THE YUKON BEAVER EATER, AND GROUND SLOTHS IN NEW ZEALAND?

Restoration of Megatherium (Wikipedia/Public domain)

When we think of sloths, we generally picture those famously sluggish, dog-sized, tree-dwelling beasts that spend much of their time hanging upside-down from branches in modern-day Central and South America. Millions of years ago, however, there were several additional, very different morphological types – of which the most famous and dramatic were the ground sloths.

Most of these were primarily terrestrial, some were rather bovine in appearance but with shaggy fur, and many were considerably larger than their arboreal relatives. Although principally quadrupedal, ground sloths were capable of squatting erect on their hind legs to browse upon high-level foliage, and their distribution range included not only tropical mainland Latin America, but also North America as well as various of the Caribbean islands.

There were four separate taxonomic families containing ground sloths. The largest species were the megatheriids, typified by Megatherium ('big beast') from the Pleistocene of Patagonia, which attained the size of an elephant (recently split from the megatheriids into their own taxonomic family are the nothrotheriids). At the other extreme were the megalonychids, some being the smallest of all ground sloths, but also including the ox-sized Megalonyx ('big claw'), which earned its name from the huge claw on the third toe of each of its hind feet. This latter family also contains today's two-toed tree sloths.

Skeleton of Megatherium (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Intermediate in size between the above groups of ground sloth were the mylodontids - which are of particular cryptozoological interest. For although the last representatives of all types of ground sloth officially died out several millennia ago, reports of mysterious creatures resembling these supposedly bygone beasts have emerged from several different Neotropical locations in modern times - including in particular some compelling evidence to suggest that Brazil may harbour a species of living mylodontid, eluding scientific discovery yet well known to the native people sharing its secluded jungle domain, referring to this cryptid as the mapinguary.

Moreover, certain putative ground sloths living in modern times have been reported from localities outside the Neotropics, including the following pair of hitherto little-known examples.

THE SAYTOECHIN OR YUKON BEAVER EATER

In September 1989, the then recently-formed British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC) was contacted by a Canadian First Nation member named Dawn Charlie concerning a mysterious beast featuring in their oral traditions relating to Yukon's wildlife. The beast in question was referred to as the saytoechin (which translates as 'beaver eater'), and was described as being bigger than even the biggest grizzly bear, and feeding principally upon beavers, which it apparently captured by flipping up their lodges and then seizing the exposed beavers inside. When Native Americans living in the area were shown a book of extinct mammals, they selected an illustration of a ground sloth as the saytoechin, and the most recent reported sighting of one dates from the mid-1980s. As documented in 1990 by BCSCC co-founder Prof. Paul LeBlond in #4 of the Club's newsletter after interviewing Dawn Charlie, the details given by her concerning this sighting are as follows:

The latest report was from Violet Johny, my husband’s sister, who was fishing with her husband and her mother at the head of Tatchun Lake 4 or 5 years ago.  An animal came out of the woods, 8 or 9 feet high, bigger than a grizzly bear.  It was a “saytoechin” and it was coming towards them.  They panicked, fired a few shots over its head and finally managed to get the motor going and took off.  There are other reports.  There is also a report that a white man shot one in a small lake in that area.  Beaver eaters are supposed to live in the mountainous area east of Frenchman Lake.

Although ground sloths are generally thought of as tropical Latin (particularly South) American creatures, before their official extinction at the end of the Pleistocene some species had migrated northwards and had indeed established themselves in parts of North America. At least five genera are currently represented by fossils discovered in various locations here, including a single species, Megaloynx jeffersonii, in Yukon.

Life-sized restoration of Megalonyx jeffersonii in life, at the Iowa Museum of Natural History (© Bill Whittaker/Wikipedia)

So in terms of zoogeography alone, a Yukon ground sloth is already known, but obviously a living one is another matter entirely – as is the saytoechin's apparent dietary proclivity for beavers. This is because according to traditional palaeontological belief, all forms of terrestrial non-aquatic ground sloth were exclusively herbivorous. Having said that: in 1996, Drs Richard Fariña and Ernesto Blanco from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay, published a thought-provoking if controversial paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which they proposed that Megatherium could have used its fearsome claws to overturn, stab, and kill glyptodonts as prey.

