes and tetrapod-like creatures. Contrary to Earth, where tetrapods are contained inside lobe-finned fishes (which together are the sister group of ray-finned fishes), the Monster Hunter consensus tree presents a different topology (Fig. 1). This evolutionary tree suggests tetrapods outside the lobe-finned fishes. This result can be explained by the lack of sarcopterygian fishes (e.g., lungfishes and coelacanths) in the game, as well as the lake of basal tetrapodomorphs (e.g., Panderichtys, Tiktaalik and stegocephalians). Plesioth and Cephadrome (the “ambulichtyies”) share more characters with fishes than with tetrapods. More recent games of the franchise have creatures that could change the topology of the tree into a more Earth-like tree of vertebrate evolution, like Climbing Joyperch, which is very similar to Tiktaalik, and Petricanths in Monster Hunter World. Future complementary studies should highlight and resolve this “Monster Hunter Romer’s Gap”.

Tetrapod clade

As the sister group to the “ichtyan” clade, the consensus tree (Fig. 1) shows a group with four-limbed creatures, similar to the Earth’s Tetrapoda clade (Fig. 4). This one is supported by the occurrence of chiridian limbs (i.e. with joints and digits), atlas vertebra and lacrimal canals, observable in humans, pigs, and frogs. Like on Earth, amphibians (represented here by the frog) are the most basal tetrapods, due to the lack of an amniotic shelled egg (Benton, 2014). Frogs also have a sprawling quadruped locomotion in opposition to the other tetrapods, which present an erect posture.

The other taxa in the tetrapod-like group form a clade based on the production of amniotic eggs, observed in humans, pigs and highly suspected in Apceros, Aptonoth, and Rathalos. Digits, four at forelimbs and hindlimbs, end in claws. These characteristics tend to compare this clade with the real-world amniote clade. However, in opposition to real amniotes, these of Monster Hunter show an ancestral and common endothermy. On Earth, heat production strategies appeared independently in therapsids and archosaurs (Legendre & Davesne, 2020).

The amniote clade is divided into three subunits: the theropod-like clade, the mammal-like clade and the wyverns. We also observe that Fatalis is alone at the same branching level. Its scrawling locomotion, the ancestral type in tetrapods, prevents it from being included in one of the other clades with erect locomotion (via convergence). Its supplementary pair of chiridian limbs, forming wings on its back, are a unique autapomorphy and does not permit exact classification. On Earth, no vertebrate species has six limbs. A plausible hypothesis to explain these extra arms can be an abnormal expression of homeotic genes during the embryo development, duplicating the forelimbs. However, supernumerary limbs also need to be functional with their own nervous system and brain modifications, such as the sensory cortex to touch, the motor cortex to move, and the cerebellum for coordination.

Theropod clade

Within the tetrapod group, Genprey, Velociprey, Giaprey, Ioprey, and Lao-Shan Lung form a clade based exclusively on the occurrence of a dewclaw on the hindlimbs (Fig. 5). Quadruped locomotion is the ancestral type visible on Lao-Shan Lung, the most basal taxa of the clade. All the others possess prograd bipedality and a reduction of the forelimbs, similar to theropods from Earth. Genprey, Velociprey and Giaprey exhibit five digits on their hands in comparison to most basal taxa, which have four. Five fingers are visible on frogs (one is vestigial), the most basal taxa of the tetrapod clade. This fifth digit can be a recurrence of the lost digit, for example by homeotic genes reactivation. It can also be a newly-acquired “sixth” digit, fulfilling the same function of the ancestral lost digit. Finally, these three creatures have a raptorian claw on their feet, similar to the paravian dinosaurs like dromaeosaurs, troodontids and Balaur (Hendrickx et al., 2015).

Even though it was not used as a character in the analysis, Ioprey, Genprey, Velociprey and Giaprey all display social behavior, living in packs led by an alpha. Gregariousness seems to be a synapomorphy of this clade.

Mammalian clade

A mammalian clade appears in the big amniote group (Fig. 6). This one is defined by a viviparous reproduction, a heterodont and bunodont dentition, and lips. All taxa of this clade present an outer ear visible by an auricle and the occurrence of hairs and fur. Some characters are only visible on humans and pigs, such as nipples and placenta occurrence, though they are suspected on others by parsimony. Lastly, all of them present loss of scales. This well-resolved clade is very similar to Earth’s placental mammals phylogenetic tree (Kitazoe et al., 2007; Song et al., 2012).

We find firstly human and wyverian forming a humanoid clade based on orthogrady, bipedality, and disappearance of the tail. This clade is the sister of a second one, containing feline taxa and ungulates. This Feruungulata-like clade is defined by the occurrence of a rhinarium, ears situated highly on the head and a digitigrady of anterior members.

