.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

4 ft chupacabra 2, originally uploaded by Boju. This is a prop chupacabra I built for a freak show.

As part of the Dapper Cadaver Blog’s Monster Mondays project today I bring you another cryptid on the brink of being real – The Chupacabra, or in Spanish, El Chupacabra.

The Chupcabra has only been with us a little over 10 years, being named in Puerto Rico in 1995. It was described as a reptilian or alien looking bipedal creature with huge eyes, a round head, and spikes down it’s back. But the Puerto Rican Chupe bears little resemblance to the globe trotting hairless vampire dog thats been seen from Chile to Maine, and even Russia. Our Chupacabra haunts mostly Mexico and Texas, where its occasionally described as a hairless kangaroo-dog with spikes down it’s back, or just an ugly wrinkled hairless dog, with a huge muzzle, and saber-like fangs. They can travel by running or hopping. I wonder if the hopping may be due to injury or disease? From the Russian Chupacabra of 2006 ““It’s definitely a chupacabra! It has small front and large hind paws. To begin with the animal was walking on four legs, stood on its hind legs at the water, lifting up its long tail, and then started jumping like a kangaroo,” he says. In May Dmitry is determined to seek out the Russian chupacabra along with colleagues from the Ural Ufology Monitoring Station.”

In Texas multiple corpses have been recovered, centered around Cuero Texas, and most recently a video of a Chupe running down the street looking a lot like a mexican hairless. DNA evidence shows it to be closely related to, or a diseased, domestic dog or coyote.

If we drop the name Chupacabra from this tale, which is a completely different looking Puerto Rican monster that also sucks the blood of livestock, then the story gets older, and more interesting. The earliest “Chupacabra” attack I could find is in England nearly 200 years ago.

It goes something like this – “In the month of May, 1810, something appeared at Ennerdale, near the border of England and Scotland, and killed sheep, not devouring them, sometimes seven or eight of them in a night, but biting into the jugular vein and sucking the blood….Upon the 12th of September, someone saw a dog in a cornfield, and shot it. It is said that this dog was the marauder, and that with its death the killing of sheep stopped” –Charles Fort

Charles Fort then recounts of another Vampire Dog attack in Ireland in 1847, likening them to vampire bats, but finding it difficult to believe dogs can be vampires. As with the Chupacabra, the livestock was killed and drained of blood, but the body left in tact. When giant canine tracks were discovered near the kill sites, locals began shooting stray dogs on sight. During this wave of attacks several people were attacked an bitten by the vampire dogs, and suffered strange symptoms and madness. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this topic read the accounts of Charles Fort, as he goes through nearly 100 years of UK Chupacabra sightings.
For the next 200 years, vampire dog attacks have sporadically appeared. Like today’s Chupacabra attacks, the vampire dog attacks come in waves. They’re devastating at the time, often taking dozens of livestock and whipping people into a panic, but the soon halt. Whatever is going on, it’s clear we’re not dealing with a species that feeds on blood to survive generation after generation. Could we be dealing with a mutant? A disease? A madness? Malnutrition? The Supernatural? Could something be driving otherwise normal canines to become vampires?

Here’s one of the Texas Chupe specimens. It’s DNA showed it was most likely a coyote, but the muzzle is much thicker and the canine fangs are much longer. While mange may explain hair loss, something else would need to explain the changes to this “coyotes” teeth, snout, and behavior.

***************UPDATE*************UPDATE***************

I’ve been looking into canine diseases ever since I compared the US and English Chupa attacks. The English reports don’t mention hair loss as the Texas reports do, so we can disregard this as a symptom in the UK “Vampire dog” cases.

Although I could find no reports of rabies leading to blood drinking, the symptoms are interesting.

“The rabid animal may next enter a “furious” stage where it wanders about biting everything whether it moves or not.  It then develops paralysis of the throat, which makes swallowing difficult.”

It’s reasonable to assume that a starving animal which cannot swallow may try to sustain itself on a liquid diet, like a sick person drinking 7 Up and chicken soup, but for a carnivore that chicken soup would be blood. Again, this is speculation. We all know rabies can cause dementia in humans. However, by the mid 1800’s scientists including Louis Pasteur were working on vaccines for the disease, so if it was known, would so many cases of it go undiagnosed?

In the US a common symptom of Chupacabras is hair loss. If we assume a sore throat or difficulty swallowing to be the cause of the blood sucking, then I could only find one canine disease with both symptoms – Leishmania.

Leishmania is most commonly found in South and Central America. The Baker Institute Report notes that Leishmania has been reported in 21 states, and parts of Canada, but is rare. “Only if you live in southern Texas might the risk be significant” The territory of this disease fully coincides with chupacabra central. It causes hair loss, scabby or scaly skin, and swollen glands that can make swallowing difficult. It also can cause lameness which could explain why so many Chupas are described as hopping.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

bigfoot_wideweb__470x379,0, originally uploaded by Boju.