From analysing a Megatherium skeleton, Fariña and Blanco discovered that its olecranon (the elbow portion to which the triceps muscle attaches) was very short. This adaptation is found in carnivores, and optimises speed rather than strength. These researchers opined that this would have enabled Megatherium to use its claws like daggers, and they suggested that it may have commandeered kills made by the sabre-tooth Smilodon in order to add nutrients to its diet (such behaviour is known as kleptoparasitic). Moreover, based upon the estimated strength and mechanical advantage of its biceps, they proposed that Megatherium could have overturned adult glyptodonts as a means of scavenging or hunting them.

However, this proposal has not gained widespread acceptance. In particular, palaeontologist Dr Paul S. Martin considers it "fanciful", noting that in terms of their dentition, ground sloths lack the carnassials that characterise predators, and that to suggest even that they were scavengers (let alone predators) is a reach. In addition, ground sloth dung deposits studied by him in Arizona's Grand Canyon and also in caves in Nevada, New Mexico, and western Texas contained no traces of bone. So far, therefore, at least as far as the palaeontological world is concerned, the case for carnivorous ground sloths in the past (not to mention in the present) has yet to be convincingly made.

Exquisite vintage illustration of Megatherium, from Extinct Monsters - A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life, 4th ed., 1896, Reverend H.N. Hutchinson (public domain)

As for the saytoechin: as discussed by Canadian cryptozoologist Sebastian Wang in a BCSCC Newsletter article (fall 2006) documenting this little-known cryptid, although the Native Americans selected a ground sloth from a book of extinct mammals as resembling it there is little else that actually links the two creatures directly. Other, less dramatic identities for it include an unusually large grizzly bear or black bear, plus some cryptozoological ones, such as a bigfoot, or even a surviving short-faced bear Arctodus or giant beaver Castoroides, although the idea of a giant beaver habitually preying upon normal beavers does not seem very likely. As far as I am aware, no specific search has ever been made for the mystifying Yukon beaver eater, so it is surely time for someone to rectify this oversight.

GROUNDS SLOTHS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN NEW ZEALAND?!

It was cryptozoological archivist Richard Muirhead who kindly brought to my attention what must surely be the most unexpected claim ever made regarding alleged living ground sloths, which can be found in British retired submarine officer Gavin Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002). In it, he claims that from 1421 to 1423, during China's Ming dynasty under the Yongle Emperor, the fleets of Admiral Zheng He, commanded by the captains Zhou Wen, Zhou Man, Yang Qing, and Hong Bao, discovered the Northeast Passage, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica; circumnavigated Greenland; attempted to reach the North and South Poles; and circumnavigated the world a century before before Ferdinand Magellan carried out the first officially-recognised circumnavigation. Not too surprisingly, mainstream historians do not agree with his claims, but such matters lie outside the scope of this present book of mine.

Megatherium statue in Bautzen, Germany (© Frank Vincentz/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

What does lie within its scope, however, is Menzies's suggestion in his own book that on one of their ships the Chinese took aboard some mylodontids captured in Patagonia but that upon reaching New Zealand in c.1421 a pair escaped when the ship was wrecked in Dusky Sound in Fjordland at the southwestern tip of South Island. Moreover, in 1831 a ship from Sydney, Australia, visited Dusky Sound, where two sailors from the ship saw an animal that according to Menzies fitted the description of a ground sloth.

If so, this would indicate that the escaped mylodontids from the 1400s had not only survived in New Zealand but must also have established a population that was still in existence there four centuries later – always assuming of course that the beast seen was indeed a ground sloth, which is a massive assumption to say the least, and even more so when an independent source of information concerning this latter cryptid is examined (see below). Also, the wrecked ship was not Chinese, but an English vessel called the Endeavour, and was wrecked in 1795, not 1421.

