u/CrofterNo2

Recently, I've noticed a significant increase in the number of comments arguing that the mapinguari cannot be a ground sloth – or whatever else – because it is, ostensibly, a human cyclops with a mouth in its belly, and therefore does not actually resemble a sloth, primate, or bear at all. This disagreement is due to the assumption that the common pop culture version of the mapinguari is what's being referred to. In fact, the purely folkloric version of the mapinguari (here defined as the one or ones appearing in stories and unambiguous folk tales) is described differently – sometimes wildly so – all over the Amazon, while the cryptozoological idea of the mapinguari (here defined as the one described in reliable first-hand sightings) is not based on any of those descriptions. I thought I would stitch together some highly truncated information from my own writings on the mapinguari to explain just which descriptions the ground sloth theory – and competing theories involving spectacled bears, mystery primates, and giant peccaries, none of which have much to do with the popular cyclops either – is based on, and to give a little context concerning where those descriptions come from.

The theory that the mapinguari could be a ground sloth was originally proposed by the late David Oren, an American-born, naturalised-Brazilian ornithologist who was invited to join the zoological department of Brazil's Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, at the 'gateway to the Amazon'. From his first day in the Tapajós Basin in the eastern Amazon, Oren heard stories of the many supernatural creatures and spirits believed to inhabit the forests, including the mapinguari. According to those who claimed to have seen it, it was a monkey-like monster, distinguished by its hairy body and overwhelming stench. Many witnesses told him, 'I came across a giant monkey,' yet this animal was usually said to have enormous claws, whereas the largest monkeys have flat nails. The only clawed New World primates are the callitrichids – marmosets and tamarins – which also happen to be the smallest of all monkeys. Oren therefore filed the mapinguari away alongside forest folklore such as the curupira and the mãe-de-seringa.

At the University of Brasilia, Oren's thinking was changed by the late historian David Gueiros Vieira, who had been an administrator at the mining camp of Serra Pelada for over a year. In long conversations with Oren, Vieira recounted the first-hand sightings of reliable prospectors who had returned to the camp with stories of having seen mapinguaris. In 1988, through Vieira, Oren listened to an account which he could not dismiss as folklore or fantasy. A terrified Indian, working as a prospector in what is now northern Tocantins – where the name capelobo appears to be traditionally used for what we call the mapinguari – told him that he had been attacked in the rainforest by a completely unfamiliar creature, a 'wheezing,' stinking animal with enormous claws, the face of a monkey, and a large thick tail, covered in a coat of reddish and blackish hair. It started out walking on all fours, but the man must have threatened or even fired at it, because it ran after him, and rose up on its hind legs to a full height of six-foot-six, 'to defend itself'. Vieira asked, 'David, you are the biologist, I am the historian. What could this creature be?' Running the description over in his mind, a light went off in Oren's head, as he often phrased it: 'this creature could only be a ground sloth!' When he showed a reconstruction to the witness, the prospector agreed: this was the animal which had attacked him.

The next thought to go through Oren's mind was 'wait a minute, you'll be taken for a wacko!'. So, for the next five years, Oren and some close associates – most prominently Dionisio Pimentel, an ornithological assistant at the Museu Goeldi, and Universidade Federal do Acre palaeontologist Alceu Ranzi – secretly gathered a body of evidence in support of his theory, interviewing claimed mapinguari witnesses from all four corners of the Amazon. The most recent sightings came from the western Amazon, in the states of Acre and Amazonas; for the time being, most sightings from the east were decades old. Beyond his first interview with the prospector from Tocantins, he never showed his eyewitnesses pictures of ground sloths, seeking not to influence their accounts. By August 1993, Oren felt that it would be scientifically irresponsible to keep his findings secret any longer; in addition, the evidence seemed so strong to him that he feared the mapinguari would be discovered by someone else before he had a chance to publish his results. He had collected enough first-hand sightings to give a detailed description of the mapinguari's possible appearance and behaviour, and to compare it to what was then known of ground sloths, in the scientific journal Goeldiana Zoologia, and in several media interviews.

