The shape of the world rewards a kind of curiosity that is willing to look really, really closely at ten boring things to find one worthy of More Examination Than Could Possibly Be Worthwhile, and returns to this sort of curiosity are probably increasing over time.
I think the Internet both acts as a distributed anomaly detection system, an organizing system for ad hoc and persistent flocks of people looking into things, and a broad secular boost on the returns of being right with regards to some classes of anomalies.
Interestingly, fiction tends to say that anomalies are generally found by deeply disturbed people or long-time experts who are also generally some flavor of broken, which... doesn't really match who ends up doing the yeomen's work on these things?
If there were actually a large reptile spotted off the coast of Japan there would be a subreddit within a day, and the moderators would probably have far more Wikipedia edits than most people but otherwise be pretty normal.