A mylodontid depicted on a postage stamp issued by Cambodia in 1994 (public domain)

Further information concerning this very strange state of affairs was presented in Robyn Jenkin's fascinating book New Zealand Mysteries (1970), which contained the following detailed account of the sailors' mystery beast sighting:

Even more bizarre was a story, also reported to the Collector of Customs in Sydney when the Sydney Packet returned home in 1831. One of the ship's gangs which had been stationed at Dusky Sound told of the discovery of an enormous animal of the kangaroo species.

The men had been boating in a cove in some quiet part of the inlet where the rocks shelved from the water's edge up to the bushline. Looking up they saw a strange animal perching at the edge of the bush nibbling the foliage. It stood on its hind legs, the lower part of its body curving into a thick pointed tail, and when they took note of the height it reached against the trees, allowing five feet for the tail, they estimated it stood nearly thirty feet in height!

The men were to windward of the animal and were able to watch it feeding for some time before it spotted them. They watched it pull down a heavy branch with comparative ease, turn it over and tilt it up to reach the leaves it wanted. When it finally saw them, the animal stood watching the men for a short time, then made one almighty leap from the edge of the bush towards the water's edge. There it landed on all fours but immediately stood erect before making another great leap into the water. The men were able to measure the first jump and found it covered twenty yards. They watched the animal plough its way down the Sound at tremendous speed, its wake extending from one side of the Sound to the other.

Here again one is tempted to think the rum was talking, and for an Australian going away from home for months on end, what other animal would stir the imagination but a kangaroo? But how much more romantic to think that perhaps they really had seen some prehistoric animal living out its days in the remote fastnesses of the West Coast Sounds.

Romantic it may be, but the mundane reality is that no ground sloth is suspected to have behaved in the highly dramatic manner ascribed to the creature described above, or to have attained its colossal dimensions, which even dwarf those of the mighty Megatherium. In any case, as no comparable accounts appear to have been filed in this dual-island country since that one, it is surely safe to say that if a living ground sloth is indeed discovered one day, it will not be anywhere in New Zealand!

My late mother, Mary Shuker, alongside a life-sized Megatherium statue by Victorian sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in London's Crystal Palace Park, photographed in 2010 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

My sincere thanks to Sebastian Wang for making available to me his detailed BCSCC Newsletter article on the Yukon beaver eater, and to Richard Muirhead for bringing to my attention the remarkable history of New Zealand's alleged ground sloths.

This ShukerNature article is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors.

19^th-Century engraving depicting the creation of the Crystal Palace Megatherium (public domain)

HOW AN AUSTRALIAN VAMPIRE BECAME THE JERSEY DEVIL

The Jersey devil (© Richard Svensson)

For various reasons, it has been quite some time since I last blogged here on ShukerNature. But for many other reasons, which have illuminated my life during the past 24 hours due to the kindness of friends, I realise that it is high time that I did, so here goes. Due to its specific subject, I would like to dedicate this ShukerNature article to one of those friends in particular, as I know that it has been an interest of hers since an early age. And so, Emma Marie, this is for you.

It is rare that a blatant zoological impossibility is not only captured alive but is also placed on public display. Yet during 1909 in Philadelphia, USA, this is precisely what happened...sort of.

One of the most bizarre and baffling mystery beasts documented in the annals of cryptozoology must surely be the Jersey devil (aka the Leeds devil - according to one yarn, it was supposedly the monstrous offspring of Mother Leeds, a reputed New Jersey witch, after she had been impregnated by the devil in 1735). Alleged sightings of this creature date back as far as the 18^th Century, and most commonly occur within an extensive, heavily-forested area of coastal plain stretching across seven counties in southern New Jersey, known as the Pine Barrens. However, there have also been reports emanating from areas far beyond this epicentre – especially during a major 'flap' or outbreak of Jersey devil activity that took place during January 1909, and which stretched as far as Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.

The creature itself, widely blamed for livestock killings and other depredations, has been described in many different ways, but was generally accorded a pair of leathery, bat-like wings, as well as four limbs (with the clawed front limbs much shorter than the cloven-hoofed hind ones). It was also said to be bipedal, and was often claimed to sport a horse-like head but bearing a pair of ram's horns, a long forked tail, and flashing red eyes. In some encounters, the eyewitnesses alleged that it had emitted a loud blood-curdling scream.

