Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. He is the author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), Dragons: A Natural History (1995), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), The Unexplained (1996), From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (1997), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), The Hidden Powers of Animals (2001), The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003), Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013), The Menagerie of Marvels (2014), A Manifestation of Monsters (2015), Here's Nessie! (2016), and what is widely considered to be his cryptozoological magnum opus, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016) - plus, very excitingly, his first two long-awaited, much-requested ShukerNature blog books (2019, 2020).

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Wednesday 13 April 2011

GOING WILD OVER THE WILD AMERICAN HOUND – YOUR ASSISTANCE IS REQUESTED!

Johann Daniel Meyer’s mysterious ‘wild American hound’

Here’s an odd little conundrum for you to cogitate upon at your leisure, should you be so inclined. During an online surfing session a few days ago, I happened upon the curious illustration presented above.

Details concerning it are sparse in the extreme, but here is what I have been able to uncover so far. Measuring 12 inches by 8 inches, the image has a German title that translates as ‘wild American hound’, and is a hand-coloured copperplate engraving by Johann Daniel Meyer that appeared in his Angenehmer und nützlicher Zeit-Vertreib mit Betrachtung curioser Vorstellungen allerhand kriechender, fliegender und schwimmender, auf dem Land und im Wasser sich befindender und nährender Thiere etc - a three-volume wildlife tome published between 1748 and 1756 in Nuremberg, Germany.

As can be readily perceived from this engraving, however, whatever the creature depicted by it may be, it is certainly not a hound, nor, indeed, a canid, of any kind (wild and/or American notwithstanding!). So what is it?

When I first looked at it, I initially thought of the Virginia opossum Didelphis virginiana, because the engraved creature does bear a degree of overall resemblance to this largest and most famous of modern-day New World marsupials. I even found an online photo of the Virginia opossum, reproduced here, that vaguely recalls it.

Virginia opossum

Even so, Meyer’s mystery beast can be readily differentiated by its wholly brown colouration, in particular its dark face and its body’s extremely short, uniformly brown fur – in stark contrast to the white face and the longer, shaggy, grey body fur of the Virginia opossum. Meyer’s beast may have a bare tail, which, if so, likens it to the latter species, but, equally, it may simply have very short fur – the engraving does not make this clear.


Engraving of kinkajou

In addition to the Virginia opossum, I have also considered those uniformly brown-furred, Neotropical raccoon cousins known respectively as the kinkajou Potos flavus and the olingos (a quartet of Bassaricyon species, including the recently-discovered olinguito B. neblina). Again, as shown here, superficially these are somewhat similar to Meyer’s beast, but none of them is native to North America.


Olingo (Fiona Reid – Field Guide to Mammals of Central America)

So unless the ‘American’ in ‘wild American hound’ was being used in its very broadest sense, i.e. appertaining to anywhere within the entire New World, rather than its much more common and more specific usage as a contraction of the United States of America, I have once again come to a halt in my search for this mystifying mammal’s taxonomic identity – unless, gentle readers, you could offer any suggestions or additional information? If so, please post details here, as I’d very greatly welcome them!


MAJOR UPDATE: 3 April 2014

I recently purchased a copy of the 2011 reprint of German publisher Taschen's modern-day (2001) reproduction compendium of all of the sumptuous colour plates that originally appeared in a gloriously-illustrated tome first published in four volumes from 1734 to 1765. Commissioned by Albertus Seba, one of the most celebrated collectors of natural history specimens ever (click here for more details regarding Seba in a separate ShukerNature blog post), this tome, or Thesaurus as it was entitled, was basically a lavish catalogue of his two internationally-renowned collections' specimens, each of which was described in Latin by Seba and supplemented by footnotes in French (the text from his Thesaurus is not included in the Taschen plates compendium).

