Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

As anyone alive in 2003 will remember, the “Lemon Shark” ditty was everywhere for a few months. Starting off as a simple advertising hook for R1ngt0nes.Biz, along with four others (Orange Bear, Lime Tiger, Tangerine Lion), Lemon Shark quickly eclipsed the others and became the focus of a sustained advertising campaign. Combined with a variety of lemon sharks, including CGI and men in suits, an extended version of the song even charted in both the UK and the US.

Of course, there was a downside to the fad, and a reason that it disappeared more quickly and completely than most. R1ngt0ne.biz didn’t sell ringtones, but rather sold subscriptions to a ringtone service that charged $20 per month for access to a library of 20,000 tones, including Lemon Shark. Most people, upon receiving their first month’s bill, called to complain and within a year the company was so inundated by lawsuits and complaints that its Delaware business license was revoked. While Lemon Shark was sold (to Guangzhang Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. d/b/a Harmonium Labs), the subsequent uses of the character very quickly sank into obscurity.

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The Ingram Expedition, also known as the Erstwhile Expedition after its main vessel, HMS Erstwhile, was an attempt on the Northwest Passage. While not as infamous as the lost Franklin Expedition that preceded it, the Ingram Expedition is noteworthy for the unusual method in which it met its end.

Ingram had been a mate on one of the many expeditions funded by Lady Franklin to find her husband, and had arrived home determined to make his own attempt at the route. In Ingram’s mind, the lack of appropriate stores was the major problem for any such expedition, and so he set to work finding a way for his ship to can and preserve the meat that it hunted along the way for future use.

In doing so, he collaborated with “Doctor” Omar Cyrus to create and perfect a portable cannery that would produce long-lasting and shelf-stable foods. Ingram was recorded as boasting that his “shelf-stable puffin” hunted in the Grand Banks would see his crew through the Passage. There was just one problem: Cyrus was an utter charlatan, with a fake medical degree and no actual experience in canning or preservation. His equipment and methods were, by and large, useless and led to spoiled stores or worse, outbreaks of acute botulism. This was discovered in a major food scandal not long after Ingram had set out, but a cutter sent to intercept him was unable to locate HMS Erstwhile.

The ship was eventually located off Baffin Island, having drifted some distance from its route and become icebound. Several men who had died of botulism were aboard, and the local Inuit led searchers to the graves of the few survivors, whom they had been powerless to help.

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Created as a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the “World’s Largest Ball of String” tourist trap, the “World’s Smallest Ball of String” was made by nanoscale researchers at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology using an extremely fine thread of synthetic spider silk spun on a custom loom (also nanoscale) into thread before being balled up. A similarly nanoscale cat was prepared, but largely ignored.

The tiny string ball received coverage from many mainstream media outlets, and many high-resolution pictures were distributed to the media. The team was even nominated for an Ig Nobel Prize, though they ultimately lost to a team that had developed oral contraceptives for domestic rabbits.

Capitalizing on the easy availability of photos and information (as an NSF grantee, all information about the research was open-access), an enterprising huckster opened a roadside attraction claiming to have the world’s smallest ball on display. Using photos and information about the real ball, the proprietors charged $5 a head to look through an “electron microscope” at the ball, while really just rigging a projector to an ordinary magnifier. Local government officials estimate that the con artists made close to half a million dollars before their scheme was blown by a statement from the original team, clarifying that the original ball had been unwound and destroyed immediately after it had been photographed.

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Upon following the cat to the beach, Newberg discovered that it was digging clams out of the sand and eating them, a novel behavior never before observed in feral domestic cats. It used its claws to open some of the clams, and seemed to have formed a sort of symbiosis with local gulls for the more stubborn ones; the cat would allow the gulls to pick up and drop the clams onto rocks to break them, before chasing the gull away to eat.

The cat’s close association with water and clams continued after it gave birth to a litter of kittens, with Newberg observing three of the six kittens engaging in clam-digging behavior themselves. He speculates that the behavior could have spread to other feral cats in the area had it not been for the arrival of Hurricane Irv, which made landfall as a Category 5 storm and demolished the beach the cats had been using. Newberg never saw any of them again after the storm, and no further examples of cats digging for clams were recorded over the next ten years.

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Lot #2201: taxidermied Virginia opossum, upright, with clock in mouth. This was Mayfield’s attempt to create an art piece that mirrored one of the persistent visions of which she had been complaining in the year before her death. Specifically, she insisted that the opossum was a manifestation of a Muskogee psychopomp that would visit the soon-to-be-deceased to remind them of their mortality. Nga-to-fe-do, she called it, the Time Devourer. Mayfield’s close friends, worried, consulted the Muskogee Nation’s official historian, who confirmed that no such psychopomp existed in Muskogee religion, and that Mayfield’s name for it was “not necessarily nonsense but definitely not Muskogee.”