In felids, formed by Melynx and Felyne, we observe secodont teeth in association with their carnivorous diet, retractable claws and whiskers. In opposition, the euungulates are herbivorous with bunodonty. They also present a distinctive unguligrady locomotion and a reduction of the tail. As on Earth, we observe a clear distinction between perissodactyls (with Kirin and mesaxonian unguligrady) and artiodactyls (with paraxonian unguligrady). The latter have also a reduction of the inner and outer digits, forming two dewclaws.

To conclude, Bulfango, Mosswine and pigs present a snout, a character distinctive of suids. Pigs, the only domesticated taxa of this study, seems to have Mosswine as wild ancestor, sharing with it a hairless pink skin.

Wyvernian clade

Dragon-like creatures form a huge clade within the tetrapod one (Fig. 7). The included taxa (Rathalos, Diablos, Monoblos, Yian Kut-Ku, Yian Garuga, Gravios, Gypceros, Khezu and their subspecies) share in common a prograd bipedality. They also have the capacity of flying, with forelimbs transformed into wings with dactylopatagium and plagiopatagium. However, this clade has a quadrupedal origin, represented in the tree by the two herbivorous Aptonoth and Apceros. These two taxa also share with wyverns the occurrence of upper and lower rhamphotheca forming a beak. The tail ends with osteodermic caudal structures like a stegosaur’s thagomizer or an ankylosaur’s tail club. Furthermore, they share the production of amniotic eggs with shell.

Diablos, Monoblos and white Monoblos form a first inner group that I called Ceratowyvernia. These three taxa have in common a skull extension in a frill, ornated by epiparietal bones. It is possible that this bony structure has a display function during male-to-male fights or reproduction, as suggested in ceratopsian dinosaurs (Fig. 8) (Farke, 2004; Fark et al., 2009), hence their name Ceratowyvernia (“Horned wyverns”). In the elongation of the frill, a scapular shield protects the neck’s base and the back’s front.

Ceratowyvernia also present, on the feet, a migration of the inner digit to the back of the feet with an almost complete anisodactyl position. Anisodactyly is generally presented in arboreal animals for perching, like real-world songbirds. However, anisodactyly is also present in some cursorial birds and it seems to be a foot morphology enabling an ecological flexibility that allows some birds to cope with environments with strong aridification periods (Raikow & Bledsoe, 2000; Martin & Sherratt, 2023). Monoblos, White Monoblos and Diablos live in deserts and semi-deserts. However, these environments seem to be relatively stable and not quick to change. Another explanation of this morphology in Monoblos and Diablos could be behavioral. Martin and Sherratt (2023) showed that, in Australia, some birds present a light anisodactyly to propel them in water by paddling, such as the grey teal Anas gracilis, or swimming, such as the little penguin Eudyptula minor. Monoblos and Diablos are not semi-aquatic wyverns, but present fossorial behavior, using their head and strong forelimbs to dig and move underground. Anisodactyl feet could have been selected to aid propulsion in the soil.

**Figure 8.** Comparison of male-to-male confrontation: A. Triceratops models (Farke, 2004). B. Diablos in the game cinematics.

Ceratowyvernia is the sister group of a clade defined by the occurrence of a pressurized pocket in the body. In Gypceros, Khezu and their subspecies, this organ is used to stock venom (in the former) or electrified mucus (in the latter). These taxa also present a scaleless skin and flexible tail, without a thagomizer, allowing whipping in Gypceros and sucking substrate in Khezu. I decided to call them Xenowyvernia because of their atypic appearance, locomotion and way of life.

Gravios, Yian Kut-Ku, Yian Garuga, Rathalos and their subspecies form a clade that I called Pyrowyvernia, referring to the pressurized organ containing a flammable substance used for hunting or defense. With the exception of Gravios, all of the others are carnivorous taxa. During their hypothetical evolution, they developed different morphological traits in that sense. Yian Garuga, Yian Kut-Ku and Rathalos subspecies have an anisodactyl foot selected to catch prey. They also possess a bony sting at the tip of the tail. This bone is hollow with a canal connected to a venom gland. This organ was, however, lost during the evolution of the group and is absent in Yian Kut-Ku and Blue Yian Kut-Ku, where only an atrophied bony sting remains. Yian Garuga, Yian Kut-Ku and Rathalos subspecies also develop efficient hearing, with the occurrence of a scale transformed in an auricle-like structure, convergent to the outer ear of mammals. This adaptation was further selected upon, with the apparition in Yian Garuga and Yian Kut-Ku of large, parabolic, somital and mobile ears to locate prey by sound. We choose to name this clade Audiowyvernia (“hearing wyverns”).