Jersey devil as depicted in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 1909 (public domain)

Needless to say, from a zoological standpoint such a creature is an anatomical nonsense, as scientists and other wildlife experts have always steadfastly maintained – thus suggesting that if the Jersey devil is indeed real, it is very different (and far more prosaic) than the evidently much-exaggerated, greatly-embroidered versions that have been claimed by some eyewitnesses down through the ages. Nevertheless, this did not prevent a pair of very canny entrepreneurs from cashing in on the Jersey devil frenzy that took hold during 1909 with what proved to be a very lucrative if entirely fraudulent exhibition purporting to display no less extraordinary an entity than a bona fide, recently-captured, and still very much alive specimen of this sensational(ised) mystery creature.

During the early 20^th Century, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania was home to T.F. Hopkins's Ninth and Arch Street Museum, but by the onset of 1909 it was suffering from falling attendances. Anxious to reverse this worrying trend, Norman Jefferies, the museum's publicity manager, hatched a mutually beneficial scheme with animal trainer Jacob F. Hope, one that would boost the museum's popularity and also be financially remunerative to Hope in exchange for his assistance.

As concocted by Jefferies and Hope, a certain story was duly made public about how an extraordinary - and extremely bloodthirsty - animal known as an Australian vampire, formerly in Hope's possession, had recently escaped, and how it was this creature that had been responsible for the bizarre Jersey devil sightings reported in the eastern Pennsylvania/southern New Jersey region during that same time period. Happily, however, according once again to their story, this creature had now been recaptured alive and unharmed, and would be put on display by the museum where it could be seen by one and all, for a viewing fee of course.

Original advertisement for the Jersey devil exhibition at the Ninth and Arch Street Museum in January 1909 (public domain)

To substantiate this claim, Hope had arranged for a team of a dozen or so specially-hired men who were part of the hoax and acted out the role of trained animal handlers, armed with nets and other implements, to venture forth into a local park one night where the creature was supposedly on the loose, and capture it there. This was duly accomplished when one of the men, perched in a tree, dropped a net over the animal when it passed by underneath. Interested outside observers who may have suspected a fraud had they directly witnessed what was happening were kept outside by a fence ringing the entire park, which was also closed to the public at night anyway.

And what was this ferocious 'Australian vampire' that they had captured in the park? In reality, it was nothing more alarming than a large male red kangaroo Macropus rufus that Jefferies had obtained earlier from a New York animal-dealer colleague and had then 'transformed' into the greatly-feared Aussie mystery beast. This transformation consisted of Jefferies painting a series of vivid green stripes upon its red fur and attaching to its shoulders a pair of lightweight artificial wings, manufactured from thin bronze and covered with rabbit fur. It had then been secretly taken to the park by its supposed pursuers and quietly released there, after which they had promptly – and publicly - recaptured it.

A massive steel cage placed inside the museum's cellar was then set up by Jefferies as the location for his unique specimen's exhibition. Dimly lit, temporarily hidden from outside view by a dropped curtain, and with a gruesome collection of chewed bones strewn across the floor, this was the melodramatic scene in which the creature would take centre stage. Unfortunately, however, the kangaroo did not like its surroundings, and refused to cooperate by putting on any kind of show when tried out by Jefferies in advance of admitting any paying visitors. So he arranged for a boy armed with a long stick bearing a sharp nail at its end to lurk hidden amidst the shadows at the back of the cage.

The Jersey devil (© Markus Bühler)

 As soon as the visitors came in and the curtain rose, the boy would poke the kangaroo surreptitiously with the nailed stick, causing it to leap forward shrieking, its false wings flailing, scaring its audience for an instant before the curtain came down. The shocked audience would then leave, the next visitors would enter, the curtain would rise, and the same brief scene would be enacted all over again, and again, and again – because the exhibition proved very popular, generating much-needed increased takings for the museum, and presumably a handsome payment for Hope too. Only the poor frightened kangaroo, tormented by the nail-embedded stick and confronted by gawping, screaming audiences, gained nothing from the tawdry proceedings.

And how do we know all of this? In 1929, Jefferies publicly confessed to the whole squalid charade.