Another special report from Dapper Cadaver’s Monster Monday Blog. A couple of hunters are claiming to have found the body of a bigfoot in the backwoods of Georgia, USA. Good, lets see the body. They’ll announce their findings this Friday in Palo Alto, CA, including DNA evidence, and I should hope, the body itself. So far all that’s been released is the above photo.

The claims and the evidence for Bigfoot.
1. The Photo- photos are not proof. Plain and simple. The above photo could be fake, or it could be real, and unless you can spot something absolute like a zipper, there’s not much we can say about it. Props and costumes are designed to look real, so there’s not reason it can’t be a fake. Also, real things can easily appear fake in photographs, like the below gorilla corpse

2. DNA – Seems fool proof, but even this is going to be a tricky sell. Quick DNA tests are used to determine what something is NOT, so they’re compared against known samples. Since bigfoot is an unknown sample, they’ll need to sequence a lot of DNA to show that this is a new species. For comparison, the Chupacabra specimens that were found showed a 98% match with Coyotes, leading experts to conclude they were coyotes. While 98% sounds like a lot, remember that Humans share 98% of the genome of a chimpanzee. even 2% is talking about hundreds of thousands of different genes. Enough to establish a species.

3. The body. This is the only thing that counts. We need to see bones. We need to see stomach contents. We need to know this is a beast physically different from other apes and humans, and by it’s stomach determine that it did in fact live in Georgia.

4. The finders – these guys are known bigfoot hunters, and known bigfoot haoxsters. One of them has a book coming out soon, so this could all be free publicity. It’s already been revealed that the “Scientist” in their you tube video was a fraud. Sure, they spend a lot of time looking for bigfoot, but they also have falsely claimed to have evidence before.

That’s pretty much everything to keep in mind. Many a bigfoot has been seen in the south east, and a friend of mine from Louisiana is the only person I know who swears to have seen one. His description of a 7 foot reddish brown ape with 4-5″ inch shaggy fur, a black face, and a beard quite accurately matches the beast found. And he saw his more than 20 years ago. I myself doubted the existence of bigfoot until a few years ago. Any creature that large, whether alive or extinct, should have left bones, and up until a few years ago, no ape or human skeleton taller than modern man had ever been found. Even neanderthals, who are larger than us in many ways, are roughly the same height as us. Then they found the jawbones of Gigantopithecus, a 7 – 10 ft tall ape that lived a hundred thousand years ago in China. Now bigfoot has a plausible descent. Unlike modern apes and humans that eat fruits, vegetables, meat, and tender leafs, Giganto evolved to eat tough plants, like bamboo, grass, mature leaves, and pine needles. It’s entirely likely this beast could survive in the southern swamps and northern woods. And as similar as it is in diet to the Panda, it could be similar too in it’s elusive behavior. The Panda was not proven to exist until the 1927.
Here’s a reconstruction of what Giganto was thought to look like

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

monster of troy, originally uploaded by Boju.

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the Montauk Monster identification last week. High resolution photos were finally released, clearly showing raccoon paws. Congratulations if you correctly IDed the beast as a raccoon.

The response was incredible, and several new and plausible theories were brought forward, so this week, the Dapper Cadaver Blog would like to invite you to help unravel one of the most ancient monster mysteries in history – The Monster of Troy. Depicted on a Greek vase circa 560-540 BC, a huge, ghastly skull is seen emerging from a cliff as the heroes shot it with arrows. Its unusual in that most monsters of the Greeks are shown alive, enacting myths. This may be an actual record of a monster skull, a fossil skull, be unearthed, and I believe in good enough detail to positively ID the beast.

Important to note is that the Monster of Troy is sometimes described as a land monster, and sometimes as a sea monster, so we can’t rule either out. It’s known that the Greeks unearthed many ice age mammal skeletons, but the open boney ring around the eye, called scleral ossicles are only found in birds, dinosaurs, and reptiles, and the open sinus in front of the eye suggests a dinosaur or bird.

Paleontologists have suggested some of the following possibilities
Prehistoric Giraffes

Giraffes do have forward facing teeth and thick jaw bones. However, they don’t have open sinuses or scleral ossicles, and they do have horns, which a monster artist would have included.

A Giant Ostrich

Aside from the scleral ossicles, which are so delicate they’re rarely preserved, I don’t see how anyone could mistake an ostrich for the monster of Troy.

A Prehistoric Whale

This is a pretty good sea monster. It’s huge, has forward facing teeth, and an open sinus. However, no scleral ossicles because no mammal has the bony eye ring.