As previously mentioned, all wyverns in this study have wings, similar to those of bats, with patagium tensed between fingers and the flank. However, the occurrence of wings does not necessarily mean capacity of powered flight. Some wyverns, such as Rathalos, Yian Kut-Ku, Yian Garuga and Gypceros, are active flyers. They can fly away to change places, for example, and can even hunt prey (such as you, the hunter) from the sky, like the dive-bombing flight of Rathalos, inspired by birds of prey hunting techniques. On the other hand, some wyverns cannot fly high or for a long time. One example is the Khezu, which prefers to walk, even when moving away. Gravios is so massive that it can take flight only for a few seconds and a few meters above the ground. Diablos and Monoblos are not as massive as Gravios, and possibly could fly; however, they prefer walking or digging as locomotion.

The most parsimonious scenario tells of a progressive flying acquisition, from a wingless ancestor to a wyvern with wings but incapable of (or limited) powered flight, similar to Diablos and Monoblos (Fig. 9). Next, evolution would have selected flight that became a strong behavior in Gypceros, Yian Kut-Ku, Yian Garuga and Rathalos. This hypothesis suggests that patagium could appear before flight, making it an exaptation.

**Figure 9.** Mapping of flight type on the wyverns’ clade.

Although wings of wyverns are anatomically close to bat wings, it is difficult to use their evolutionary story as comparison. The oldest known bats, like Icaronycteris from the Eocene, already look like current ones, which does not allow us to fully understand the origin of flight in this mammal clade (Brown et al., 2019). Pterosaurs, the other vertebrate with patagium, are a similar story. Their strongly modified anatomy does not allow us to clearly and fully understand the origin of this group and, at the same time, their flight ability (Witton, 2013).

The only other group of flying vertebrates are birds. Since the discovery of Archaeopteryx (1861), different hypotheses have been made to explain the emergence of flight in this clade. Garner et al. (1999) proposed the “Pouncing model”, from an ambush predator ancestor. Williston (1879) and Ostrom (1979) proposed the “Cursorial model”, where wings were positively selected by accentuating stability on the run. Marsh (1880) proposed the “Arboreal model”, from an arboreal ancestor that soared from tree to tree. Today, scientists tend to think that these hypotheses do not exclude each other (Segre & Banet, 2018).

In the case of wyverns, the taxa from the first Monster Hunter games are heavy creatures, from hundred kilograms to several tons. The “Arboreal model” cannot be used to explain the emergence of flight; Monoblos and Diablos weigh several tons, so no tree could sustain that. The “Pouncing model”, from an ambush predator ancestor jumping from higher ground, is unlikely. The external group to wyverns, Apceros and Aptonoth, are herbivorous, as are the most basal wyverns, Diablos and Monoblos. Thus, the “Cursorial model” seems to be the most plausible; with the exception of Khezu, all wyverns are good runners, so it is possible that the origin of flight lies in this behavior. Studying other wyverns from more recent games, including the smaller ones, should allow us to confront this hypothesis and better understand the emergence of flight in the wyvern clade.

CONCLUSION

The bestiary of Monster Hunter is rich in diversity thanks to a series of successful games, born in 2004 with the eponymous game. Today, there are more than 300 in-game taxa, including predators and prey, and different species and subspecies. In this article, I tried to apply cladistic methodology to the bestiary from the first games, the so-called “First generation”, in order to obtain results with a historical, solid, and reproducible scientific method. The consensus tree presents great similarities with our planet’s tree of life. This can be easily explained by the large inspiration of creature designers in past and present nature. The cladistic method, by using the same polarization of states characters than on Earth, can also explain the similarity between this fictional fauna and the real-world one.

However, the weak representation of some taxa, like sarcopterygian and tetrapodomorph, resulted in meaningful differences to the evolution of vertebrates on Earth. Future studies, more focused on some clades and using taxa from all canon games, should be able to better develop some branches of the tree. Many novelties would be expected for the invertebrates, which were only represented in the first generation by insects. More recent games introduced new clades, such as crustacean-like creatures (Herminataur and Caenataur species), chelicerate-like ones (Nercyllia and Rakna-Kadaki species), and cephalopods (the cuttlefish-like Nakarkos and the octopus-like Nu Udra). Finally, in the tetrapod clade, more mammalian and reptilian taxa could result in a better resolution of the current polytomy; for example, the erect position that appears via convergence in mammals, theropods and wyverns, could be interpreted differently on a more detailed tree with more tetrapod-like taxa.

The fauna of the Monster Hunter franchise, with its rich lore and its strong Earth nature inspiration, can be a topic or reflection of evolutionary biology, as we saw in this article. In a more down-to-earth manner, it is also a good exercise for biology students and enthusiasts, allowing them to learn this method, its application, and also its limits. In the same thought exercise, the flora of the different biomes could also be studied. Further away, landscapes, minerals, and climates also give this franchise an interesting geoscientific content to explore.

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About the author

Christopher Sevin, MSc., is a French independent scientific educator. Graduated with a Masters’ degree in Vertebrate Paleontology, he works in scientific communication, cladistics applied to pop culture and the evolution of the Limagne Basin (France) during the Oligocene–Miocene transition.

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