ALBERTUS SEBA AND A PAIR OF SPECKLE-COATED MYSTERY BIG CATS FROM THE 1750S

A pair of anomalous speckle-coated 'tigers' depicted in a 1750s plate from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus

In yesterday's ShukerNature blog post (click here), I presented a selection of speckle-coated mystery big cats reported from various parts of South America. Now, less than a day later, I'm able to present a very unexpected but fascinating update to this subject.

As so often happens during my cryptozoological researches, while seeking something entirely different while browsing online this morning I came upon a remarkable engraving that may have some bearing upon the speckled mystery cat saga.

Albertus Seba (1665-1736), a Dutch pharmacist by trade but inflamed by an unquenchable passion for collecting zoological specimens, was so successful financially in his work that he was able to assemble not one but two truly spectacular, prodigious collections of unprecedented size and scope that gained international acclaim. Indeed, the first of these collections was so astonishing that in 1716 it was purchased in its entirety by no less a celebrated figure than the Russian tsar Peter the Great; the second was auctioned in 1752 in Amsterdam, and several prize specimens were purchased by what was then the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, founded by Peter the Great (but merging in 1841 with the Russian Academy to become the present-day Russian Academy of Sciences).

Portrait of Albertus Seba, by Jacobus Houbraken (1698-1780)

Perhaps Seba's most lasting claim to fame, however, is his magnificent four-volume Thesaurus (published 1734-1765). Its full, dual Dutch-Latin title is Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio – Naaukeurige beschryving van het schatryke kabinet der voornaamste seldzaamheden der natuur, which translates as 'Accurate description of the very rich thesaurus of the principal and rarest natural objects', and it is basically an exquisitely-illustrated catalogue of every zoological specimen that Seba had collected, containing 446 full-colour folio-sized copper plates. A copy of this wondrous work sold at auction a few years ago for the staggering sum of US $460,000.

However, a modern reproduction compendium of all of its colour plates (but not containing Seba's accompanying text descriptions of the specimens in Latin and French), entitled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities and compiled by Irmgard Müsch, Jes Rust, and Rainer Willmann, was published by Taschen in 2001, followed by further printings more recently. Purchased directly from Taschen, a hardback copy currently costs £125 (remarkably, however, it only costs £18.75 on Amazon!!).

Detailed scans of many if not all of the plates from Seba's Thesaurus can also be found online, and many of the animals depicted in them are portrayed relatively accurately, especially given the pre-scientific time period in which this publication was prepared. While browsing a collection of these sumptuous plates on the website Albion Prints website (www.albion-prints.com), I came upon a fascinating example, whose date was given as the 1750s, depicting a series of true moles and African golden moles in the top section, but with the rest of the plate devoted to a pair of very remarkable-looking big cats. Here is that plate:

A pair of anomalous speckle-coated 'tigers' (and also a series of mole colour morphs) depicted in a 1750s plate from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus

According to the description given for the plate, these cats were tigers! I am not sure whether this identification is the original one given by Seba in his Thesaurus, or is simply one hazarded by the owner of the website containing the scans, but what I am sure of is that whatever these pale-furred, liberally spotted cats may be, they are certainly not the orange-furred, unequivocally -big cat that we all know as the tiger, unless...?

What if the term 'tiger' was being used here not in relation to Panthera tigris, but rather in its Latin American meaning, i.e. 'jaguar'? Yet these illustrated cats possess no trace of the jaguar's normal rosettes and they lack its fur's deep orange background colouration too, being patterned all over instead with an array of solid black dots or speckles upon a virtually white background - thereby greatly resembling the alleged appearance of Peru's speckled tiger aka Anomalous jaguar.

As one of the greatest zoological collectors of all time, if anyone were likely to obtain specimens of this most exotic, elusive form of South American crypto-cat, Seba would have to be a primary candidate for achieving such a feat.

The modern-day Taschen compendium of the plates from Albertus Seba's Thesaurus, entitled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (© Taschen)

Needless to say, I realise that this is all highly speculative. It may simply be that the two cats are very inaccurate representations of normal jaguars, or even leopards, such as the pale-coated Arabian leopard Panthera pardus nimr (their non-gracile body proportions and lack of teardrop facial markings argue strongly against their being cheetahs). Yet in view of how accurate other depictions of animals are in Seba's Thesaurus, this seems strange.

