Peer Rejected

rejections > crypto.ZO > REJ:2026.07.11.0001

REJ:2026.07.11.0001crypto.ZO (Cryptozoology)PRJ-2026-0017Vol. 2, No. 7Status: Rejected

Too Big to Foot: Market Concentration, Barriers to Entry, and the Coming Consolidation of the Cryptid Sighting Economy

Hesther R. Lockhart-Buntline1, Marisol E. Okonkwo-Vance2, Douglas F. Peatbog3

1. Institute for Applied Cryptozoology, Drumnadrochit · 2. Center for Attention Economics, Van Meter University · 3. Office of Imaginary Competition Policy, Geneva

Submitted and rejected July 11, 2026 · 9 pages · 6 figures · review duration: 10 minutes

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Abstract

Humanity has catalogued 1,247 distinct monsters, yet seven of them account for of all recorded sightings. Drawing on the Consolidated Sightings Ledger (CSL-26), a new dataset of 87,416 reports spanning 1950–2025, we show that this concentration cannot be explained by media coverage, habitat accessibility, or photographic quality—the leading monsters are, if anything, the blurriest. What remains is an economic explanation: monsters compete for a fixed supply of human belief, and the sighting market has consolidated exactly the way mature industries do. We identify the decisive barrier to entry—the Five-Minute Silhouette criterion, under which a monster survives only if it can be described in one breath (“a big hairy man”)—and confirm it in two experiments: a telephone-game study in which famous monsters survived five retellings intact while obscure ones degraded into household objects, and a silhouette flash-card task in which unknown monsters were confidently misidentified as Bigfoot. By the standards regulators apply to supermarkets, the monster economy is broken: every market segment exceeds the merger-guideline threshold for “highly concentrated,” an unreviewed Bigfoot–Yeti merger is visibly in progress, and our model gives a new monster a chance of ever succeeding again. We conclude with remedies. Chief among them: break up Bigfoot.

keywords: market concentration · Pareto principle · barriers to entry · folklore transmission · cryptid economics · antitrust

Cite this rejection

@article{PRJ20260017,
  title   = {Too Big to Foot: Market Concentration, Barriers to Entry, and the Coming Consolidation of the Cryptid Sighting Economy},
  author  = {Hesther R. Lockhart-Buntline and Marisol E. Okonkwo-Vance and Douglas F. Peatbog},
  journal = {Peer Rejected},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0017},
  url     = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/too-big-to-foot}
}

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REJ:2026.08.01.0001 crypto.ZO (Cryptozoology) Rejected

Ontogenetic Synonymy in the Urban Avifauna: Columba livia Gmelin, 1789 Is the Terminal Stage of Sturnus vulgaris Linnaeus, 1758, with a Revised Five-Stage Key and a Recommendation Under Article 81

Anneke Vroom, J. P. Ballantrae, Nkechi Ibe, Wojciech Sadło & The Subcommittee on Nomenclature

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 40 minutes on Aug 1, 2026.

Abstract: The feral urban pigeon is not a species. We show that Columba livia Gmelin, 1789 is the fifth and terminal life-history stage of Sturnus vulgaris Linnaeus, 1758, and that the two nominal taxa are therefore conspecific. Four observations, each at present disposed of separately, motivate the revision. First, juvenile-plumage C. livia are absent from the wild record: across 2,140,000 urban point counts from 61 cities the juvenile:adult ratio is 0.0002, against a median of 0.31 for 43 co-occurring species, and every positive record lies within 400 m of managed stock. Second, the conventional columbid demography fails in both available parameterisations, over-predicting growth by 36.1 percentage points per year when fecundity is taken from lofts and predicting collapse when it is taken from the field. Third, the sturnid budget fails in the opposite direction, over-predicting growth by 18.6 points against an observed regional decline. Fourth, and decisively, 844 of 3,412 recoveries of nestling-ringed S. vulgaris report a field species of C. livia; the scheme codes these as clerical species mis-entry and overwrites the field determination. The coding rate is 0.0% below 14 months of age and 97.8% beyond 36 months, while the same recorders’ rate for a control species is 0.3% and flat. Clerical error does not have an onset. A five-stage Lefkovitch model fitted to sturnid ringing and aviary data alone yields lambda 1 = 1.003 against an observed +0.3%/yr and reconciles the two failed budgets: the recruitment the columbid model cannot find, 0.254 per adult per year (95% CI 0.231–0.278), is the stage-II disappearance the sturnid model cannot lose, 0.251 (0.226–0.277); their ratio is 1.012 (0.887–1.154). Because no columbid count enters the fit, the model’s stable stage distribution is a free prediction: terminal-stage abundance fraction 0.101, observed 0.104 (0.089–0.121). In a 240-bird aviary cohort, 61 individuals entered the transition at a median age of 19.4 months, increasing in mass from 78 g to 310 g, and retained individual identity at 14 of 15 nuclear microsatellite loci. We give a revised five-stage key. Under Article 23 the senior name is S. vulgaris; Article 23.9 is not available; we recommend an application to the Commission under Article 81.

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