This ShukerNature blog article is excerpted from my book A Manifestation of Monsters.

LET'S ALL LOOK OUT FOR THE LAVELLAN

A 19^th-Century painting of some aquatic shrews (public domain)

In an earlier ShukerNature blog article, I documented a quite small and little-known but thoroughly fascinating if somewhat macabre mystery beast from Scotland known as the earth hound (click here) – and now, here is a second one, the lavellan.

According to local lore in Caithness and Sutherland, apparently the stronghold of this cryptid, the lavellan is – or was – a rodent with flashing eyes, a disproportionately-large mouse-like or rat-like head, and similar body colouration too. However, it was larger than a rat, had an exceedingly venomous bite, was also a blood-sucker, and inhabited marshes as well as deep water-filled hollows in rivers.

A water vole - one identity that has been proposed for the lavellan (© public domain)

Any cattle drinking from a body of water containing a lavellan would invariably die, and, bizarrely, this creature could inflict lethal injuries upon livestock from a distance too, from as far away in fact as approximately 100 ft, though the precise mechanism responsible for this fatal activity is never elucidated in such reports. Yet, paradoxically, if farmers had sick animals, they could be cured if they drank water in which the pelt from a dead lavellan had been dipped.

Interestingly, its name in Scottish Gaelic is also applied to the water shrew Neomys fodiens (which, interestingly, does have a weakly venomous bite) and the water vole Arvicola amphibius, both species having been identified as the lavellan by various authors. Yet the latter creature was supposedly much larger than either of them. Conversely, in John Fleming's book History of British Animals (1828), he claimed that it was likely to be the stoat Mustela erminea, because in early highland lore the stoat supposedly exuded some kind of "foul matter" that was toxic to horses and other animals.

A stoat - another identity proposed for the lavellan (public domain)

The lavellan's most diligent modern-day investigator is naturalist Raymond Bell, who has memorably dubbed it a 'giant vampire shrew' in various talks and writings that he has prepared on this subject. He has speculated that it may have been at least in part nothing more than a fictitious bogey-beast invented by parents to ward their children away from deep water, or even an attempt to explain away mysterious diseases arising in livestock. However, he also concedes that some bona fide creature might have been at the core of the lavellan legend too, but what that creature was may never be determined.

(As an entertaining digression, 1959 saw the release of a Ray Kellogg-directed science-fiction film that went on to become a highly popular cult movie - The Killer Shrews, in which visitors to a remote island are terrorised by giant mutant shrews. The most famous aspect of the film is that whereas close-ups of the shrews utilise hand-puppets, wider shots of the entire creatures feature coonhounds dressed up to look like shrews! A sequel, Return of the Killer Shrews, was produced in 2012. Both films starred James Best.)

Promotional poster for The Killer Shrews (© McLendon-Radio Pictures Distributing Company – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use educational/review basis only)

Incidentally, a real-life creature that has been colloquially dubbed a giant killer shrew is Deinogalerix koenigswaldi, which lived during the late Miocene Epoch (11.3-5.6 million years ago) on what was then the Italian island of Gargano, now the Gargano Peninsula. With a skull length of 8 in and a total body length of 2 ft, it occupied the ecological niche filled today by dogs and cats. Yet in spite of its generic name (Deinogalerix translates as 'terror shrew'), it was actually a giant species of gymnure or hairy hedgehog, a group of eulipotyphlan insectivores whose largest modern-day representative is the wonderfully-named moonrat Echinosorex gymnura (click here for a ShukerNature article devoted to this very distinctive mammal).

It is fascinating to consider that the ostensible familiarity of Great Britain's extensively-studied, exhaustively-documented natural history can nevertheless still harbour such riddles as the lavellan and the earth hound. But will their mysteries ever be solved? Perhaps someone reading this present article of mine has the answer to that question and, if so, I very much look forward to hearing from you!

Artistic restoration of Deinogalerix koenigswaldi in life (© Stanton Fink (aka Apokryltaros)/Wikipedia CC BY 3.0 licence)

This ShukerNature blog article was excerpted and expanded from my book The Menagerie of Marvels – further information has been collected by Raymond Bell, who may in due course submit a formal paper on this cryptid to the Journal of Cryptozoology, the world's only peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to mystery animals, published annually. Look out for Vol. 4, coming soon!

