Cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans # 7 (Patreon)

The annoyingly slow work on the cryptids project continues, and here are the latest efforts: the pale Chinese bear the bai-xiong (or baixiong, it means 'white bear') and the mid-sized South American ground sloth - the ellengassen - that Heuvelmans listed in the Neotropical region of his list. I don't think that the baixiong should be regarded as a cryptid, since it's known from taxiderm specimens and even individuals that have been kept alive (Heuvelmans mentioned specimens kept at Wuhan and Beijing; 10 are on record, and two are alive today, one at Wuhan and one at Shenzhen Wildlife Park, Guangdong Province). It even has a scientific name: Selenarctos shenonensis Liu, 1977. A photo of a taxiderm specimen is included in David Xu's book 2018 Mystery Animals of China.

This is not, then, a potential taxon known only from anecdote; a mild controversy exists as to what these bears are, since (so far as I can tell) this hasn't been determined with absolute certainty and a few different suggestions have been made. Is this an unusual population (a subspecies?) of Asian black black, or Brown bear? The suggestion has also been made that some of the sightings attributed to this bear represent wayward Polar bears. The presence of thick fur lateral to the neck and the relatively posterior placement of the ears in the specimen pictured by Xu makes me think that this specimen - and maybe baixiong in general - are pale Asian black bears.

With the baixiong done, I think I only have one bear from the list left to do, and that's the giant MacFarlane's bear. Here's a montage of the bears done so far... Milne at top, Riff bear at lower right....

As for the sloth -- Heuvelmans spoke a lot about the possible late survival of ground sloths in his On the Track of Unknown Animals (published 1958), but it isn't clear from his text there that he was positing survival to modern times of sloths otherwise known as fossils. His inclusion of the ellengassen in the list does show, however, that he thought one big sloth, at least, to still be extant. In recent decades the main advocate of this hypothesis has been ornithologist David Oren, who has argued that the mapinguiri of the Amazon is a mid-sized ground sloth that persists to today. Oren argued that the supposedly bullet-proof skin, large curved claws, coarse brown fur and so on were consistent with a sloth identity. I personally think he was guilty, however, of picking the features that he liked, and ignoring those that were not consistent with the sloth hypothesis. Indeed, other people imply that mapinguiri is a bigfoot-type creature. The truth is that it's a vaguely defined monster that isn't really described in a precise way.

Finally -- BLACK DOGS. And finishing with something that isn't relevant to the Heuvelmans list, you might be interested to know (if you didn't already) that I recently published a long article on spectral Black Dogs at TetZoo. This involved doing some art very similar in style to the creatures I've been illustrating for the Heuvelmans project...

Here's the article: https://tetzoo.com/blog/2022/8/13/legend-of-the-black-dog

Ok, that's it for now. Thanks as always for support, it's much appreciated. Much is going on in these parts, including ANOTHER British spinosaurid paper, a new cryptozoology book proposal, and an article on cryptozoology for The Biologist. Until next time!