Cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans # 6: CATS 2 (Patreon)

I've done more cryptids from the Bernard Heuvelmans list (see previous entries for some explanation), and I've now finished all the cats. As you can see, the remainder are a very attractive bunch. Here are thoughts on them...

1. The onza, a puma-like cat of Mexico regarded as distinct from the puma. Heuvelmans noted suggestions from the 1980s that this animal - if real - might be a surviving population of Miracinonyx, an animal regarded at the time as an American cheetah but today regarded as a cheetah-like member of the puma lineage (within the puma-cheetah clade; yes, they're still close relatives). When Heuvelmans's article was published, a major talking point in the cryptozoology world was the 1986 obtaining of a supposed dead onza specimen, shot in Mexico by rancher Andres Rodriguez Murillo and then subjected to scientific study. This was suspected by some to perhaps prove the onza's reality as a new species, but regarded immediately by others as an unusual puma. My reconstruction of the animal here is based on photos of the Rodriguez onza. Current thinking on the onza is vague; my conclusion is that the word never really applied to a single species (let alone a scientifically unrecognised one), but was instead used vaguely for various cats of the American tropics including jaguars (hence the name Panthera onca) and jaguarundis. 

2. Heuvelmans recognised the blue or Maltese tiger as a cryptid, even though - if real - it's clearly a colour morph or mutant, not a taxonomic form. Claimed sightings of blue tigers - yes, actually a deep shade of blue - come from Fujian Province and the best known originate from missionary and hunter Harry Caldwell, who even wrote a book titled Blue Tiger in 1925. There's no scientific basis for the existence of such animals but Karl Shuker (in his 1989 Mystery Cats of the World and his 2020 Mystery Cats of the World Revisited) proposed genetic mechanisms by which they might actually arise. There's a claim that a blue tiger was kept at a US zoo during the 1960s.

3. CAR and Chad are said to be home to a mountain-dwelling large cat, known variously as vassoko or coq-ninji, or tigre de montagne among French speakers. It's said to be red and marked with broad white vertical stripes, to be tailless... and to be sabre-toothed. Heuvelmans posited that it might be a relict machairodont, its persistence in remote mountain habitat being the consequence of a history that involved avoiding competition with conical-toothed pantherine cats. Heuvelmans actually proposed that machairodonts avoided competition with conical-toothed cats via two evolutionary routes... we'll get to the second one in a moment.

4. Heuvelmans followed Loren Coleman and Mark Hall in thinking that North American reports of lion-like cats might actually be descriptions of surviving specimens of Panthera atrox (though he regarded it as P. leo atrox), the great American lion. This cat was massive - perhaps reaching 500 kg - and substantially more heavily built than modern lions. I've reflected that here, deliberately showing the animal as giant and chunky.

And there's more....

Heuvelmans also promoted the existence of a great aquatic cat, based on legends and stories from right across tropical Africa that describe an assortment of toothy water monsters. He argued that these were late-surviving, aquatically adapted sabretooths which had become long-tailed ‘jungle walruses’. His proposal was that machairodonts had specialised in two ways to avoid competition with pantherine cats: by taking to the mountains, and by taking to the water and evolving pinniped-like features. As described in my books Hunting Monsters and Cryptozoologicon Vol 1, this is excellent SpecZoo but terrible rational thinking. The assorted African water monsters which Heuvelmans combined to make this creature (the n'yamale of Gabon, the ntambue ya mai of DRC, the dingonek, ndamathia and muru-ngu to people of Kenya, CAR and elsewhere) have little in common and – if you go back to the original accounts – there’s nothing about them that makes them ‘aquatic sabretooth’ descriptions. The whole area comes across as desperately romantic, free-wheeling speculation, sorry Bernard.

I placed the animal close to an onza to give some idea of scale.

Ok, that's it for now. More animals from this project soon! Thanks as always for support here.