Browsing through the Taschen compendium of the Seba Thesaurus's innumerable pictures, and marvelling at their detail, colour, and precision, I was startled to discover that one of the plates (specifically Plate 30 in what was Vol. 1 of Seba's Thesaurus) contained what was evidently the original illustration upon which the version from Johann Daniel Meyer's tome that opens this present ShukerNature blog post was based (and then reproduced in mirror-image format). For not only is the Seba version of this illustration much more detailed, but Vol. 1 of his Thesaurus (i.e. the volume that contained it) was published in 1734, more than a decade before the first volume of Meyer's tome. Here, then, was the original wild American hound, and the plate in question is duly reproduced below:


Plate 30 of Vol. 1 of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus - the wild American hound is positioned directly beneath the long tail plumes of the paradise flycatcher above it

Surely, therefore, Seba's historic tome would provide me with the long-awaited solution to the mystery of this enigmatic mammal's taxonomic identity? In reality, the mystery only deepened. In Taschen's modern reprint of Seba's Thesaurus, the compilers have valiantly attempted to identify all of the many species depicted in it, and have included these proposed identities beneath each plate. Many are recognisably correct.

When I looked to see their identity for the wild American hound, however, I was nothing if not startled to discover that they had labelled it as a mongoose, and had even included these creatures' taxonomic family name, Herpestidae, albeit with visible trepidation (a question mark had been added directly after it in parentheses). Yet if this individual had truly originated in America, it was highly unlikely to have been a mongoose, because these mammals are confined entirely to the Old World, True, mongooses have been deliberately introduced to several Caribbean islands, where they still thrive today. However, this misguided course of action (they prey upon many of the islands' rare, indigenous species) was only initiated during the early 1870s, i.e. over a century after the wild American hound had appeared in Seba's Thesaurus.

But that was not the end of the riddles and revelations exposed in Seba's Thesaurus. Turning to the Taschen plates compendium's specially-written introduction by its compilers, I discovered that the same illustration of the wild American hound was included there too, but this time unencumbered by the other creatures that were present alongside it in Plate 30, and reproduced in slightly larger size too. Here is this version:

The wild American hound, in Albertus Seba's Thesaurus

What made this especially interesting, however, was that the compilers had included beneath the illustration here Seba's own original description of what it was. Namely, "Wild dog from America with a very long tail". Obviously no mongoose, therefore, and clearly the origin of the name that Meyer had used for this animal in his own tome. Sadly, however, this does not assist in the latter's identification. However, perusing the Seba Thesaurus's better-quality illustration of it I realised that its overall body form, coupled with its long snout and extremely long tail, was reminiscent of the common coati Nasua narica, which is native to certain of the southernmost states of the USA, and lacks the vivid tail banding that is such a characteristic feature of its familiar South American relative, the aptly-named ring-tailed coati N. nasua.

Although the images in Seba's Thesaurus are very pleasing aesthetically, not all of them are especially accurate zoologically. So could the wild American hound illustration simply be a not overtly-accurate representation of the common coati? Interestingly, when moving about on the ground on all fours, coatis sometimes hold their lengthy tails up vertically or semi-vertically, corresponding well with the pose portrayed by the wild American hound in the Seba Thesaurus's illustration.


A common coati with its long tail held up semi-vertically ((c) Joseph C. Boone/Wikipedia)

The only way to be certain, however, is if the specimen that this bemusing picture depicts could be traced and examined. Many of the specimens from Seba's first collection are housed in the present-day Russian Academy of Sciences, and several (but by no means all) specimens from his second collection are also housed there (the remainder were sold off to a wide range of buyers, so may now be untraceable, always assuming that they have survived to the present day anyway). Perhaps somewhere among those many exhibits is Seba's wild American hound, still awaiting a conclusive taxonomic identification?

Cabinet of Natural Curiosities - the Taschen 2001 compendium of the Seba Thesaurus's illustration plates


SECOND UPDATE: 4 April 2014

Today I succeeded in tracking down online a pdf of the original, complete Seba's Thesaurus, containing not just the plates but also Seba's bilingual (Latin and French) descriptions of the animals depicted in the plates. Seeking out his description of the wild American hound in the hope that now I would finally discover exactly what it was, I was disappointed to find that Seba's description was only very short and consisted almost entirely of just a verbal morphological description of what can be readily observed in the plate's portrayal of this animal, e.g. its tail is very long, its fur is brown, its ears are small and erect, its eyes are large, etc.