In any event, they are certainly tantalising enough in appearance to warrant inclusion in any coverage of speckled mystery cats, just in case they are relevant and any further investigation of them can be achieved. So if anyone reading this ShukerNature blog post should happen to own a modern-day Taschen compendium of the Seba Thesaurus's plates, I would very greatly welcome any news of what identity was given in it for these two speckle-coated big cats. Thanks very much!


STOP PRESS: 15 March 2014

A few days ago, I gave in to temptation and purchased online a copy of the 2011 reprint of Taschen's modern-day reproduction compendium of this tome's sumptuous colour plates, which arrived today. I swiftly turned to the speckled cats plate, and discovered to my great surprise that they were labelled as...cheetahs! Anything less like cheetahs than these two felids would be hard to imagine, as they have the body proportions of a leopard or jaguar and lack the cheetah's characteristic facial teardrop marks. Only their speckled pelage is cheetah-like. Consequently, I can only assume that either the Taschen compendium's German compilers are mistaken in their identification, or the 18th-Century artist responsible for the original plate versions in Seba's Thesaurus did not draw them from life, or from accurately prepared taxiderm specimens either. Thanks also to Facebook friend Robert Hodge, who checked through his own copy of Taschen's plates compendium from Seba's Thesaurus while mine was en route and duly informed me that they were indeed labelled in it as cheetahs. Another mystery solved, albeit in a very disappointing, anticlimactic manner.

For plenty of additional information concerning a wide diversity of South American mystery cats, be sure to check out my two mystery cat books – Mystery Cats of the World (1989) and Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012)

ANOMALOUS JAGUARS AND OTHER SPECKLED MYSTERY CATS FROM SOUTH AMERICA

Jardine's enigmatic 19^th-Century illustration of a putative speckle-coated jaguar

I was pleased to learn yesterday that the long-awaited paper that I obliquely alluded to in my book Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), providing an extensive morphometric analysis of two skulls from two different types of Peruvian mystery big cat, has finally been published (click here to access it). It is co-authored by British palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish, who also has a longstanding interest in cryptozoology. The two mystery cats whose skulls are featured in the analysis are what another of this paper's four co-authors, Peru-based zoologist Dr Peter J. Hocking (who also obtained the skulls), originally called the speckled tiger ('tiger' being a prevalent term throughout Latin America for the jaguar Panthera onca) but which is renamed the Anomalous jaguar in the paper, and what Hocking originally called the striped tiger but which is renamed the Peruvian tiger in the paper. Based upon the results of the analysis, in which both skulls were shown to fall within the documented range for the jaguar, the paper's authors conclude that these specimens were indeed jaguars, but ones that exhibited aberrant pelage markings.

A jaguar exhibiting normal pelage markings and colouration

I'll comment further re the Peruvian tiger in a future ShukerNature blog post, as I wish to concentrate in this present blog post upon the Anomalous jaguar, because my Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery book contains some additional information – and one fascinating 19^th-Century illustration – that may be of relevance to this speckled South American crypto-felid that has long fascinated me. Here are the relevant excerpts from my book:

In 1992, within the International Society of Cryptozoology's journal, Cryptozoology, Peruvian zoologist Dr Peter J. Hocking presented some previously unpublished evidence for the existence amid Peru's remote tropical forests of four different types of mystery cat, all possibly new to science…

Three Peruvian mystery cats – speckled tiger, striped tiger, and giant black panther/yana puma (© Peter Visccher/BBC Wildlife Magazine)

Even more intriguing [than the Peruvian giant black panther or yana puma, which was the first of the four to be documented by me in my book] is the 'speckled tiger' - claimed by locals to be as big as a jaguar (jaguars, incidentally, are popularly termed 'tigers' in South America), but with a larger head, and a unique pelage consisting of a grey background covered with solid black speckles. There is no known species of South American cat alive today that fits this description - so what could this mottled mystery cat from the montane tropical forests of Peru's Pasco province be?

