Talk:Cryptobotany

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Image

I don't know how to confirm or deny this, so I did not edit it, but the image and caption don't seem to match. The lithograph looks like a depiction of an African legend, yet it says the image is from Central America. Both of these places have legends about human-eating plants, but the image seems to depict three Africans. Even if these are Africans brought to Central America, the legend would have still originated in their homeland and been imported.

Of course there's also the fact that these 19th century artists are notoriously bad at depicting indigenous people of all regions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.127.65.91 (talk) 07:07, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Neutrality

I object to the allegation that cryptobotany is a total pseudoscience. This is totally POV. Maybe the article has things the wrong way round. Some cryptobotany may well be pseudoscience, but it is also true to say that some "respectable" botanists are cryptobotanists, since they are looking for unknown or hidden (crypto) plants. Someone who looks for rare orchids is as much a cryptobotanist as someone who looks for man-eating trees. There is just an artificial boundary that creates a false division between the two. --MacRusgail (talk) 10:45, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Your objection is based on a misunderstanding of the definition of the word. Cryptobotany does not mean the search for unknown but mundane plant species. As a quick google search will show you, the term is used to refer to the search for "legendary", "fantastical" plants with outlandish properties or behaviors. As the article correctly explains, it is a pseudoscience by definition. RedSpruce (talk) 21:12, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe the root words in cryptobotany (crypto and botany) simply mean hidden and the study of plants,thus making cryptobotany the study of hidden plants, not a fantastical study of legends.--Gniniv (talk) 03:08, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Those are the meanings of the two roots to the word yes. But the word as a whole means the study of legendary plants believed by mainstream science to not exist. Many words do not strictly mean what you might think from their roots. APL (talk) 21:43, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Paragraph removed

Greetings to anyone watching this page. I removed the section on hallucinogenic and mind-altering plants, for the simple reason that it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the topic of the article, cryptobotany. ClovisPt (talk) 22:28, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Redirecting to Cryptozoology

First, see this thread at the Fringe Noteboard: "A Long-Term Wikipedia Fringe Problem: Wikipedia as a Cryptozoology's Pókemon Database". Next, after doing a Google Books search for the term cryptobotany, only two pages of results are returned. Two pages. And the vast majority of them are simply cryptozoology. This article appears to simply just be an extremely obscure extension of the pseudoscience of cryptozoology—the same people, the same history—but with plants. Is this simply supposed to be a sort of promotional tool then? I'm redirecting this to cryptozoology. :bloodofox: (talk) 20:12, 17 August 2016 (UTC)