Seba's description in French of the wild American hound, from Vol. 1 of his Thesaurus (1734)

However, it did also contain two tantalising but mystifying snippets. Seba stated that he had been sent his specimen of the wild American hound from what he referred to as the Promontory of Tiburon on the island of Martinique, and that it plundered in the forests ("il vit de rapine dans les forêts"). Did this phrase mean that it raided other animals' dens or birds' nests? As for its provenance, I have been unable to locate any Promontory of Tiburon present on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and none of the sparse number of mammalian species known to have inhabited it during the 18th Century (when Seba prepared his Thesaurus) matches the appearance of the wild hound of America (mongooses, as already noted, were not introduced into any Caribbean islands until the 1870s). Intriguingly, however, there is a forested region in California, USA, known as the Promontory of Tiburon. So could Seba have somehow mistaken the location of this promontory, wrongly claiming it to be on Martinique, so that in reality his wild hound of America specimen derived from California instead? This mystery becomes ever more mysterious! Stay tuned for further installments as my investigations into this very curious cryptid continue.



23 comments:

  1. If it's 1750ish for the date of this piece, it cannot be referring to America as the United States. The United States of America didn't exist as a country until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. And even then, each former colony was part of a confederation until the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Constitution didn't get ratified until 1788.

    The term "American" in 1748 didn't refer to the country (that didn't even exist) or solely to North America.


    BTW, North America is everything from Panama to the Arctic Ocean-- not just the US and Canada. When Panama was part of Colombia, it was considered part of South America, but now that it is its own nation, it is typically considered the southernmost country in North America.

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  2. My guess is that it is a procyonid of some sort-- olingo or kinkajou.

    My guess is "hound" is a mistranslation of "Hund." Hund and hound are cognates, but Hund is the generic word for dog in German. Hound in English has a more specific meaning-- dogs that run down prey using their noses or eyes, like foxhounds or greyhounds.

    Raccoons were originally though of as a species of dog, which you can see in their name Procyon lotor and in the family named Procyonidae.

    The name probably is referring to either an olingo or kinkajou as a "wild American dog."

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  3. Another possibility is the Coatyl (sp) of the Yucatan

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  4. Good point re the USA not existing at the time of these books' publication! I missed that one! Re North America stretching down as far as Panama, however, this is a controversial issue, as generally all of the countries occupying the isthmus, from Mexico at the northernmost end to Panama at the southernmost end, are classified collectively as Central America. Indeed, until around a century ago, when Panama became independent from Colombia, Panama was officially part of South America, and is thus the only country in modern times to have 'moved' continents.

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  5. I discounted the coati because its snout is more prolonged than that of this mystery beast, whose tail is unbanded (most, though admittedly not all, coati species have conspicuously banded tails), and the latter beast's body seems burlier than that of the coati.

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  6. I look at this engraving and the first thing to come to mind is "Otter" mostly because of the tail. Although the coloring depicted is a much lighter brown than those I've seen in nature, the coloring suggests weasel or could even be mink.

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  7. I have to admit that I personally can't see an otter for this image, but it is an interesting idea, because otters are often referred to as water hounds - in Ireland, for instance. So could this be a somewhat distorted image of an otter, possibly prepared from a verbal description rather than from firsthand sightings of living or preserved specimens?

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  8. most likely a weasel. possibly american mink.

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  9. The limbs are too long and, the hind limbs especially, too powerful for it to be a mink. Also, Europe already has a species of mink, so mink would surely have been readily recognisable to the artist, and therefore would not have elicited such an odd, unsuitable name (for a mink) as 'wild American hound'.

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  10. i would also like to point out that it looks very much like the coyotes with mange...recently thought to be the chupacabra....

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  11. also could be a toy peruvuan hairless or Xoloitzcuintle dog. Both come in a toy size and can be brown. The Xoloitzcuintle actually features a furred and hairless version. Also these dogs have been around for thousands of years so the time frame is correct. The Xoloitzcuintle ranges into Northern Mexico and the US traditionally.

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  12. The stance of the engraving's creature is totally wrong for a canid species, I feel, and its fur is too uniform for it to be suffering from mange. Also, if it were a xoloitzcuintl, which is a pet dog, it seems strange that it was referred to as a wild hound.

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  13. if i may, good doctor. endeavor to the dialectic.first of note is the chest cavity.large.with the belly ecaving in to the hindquarters.second the teeth are monodont. i suspect the person had problems drawing the legs.due to the roundness so if you allow i discount that. i am however interested in the detail he showed in the paws.(dexterity?)
    the nose ridge makes it not really possible to be any kind of primate.-something all us anthro students learn :)
    the eyes are large too. long tail.large nasal cavity.lithe body (flexible). playful stance.
    the only thing that throws me off, is the roundness of the back of the head.(that is if i was to claim that it is a weasel/ermine)
    i am wondering, if they referred to a litter of weasels or its type as pups?
    maybe, it is as you said, a misinterpretation of the name to the animal.