QUEMI, SPANISH RACCOON, MINI-SOLENODON, AND NESOPHONTIDS - A QUARTET OF CARIBBEAN CURIOSITIES (AND CRYPTIDS?)

The western Cuban nesophontid Nesophontes micrus as portrayed on a Cuban postage stamp issued in 1982 (© Cuban postal service)

Prior to their discovery and colonisation by Europeans, the West Indies in the Caribbean Sea were home to a rich diversity of wildlife, including many unusual endemic forms, most of which, tragically, were soon wiped out by the afore-mentioned colonisation process, due in no small way to the introduction to these islands of a number of non-native predatory species, including rats, domestic cats and dogs, and even mongooses. However, it is possible that some of the endemics survived to later dates than officially confirmed – and in certain cases may still be alive today, awaiting formal rediscovery. In a previous ShukerNature blog article, I documented the strange story of the mysterious Jamaican monkey Xenothrix (click here). Now, here is a selection of some more of these contentious but extremely intriguing Caribbean creatures that I have investigated and written about.

THE QUEMI QUESTION

The hutias constitute a series of coypu-related, muskrat-resembling species of rodent found only in the West Indies. Several of these are notorious for having been written off as extinct, only to be unexpectedly rediscovered years later. Indeed, in two separate cases the species in question was discovered alive several years after having been originally described from fossils.

An engraving from 1894 depicting the Cuban hutia (aka the hutia-conga) Capromys pilorides – up to 3 ft long, it is the largest true hutia, but is much smaller than the now-extinct giant hutias (public domain)

Long ago, however, they shared their islands with some much bigger relatives, loosely termed giant hutias. According to traditional zoological dictum, all of these became extinct well before the West Indies were reached by Europeans, but there is some intriguing evidence to suggest otherwise – the apparent post-Columbus existence here of a curious creature known as the quemi.

This is the name of a mysterious rodent mentioned by explorer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in his 16^th-Century account of Hispaniola. It was said to be brown in colour, like this island's hutias, but larger in size. Yet following Oviedo's report, nothing more was heard of the quemi – until the 1920s.

That was when some bones of a large, previously unknown species of rodent were discovered in a cave near a plantation at St Michel, Haiti, on Hispaniola. After studying them, Dr Gerrit Miller of the Smithsonian Institution identified their owner as a representative of Oviedo's obscure quemi, and in 1929, within his formal description of the bones, Miller named their species Quemisia gravis. Remains have since been found in the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola too. Moreover, this species was apparently a traditional item of food for the native Hispaniolans, as its limb bones have been found in early kitchen middens.

Today, the quemi is also known as the twisted-toothed giant hutia - but whatever happened to it? Researchers believe that this interesting rodent died out soon after the arrival on Hispaniola of the Spaniards, and certainly no later than the 16^th Century's close – yet another irreplaceable island endemic that simply couldn't compete with the arrival of humankind and its ever-attendant array of introduced species, particularly the black rat.

A taxiderm hutia specimen (Public domain)

Having said that, in 1989 one researcher speculated that Oviedo's description of the quemi may not have been a reference to Quemisia gravis after all, but instead to Plagiodontia velozi (aka P. ipnaeum). This is a now-extinct species of Hispaniolan hutia known as the Samana hutia, whose remains have been found with those of black rats, thus suggesting that it was still alive when the first Europeans and their stowaway rodent entourage first reached this Caribbean island in 1492.

The Samana hutia may also (or alternatively) be the identity of a second mystifying, still-unclassified Hispaniolan rodent. Known locally as the comadreja, this cryptid allegedly survived here until the 20^th Century.

THE SPURIOUS SPANISH RACCOON

Yet another Caribbean mystery mammal that may be hutia-related is the so-called 'Spanish racoon' mentioned in Dr Patrick Browne's The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (1756). Including it in a listing of six species of mammal that he collectively termed Mus (which is the genus housing the common, typical species of mouse within the taxonomic family Muridae), Browne claimed that this creature was not native to Jamaica but was frequently imported there from Cuba (where it was very common). He stated that it sported fairly rough fur; rabbit-like eyes, teeth, and lips, but wider nostrils, and shorter, smaller ears; plus a straight, tapering, hairy tail; and that it exhibited a vegetarian diet.