That’s all I could find on expert opinions. Here are some beasts I dug up as candidates. Remember, the bony ring around the eyes, the scleral ossicles, are rarely preserved, but are believed to be present in all dinosaurs.

Diplodocus (dinosaur)

Carnivorous Dinosaur

Plesiosaur (marine reptile)

Mososaur (marine reptile)

Hippo Skull (mammal)

Entelodont skull (mammal)

Although difficult to see in the fossils, scientists have found evidence that both Elasmosaurus and Plateosaurus had scleral ossicals (also known as sclerotic plates) Here’s a Plateosaurus with forward facing teeth, a massive jaw, and sclerotic plates in the eye sockets

UPDATES

The black mass behind the skull was once thought to be the ocean, and is now thought to be a cliff or cave. The curious thing about the skull is that it is a skull, and not a mythological beast. The greeks found many ice age mammal bones, but they tended to interpret them as gods and monsters, and illustrate them as alive. A famous example being elephant skulls and cyclopses

A Giant Wolf Eel SKull?

ANOTHER PICTURE OF THE MONSTER OF TROY – ALIVe

KRONOSAUR

MORE PREHISTORIC WHALES

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

montauk monster 1, originally uploaded by Boju.

Special Weekend report from Dapper Cadaver’s Monster Mondays
Early last week a hairless beast, roughly 3 feet long washed up on Montauk beach near Long Island. It was named the Montauk Monster. Multiple witnesses at various times during the day reported it, and several people photographed it. However, before the body could be analyzed, one of the locals scooped it up declaring they were going to mount it on their wall. This leaving no body, an unsolved mystery, and an internet sensation.

Here’s what we know. The beast is about 3 feet long, nearly hairless, with what appears to be a beak lined with teeth in the lower jaw. It has a tail, no obvious injuries, and apparently finger like claws. Two photographs show the creature at different times of day, and in different positions. Locals reported the waves were rolling it. Here’s the second photo, although they may be of different beasts.

If this is the same beast, it’s important to note it has a nasal opening and ears, like a mammal. The change in color is baffling though.

Several theories have surfaced as to what the Montauk Monster is. I’ll examine them from an anatomical perspective one by one.

1. It’s a sea turtle that’s lost it’s shell
Evidence for: It’s about the size of a sea turtle, it has a beak.
Evidence against: It has hair, ears, and teeth. It’s elbows point back, while a reptiles elbows point up. Also, a turtles shell contains it’s spine and ribs. It can’t simply fall out, and if it was ripped out, its back would be a bloody shapeless mess.

My Opinion: It’s definitely not a sea turtle

2. It’s a raccoon
Evidence for: It’s about the size of a raccoon. The beak is probably exposed skull (not unusual) The lower jaw dentation match the dentation of a raccoon. Both the monster and raccoons have fingers.
Evidence against: Raccoon paws are actually more like human or monkey hands, these hands appear straight , square, and thumbless, and if you look closely, he’s flipping you off. Nearly all carnivores have similar lower jaws. No upper teeth. Most importantly his neck is thicker than his head, indicating he couldn’t look all the way to the side (90′). Raccoons have slim, flexible necks. For comparison, here’s a raccoon skull, and a raccoon taxidermy form showing what they look like beneath their fur.

My opinion: It’s not a raccoon

3. It’s a pit bull
Evidence for: size and shape, lower jaw. Thick neck.
Evidence against: No upper teeth, and most importantly, the hands of the Montauk Monster appear finger/claw-like, not paw/pad-like.
My opinion: It’s not a pit bull.

4. It’s a fake
Evidence for: cynicism, monsters are hot right now.
Evidence against: So many unconnected witnesses, it would have to be quite a conspiracy, with a great prop building budget, and for no obvious gain.
My opinon: It’s not a fake.

My theory- it’s a badger
Evidence for: Badgers have matching lower dentation, thick necks, and straight claw like fingers. They also do have tails, although they’re hard to see when the badger has fur. Also, most mammals have skin pigmentation that in some way correlates with their fur cover. The white haunches and paws of this creature match the white underbelly of a badger.
Evidence against: Badgers aren’t supposed to live in the North East.
Badger with fur, showing tail

Badger skull

Furless body form used for badger taxidermy, not the similarities to the monster

5. It’s an unknown creature.
Evidence for: There is no perfect match between the Montauk Monster and any known North Eastern carnivores.

6. NEW THEORY – It’s a nutria or other large water rodent.

Evidence for: it was found in the water. Similar paws.
Evidence against: Too large, wrong anatomy, completely mismatched skull

My Opinion: It’s not a nutria.