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  14. If not a weasel, what about a larger mustelid, the fisher (Martes pennanti)? It was first described in 1765, so a 1750s illustration could be based on a second-hand report, or a pelt.

    Although Wikipedia notes 'Early Dutch settlers noted its similarity to the European polecat', in some areas the fisher is called the 'fisher cat', so perhaps it is an animal whose taxonomy is not always clear to a casual observer.

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  15. Yes, the fisher is somewhat cat-like in superficial appearance, but its fur is normally very dark, almost black - indeed, a common colloquial name for it is 'black cat', and it has been suggested that sightings of this large mustelid may even be responsible for certain sightings of alleged black panthers in North America. So in terms of pelage colouration, the beast in the engraving is too pale for a fisher identity to be very plausible, unfortunately.

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  16. I would lean toward it being a Virginia opposum. If you look at two illustrations he did of other opossums you will see that they also have the short coats and brown colouration, again not true to life. You can see them both, plus the mystery one, on this page for comparison. http://www.lastersfineart.com/antique%20prints%20p08.htm
    The illustrations have the same similarities to each other and the same dissimilarities to the real animals. Enough for me to be fairly certain it's an opossum.
    If you could gain access to the book you could no doubt rule out the possibilities by finding them elsewhere in the book. If there's no Virginia opossum I'd say you've solved your mystery :)
    Why call it a hound? It could be referring to it as being ‘dog like’ in appearance or behaviour, rather than be calling it an actual dog.
    Better image of it here showing hair on tail http://www.trocadero.com/stores/dvlaster/items/402673/en1.html Tails on the other illustrations look hairy too.

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  17. Could be a member of the weasel family or possibly a muskrat or otter. The artist may have gotten the colors wrong if they had been going from a description, or the colors may have faded. As an artist myself I know that colors can fade over a very short period of time.

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  18. What about a Cuban solenodon, also known as an American Tenrec? http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gYsaLSL-Gno/TXfNNmRYkJI/AAAAAAAABAw/E-MSm6hOr8s/s1600/cuban_solenodon%2528American_Tenrec%2529.jpg

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  19. Looks like a marsupial to me too, does it have webbed feet ?

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  20. At first, I thought it looked like a brown water opossum or Yapok until the comments above led me to the "legendary" Aztec creature Ahuizotl, which is compared to an amphibious dog with a prehensile tail :

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuizotl_(creature)

    Then I learnt that the Yapok was able to gather and collect objects with its prehensile tail ! :

    http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accounts/Chironectes_minimus/

    Maybe there was really a large kind of marsupial otter in Mexico back then.

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  21. A promontory in California ?This means that water is possibly not far from... I am looking forward to read more about it because I feel it is going in my direction.

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  22. I hope it isn't too late to respond to this post! The "Tiburon" promontory in California would be in Marin County, just north of San Francisco which had a strong Spanish presence well before the official founding of the USA. The modern town of Tiburon is only about 60 miles inland from what is now called Point Reyes.
    But in Spanish, 'Tiburon' simply means "shark", and as you might know, this area off the Northern California coast is noted for its abundance of Great White (and other species)sharks.
    I would imagine that in many oceanic places where early Spanish explorers visited that they noted where the sharks were, so a designated "Tiburon Promontory" in the Antilles was likely at one time an actual place name that has since been changed.

    Initially, I was thinking along the same lines as the other posters on this mystery creature--my first thought was a coatimundi. But the solid coloration was an enigma, as well as some of the other features.
    Also, "faithful reproduction" of species characteristics in the period of the 1700's often left much to be desired. (I'm thinking of that stuffed African Lion that has wooden human teeth in a collection in England). Anyway, I went back to the supposed source of this creature , the Antilles. Here at this link is a photo of a stuffed specimen from 1829 of a now extinct Antilles Giant Rice Rat, which looks remarkably like the artist rendering of the mystery "dog".
    http://www.biolib.cz/en/image/id220759/
    Anyone familiar with rats of a variety of species knows that their tails are an remarkably adept appendage, not quite prehensile but pretty close!

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  23. It looks like a lutrine opossum "Lutreolina crassicaudata"

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