A jaguar with a freak coat pattern and colouration is the most reasonable explanation, but this poses problems. The pelage of a complete albino jaguar (i.e. homozygous for the complete albino mutant allele of the Full Colour gene) would have white background colouration and normal but white rosettes visible only in certain lights, like watered silk; and even a chinchilla-reminiscent specimen (analogous or homologous to the white lions of Timbavati and/or the white tigers of Rewa) would have normal rosettes, probably grey or pale brown. So too would a leucistic specimen (see Chapter 3). Interestingly, on 19 January 2012, two white jaguar cubs with pale grey rosettes and normal green eyes were born to a typical rosetted father and a melanistic  mother at Aschersleben Zoo, in Germany; the first white jaguars born in captivity as far as is known, they are most probably leucistic, as indicated by their normal eye colour and the pale, washed-out appearance of their coat.

The white jaguar cubs of Aschersleben Zoo, Germany (© Aschersleben Zoo)

Genetically, the presence of solid black speckles reported for Peru's 'speckled tiger' rather than well-formed rosettes is anomalous. The only comparable case is that of the speckled servaline morph of the serval Leptailurus serval (see Chapter 27), and a couple of servaline-like cheetahs that I have dubbed cheetalines (see Chapter 19).

Skin of normal blotched serval on left and speckled servaline on right (© Owen Burnham)

One other controversial cat reported from South America that is somewhat reminiscent of Peru’s speckled tiger is the cunarid din, mentioned by the Wapishana Indians of Guyana and Brazil to Stanley E. Brock. In Hunting in the Wilderness (1963), Brock describes this strange cat as follows:

The cunarid din is quite like the ticar din [normal jaguar], except that the ground colour is nearer white than orange or yellow. The Indians say that the white kind always attain a much larger size than the former, but this is doubtful as a fact. The spots are often finer on the fore quarters and spaced further apart, and there are noticeably fewer spots within the rosettes along the sides of the body, giving the skin a rather leopard-like appearance.

Stanley E. Brock's book, featuring a regular jaguar on the cover (© Stanley E. Brock/Robert Hale Limited)

Moreover, while browsing through a copy of Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine’s classic Natural History of the Felinae (1834) recently, I was startled to discover a colour plate of a very odd-looking jaguar - whose paler-than-normal coat lacked this species’ familiar, clearly-defined rosettes and instead was patterned entirely with a heterogeneous array of solid black speckles and blotches. According to the plate’s caption, this jaguar was a native of Paraguay. Consequently, always assuming of course that it had been depicted accurately, this suggests that speckled jaguars or jaguar-like cats have also occurred here in the past. Perhaps they may still do so today.

Jardine's enigmatic illustration opens this present ShukerNature blog post and is also presented again here:

Jardine's enigmatic 19^th-Century illustration of a putative speckle-coated jaguar

Yet another speckled mystery cat from South America is the shiashia-yawá, one of several crypto-felids said to inhabit Ecuador:

While visiting southern Ecuador's Morona-Santiago province in July 1999, Spanish cryptozoologist Angel Morant Forés learnt of several mystery cats said to inhabit this country’s Amazonian jungles. Upon his return home, he documented them in an online field report, entitled ‘An investigation into some unidentified Ecuadorian mammals’, which he uploaded in autumn 1999 onto French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal’s website, the Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology, where it is still accessible today (at http://cryptozoo.pagesperso-orange.fr/welcome.htm). These very intriguing crypto-felids include:

A white-coated cat with solid black spots known as the shiashia-yawá, recalling the cunarid din of Guyana and Brazil, and Peru’s speckled tiger, but smaller (said to be intermediate in size between a jaguar and an ocelot). Angel considers it possible that this felid is merely an albinistic jaguar, but as already discussed in relation to the speckled tiger, such an identity would not explain its solid black spots, which sound very different from the familiar rosettes of normal jaguars. [My book then continues with descriptions of six other Ecuadorian mystery cats.]

The Anomalous jaguar's speckled pelage may be due to the expression of a homologous, or at least an analogous, mutant gene allele to that which creates the speckled serval and/or speckled cheetah morphs.

For plenty of additional information concerning a wide diversity of South American mystery cats, be sure to check out my two mystery cat books – Mystery Cats of the World (1989) and Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012).