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The genus “bufaciem,” commonly known as the North Island False Warblers, contains three species of small birds that were driven to extinction in 1899, 1917, and 1944 respectively as their island breeding grounds were subjected to invasive predators who destroyed the birds’ ground nests. However, “bufaciem” is perhaps more infamous today for one of the most mean-spirited taxonomic debates ever recorded.

Two wealthy amateur biologists, Franklin Rothstein and Abner Slverberg, were intensely competing with one another to describe the birds of New Zealand before the other. Rothstein submitted a description for another genus, the Stewart Island laughing owl, via telegram nearly a week after Silverberg had sent his own description by mail. The result was that Rothstein received credit for the description despite making a later submission.

As a result, Silverberg bribed the telegraph operator at the nearest office to hold Rothstein’s next message for two days, giving him time to wire in his own competing description. Adding insult to injury was the name, “bufaciem,” which was dog Latin for “toad-faced,” a favorite insult Silverberg threw against Rothstein.

Neither man, once the genus had been described, made any effort to secure it against extinction-they cared about the name more than the actual existence of any living examples.

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Arboreal macropods, or tree kangaroos, can be found in northern Australia and southern New Guinea, albeit in small numbers, to this very day. But a theory posited by former University of Queensmarsh professor Dr. Ward East claims that unidentified bones that were once held and photographed in the former Dutch East Indies, before being lost during the war, proves that a larger and more intelligent tree macropod existed at one point, a “marsupial ape.”

Dr. East’s theory rests on a series of bones found in the New Guinea Highlands during a Dutch expedition in 1922. Taken to Batavia (now Jakarta) on Java, the bones were photographed and put into the collection of the Batavia Fossielinstituut museum. After Java fell to Japan in 1942 during the Second World War, the contents of the museum disappeared, with many suspecting that they were aboard the cargo ship Ishikawa Maru which was torpedoed and sank with all hands off Surabaya in 1944.

Dr. West believes that the photographs prove that a large arboreal marsupial with many conversantly evolved apelike features lived in the highlands of New Guinea until it was extirpated by the arrival of the first humans on the island circa 50,000 BCE. This theory, chronicled in several books and a top-rated Historical Channel documentary, is largely rejected by mainstream biologists.

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Found only in a single lake, the kiwifish is a species of tilapia descended from a founding population cut off when a river changed course and isolated its freshwater acquire. Named for their round shape and usual covering of “furry” brownish-green algae, the kiwifish eats small insects while its quasi-symbiotic relationship with the algae helps to keep its skin free from parasites.

Critically endangered, and confined to only one small lake and a few tributary streams, kiwifish have been repeatedly threatened with extinction by development projects that would have drained their marshy lake, dammed one of the feeder streams, or dredged and stocked the waters to increase tourism. Each of these schemes failed due to the intervention of activists, but attempts to capture kiwifish to form a reserve population or breed them in captivity in 1999, 2007, and 2018 all met with failure, as the fish all died shortly after capture. Current efforts focus on protecting the habitat and encouraging ecotourism but have met with mixed success.

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Once said to wander the tidal flats of Sisqualamie Bay, the dolphcuta was said to be a fearsome beast with the body of a common dolphin but the hooves of a moose. Depending on the local teller in McBain County, the dolphcuta was either the unnatural offspring of a moose in rut and a dolphin or the result of a dark pact the two had signed after being roasted alive by loggers during the lumber boom.

Either way, the dolphcuta is said to prowl the flats waiting for a traveler to flounder and become stuck in the mud. It will then pounce, kicking them to death with its hooded before dragging the carcass off to a secret boneyard to be consumed. A dolphcuta is blamed for the disappearance of a Fish and Wildlife inspector in 1903, and there are persistent claims that one such fearsome beast was captured and displayed at the state fair until officials from the Smithsonian descended to confiscate it.

In either case, the dolphcuta has become a cultural touchstone of McBain County, with an annual festival in its honor as well as a series of painted fiberglass replicas spread all over the county seat.

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Cheese-sniffing dogs were a feature of many fine French fromagiers ever since Charles the Bald had retained a pair to help test his own cheeses for quality after narrowly avoiding illness from an improperly aged brie. Eventually, a number of cheese-sniffing dogs were bred throughout Europe, often by the same monks that made the cheeses. Roquefort was the most commonly dogged cheese, with many insisting as late as 1898 that they would only eat cheeses that bore the stamp of a master chien-fromage’s master.

When, in 1875, a French-style cheesemaker opened in Queensland, Australia, 24 Roquefort-sniffing mastiffs were imported from Europe. Due to a combination of mismanagement, unseasonable weather, and lack of experience, the cheesemaker shuttered after less than a year, turning the dogs loose. They quickly interbred with the local population of dingoes, creating a subpopulation that demonstrated the behavior of a European cheese-sniffing dog for several generations. As late as 1900, bulletins were posted for travelers warning them against bringing Roquefort cheese into the area, lest they attract the attention of the so-called “roquefort dingoes.”

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