A North American raccoon, which certainly does not match the decidedly rodent-reminiscent description given by Browne for the so-called Spanish raccoon (public domain)

Interestingly, raccoons did formerly exist in Jamaica (and Cuba), but they were exterminated there by Spanish colonists who hunted them for their meat, with the last sightings reported in 1687 (and they were wiped out even earlier in Hispaniola, by 1513). However, no raccoon species corresponds with the verbal portrait by Browne given above, or is vegetarian, and it would be decidedly odd to categorise a bona fide raccoon as a mouse. Conversely, the Spanish raccoon as described by Browne was evidently a rodent. Consequently, when referring briefly to this enigmatic animal within his standard work Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Western Hemisphere (1942), American mammalogist Dr Glover M. Allen speculated that "it was probably the larger Cuban hutia, Capromys pilorides". Although this identification is certainly very plausible, it has never been formally confirmed, so the mystery of Browne's 'Spanish racoon' remains officially unresolved.

MARCANO'S MISSING MINI-SOLENODON

Looking like large rats with very long, attenuated snouts, solenodons may not seem very prepossessing in appearance, but they have great zoological significance, as they represent the last of an ancient line of insectivorous mammals stretching back 30 million years.

Taxiderm specimen of the Haitian solenodon (© Markus Bühler)

Now wholly confined to the West Indies, there are just two surviving species - the Hispaniolan solenodon Solenodon paradoxus, and the Cuban S. cubanus (of which only its black-and-white subspecies S. c. poeyana is still extant; no specimen of its buff-headed type subspecies S. c. cubanus has been reported since 1944). Both species are extremely rare, and have been written off as extinct on several occasions in the past, as chronicled in my three books on new and rediscovered animals.

19^th-Century engraving of the Cuban solenodon's distinctive black-and-white subspecies (public domain)

A smaller and more obscure third species of solenodon, Marcano’s solenodon S. marcanoi, is known only from geologically-recent skeletal remains, found in the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola, whose species was formally described and named in 1962. Because they were found in association with remains of Rattus rats (introduced onto Hispaniola by European settlers), it is believed that this diminutive solenodon persisted beyond Hispaniola’s initial European colonisation by Columbus during the late 1400s, but was wiped out soon afterwards by the rats once they arrived aboard Spanish vessels during the early 1500s,

NOSEING AROUND FOR NESOPHONTIDS

Another family of unusual insectivores (or, to be precise, eulipotyphlans) exclusive to the West Indies consisted of the nesophontids. These were shrew-like mammals of varying sizes (one of the 6-12 currently-recognised species was as large as a chipmunk) that supposedly died out during the 17th Century on the cluster of Caribbean islands (Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and two of the Cayman Islands) constituting their homeland. In 1930, however, some nesophontid bones and tissues extracted from a mass of owl pellets discovered in the Dominican Republic, Hispaniola, were found to be so fresh that it seemed possible that the individual(s) from which they had derived had been killed only a short time before. This encouraged Dr Gerrit Miller to speculate that some nesophontids may still exist after all, but radiocarbon-dating of such fresh-seeming pellets has so far failed to substantiate any 20^th-(or 21^st-) Century survival.

Representation of the Puerto Rican nesophontid Nesophontes edithae (© Jennifer Garcia/Wikipedia CC By-SA 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)

Nevertheless, certain researchers have suggested that some nesophontids may indeed have persisted until at least the early 1900s. Having said that, a 10-week survey of West Indian mammals conducted on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico by Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust researchers during the 1980s failed to uncover any evidence of current survival for them. Nevertheless, given the extremely elusive nature of their solenodon relatives on Hispaniola and Cuba, perhaps there may come a time when the nesophontid family will indeed be resurrected.

This ShukerNature article consists of excerpts from my books The Menagerie of Marvels and The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals.