Cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans # 8 (Patreon)

More finished cryptids for the Heuvelmans project. I haven't finished the text on them but here are brief comments...

South American sabretooth. At upper left we have my rendition of a large, striped, cat-like mammal from Colombia and Ecuador – supposedly with sabre teeth – that Heuvelmans included in his list. Heuvelmans wondered if it might be another surviving sabretooth cat, perhaps kin to Smilodon (which is known as a fossil from South America), but he considered it “much more likely” (!) that it might be a living member of Thylacosmilidae, a fossil group of metatherians (thylacosmilids are sparassodonts, a group conventionally regarded as marsupials but found in many studies to be outside the marsupial crown-group -- in which case they're stem-marsupials or non-marsupial metatherians). I’ve drawn this cryptid according to the 'traditional' vision of Thylacosmilus favoured at the time Heuvelmans was writing. More recent work indicates that Thylacosmilus (and presumably its close relatives) perhaps looked quite different from this conventional look.

Giant beaver. At lower left is a giant beaver. The final entry for the North American section of Heuvelmans's list is woefully vague: he listed “outsized lizards, snakes, beavers, and even kangaroos – not to mention dinosaurs, unicorns and flying men”. Wow. The 'outsized beaver' can only be a reference to suggestions - made in Loren Coleman's books and backed up by claimed eyewitness accounts - that people in parts of North America have encountered living specimens of Castoroides, a bear-sized beaver (about 3 m long) from the Pleistocene.

Waitoreke. At upper right is the Waitoreke, a small, superficially otter-like swimming animal reported from New Zealand and often suggested in the cryptozoological literature to be an endemic monotreme or surviving member of a 'Mesozoic grade' lineage. It's also been suggested that the sightings could have been based on introduced Asian otters. There's no clear or detailed view on what the Waitoreke is meant to look like so the version here is unashamedly based on what John Conway illustrated for Cryptozoologicon Volume 1.

Living thylacine 1. Finally, the animal at lower right is of course a thylacine. Heuvelmans featured two or three different sorts of thylacines or thylacine-like animals. The version depicted here is a fairly 'standard' thylacine; Heuvelmans had these animals on his list as among the cryptids of Australia. He considered the idea that sightings of 'tigers' from western Australia might be accounts of living thylacoleonids (so-called marsupial lions) but ultimately preferred the idea that they were living mainland thylacines. My thylacine here is the big, traditional-looking wolf-like version of the animal that Heuvelmans would have had in mind. Thylacines were not the giant, wolf-like apex predators of the cryptozoological literature, but slighter, more fox-like animals. We need to keep this in mind when reviewing supposed living thylacine accounts.

I still have a long way to go before this is all finished. I thought I'd finished the cats but I recently discovered that I've lost my scans of two additional cat cryptids that Heuvelmans included in the list - I want to do those next!

Finally -- a new article was recently published at Tetrapod Zoology, it's a republish of an old one and is on frog skeletons... https://tetzoo.com/blog/2022/9/2/the-remarkably-weird-skeletons-of-frogs