Like the Face on Mars, the Siberian Snogger’s resemblance to a human face seems too strong to be coincidental. Judging from the data on the map itself, the picture was taken at 62.8492N,156.3910E, which is in the Magadan Oblast, in Russia’s Far East. The most stunning example undoubtedly is that of a right-facing, copper-green profile of a squint-eyed man, his fleshy lips planting a kiss on another mouth – horrifically detached from anything resembling a face. The Onformative website provides a few examples already. The hills are alive in Madagan (image taken from this page at the Onformative website). And why not? They fuse the age-old urge to see faces in strange places with some very modern facial recognition software. Is cartozoology as dead as the proverbial dodo? Perhaps the maps shown below represent a more fertile strain of allocartography.
No new cartographic animals have been rolled out for a decade. We’ve discussed this exciting hybrid of cartography and zoology earlier on this blog, but unfortunately, the website of the Society has remained dormant ever since 2003. The science or practice of discovering and studying animals outlined paradigmatically by street layouts as they appear on maps, especially with reference to physical evidence of the animals’ presence in the corresponding terrain. Why wait around for these zoomorphs to manifest themselves? Instead of passively gathering the most obvious specimens, why not actively hunt the ones that hide deep inside maps? That’s the idea behind the Norwegian Cartozoological Society, which defines cartozoology as: Some of the oldest examples are the portrayal of Europe as a queen, or Asia as winged horse, both by the German mapmaker Heinrich Bünting, a more recent one is the ‘discovery’ of an elephant in the contours of southern Ontario, or of a bunch of animals (and animal parts, horresco referens) on the London Underground. Zoomorphism – recognising the shape of animate beings in inanimate objects – is an age-old strain in cartography. There is more to be found at the intersection of cartography and pareidolia, however, than merely the shapes of countries. Rock cracks mistaken for sacred runes (pic here at Ancient Astronomy )
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