Based on his interviews with Indians, prospectors, and rubber-tappers, Oren described the mapinguari of the witnesses – as opposed to the various mapinguari(s) of general folklore – somewhat laconically as a ground-dwelling animal about the size of a grizzly bear, weighing an estimated five hundred pounds and standing no more than six feet tall on its hind legs, but surprisingly agile when on all fours, being capable of 'mov[ing] swiftly and forcefully if threatened,' almost as fast as a man running. It generally walks quadrupedally, rising onto its hind legs to feed on high vegetation, break down trees, or defend itself. The length of its arms must be striking, because some of its Indian names translate as 'long-armed creature'. It has a very tough, bulletproof hide covered in a coat of long and shaggy reddish hair, with a crest or mane of hair running down the neck and the back. Its feet are supposedly turned backwards, and its face is monkey-like, with two eyes: in his original paper, Oren states – in a passage shamelessly misquoted by a certain professional 'sceptic' – that the mapinguari is frequently said to have only one eye '[i]n the legend of the mapinguari (rather than first-hand testimony),' and in an interview published in Caminhos da Terra, No. 36 (April 1995), he is even more unambiguous, beginning his fairly lengthy description of the animal with the statement 'it has two eyes'.

Regarding behaviour, Oren's informants described the mapinguari as entirely vegetarian, twisting down and tearing apart palm trees with its claws and jaws to feed on the nutritious core, the palm-heart, as well as the berry-like fruits. Favoured palms include the bacaba (Oenocarpus bacaba), and, in the Bolivian Amazon, the urucuri palm (Attalea phalerata). The Karitiana of Rondônia stress its preference for the babassu (A. speciosa), and its consumption of this palm's fruits, as well as the nuts within them, and the Katukina of Acre add that it also feeds on bark and leaves. Several witnesses claimed that the animals they saw were followed by swarms of beetles, which never left them, a detail which appeared to be backed up by the infestation of scarabs in Rondônia's Cave of the Mapinguari during his visit. 'Nosewitnesses' describe the mapinguari's odour as unbearable, the worst they have ever smelled – comparable to musk, rotten garlic, skunk, mold and ammonia, faeces and rotting flesh, or fetid peccary and garlic vine (Mansoa alliacea). The odour is not merely superficial; many of those who smelled it reported vomiting or becoming 'intoxicated' and dizzy, suffering from headaches or fevers, and even passing out, and even more dramatic effects are occasionally claimed. Reports of people being permanently disabled or even killed by overexposure have a long history, but they continued into Oren's time: in the western Amazon, he received no less than three separate reports of people being rendered mute for the rest of their lives after being overexposed to the mapinguari's odour, and at Barra de São Manuel, on the frontier between Pará and Mato Grosso, it is alleged that many years ago, a villager who ran into, and smelled, the mapinguari returned home with a headache and a high fever, and subsequently wasted away until he died. Nevertheless, people of the eastern Amazon have found that the effects of the odour may be prevented with tobacco or urine.

Oren did not remain idle after publishing his paper. He believed that a very small number of mapinguaris could still survive in Acre and western Amazonas, and in March 1993, shortly before his paper was published, a rubber-tapper had told him that he had seen a 'giant sloth' just three weeks previously. Even if a live animal could not be found, mapinguaris were rumoured to have been killed – some of them buried – in the valleys of the Rios Juruá, Purus, Guaporé, and Madeira; and a rubber-taper in Acre was said to still possess the remains of a mapinguari which he had shot while hunting. In the end, Oren found no hard proof of the mapinguari's existence during his ten or so expeditions to these and other regions, but he did interview around eighty alleged eyewitnesses, including seven hunters who claimed to have killed these animals, allowing him to paint a more detailed portrait of the mapinguari for J. Richard Greenwell and the International Society of Cryptozoology in 1996, and in a second paper published in Edentata (now Xenarthra) in June 2001.

The seven hunters claimed to have killed mapinguaris mainly in the western Amazon. Two hunters had killed specimens in Acre's Parque Nacional da Serra do Divisor. Others had been shot in Amazonas – in the municipalities of Eirunepé and Carauarí on the Juruá, and Manicoré on the Madeira – in Marabá in Pará, close to the old mining camp of Serra Pelada, and in Juína in Mato Grosso. All but one of the animals were killed with solid lead shotgun slugs fired straight at the head; the seventh hunter simply emptied his .38 revolver into the mapinguari's chest. According to Lothar Frenz, one of the mapinguaris was killed by a rubber-tapper who was out hunting in the forest. The man, hearing a human-like shout, turned to see an angry-looking, hulking animal rising up onto its hind legs. He shot it dead, but the stench stupefied him, and he wandered aimlessly in the woods for some hours. When he recovered, he cut off the mapinguari's paw to show to his brother, but even this souvenir smelled so foul that he eventually threw it away in the forest. Two other hunters had likewise saved hair samples and claws, but had similarly discarded them; the others were too nauseous to take any remains. One of the latter group, a rubber-tapper who had allegedly killed a mapinguari after a rubber baron offered a reward for physical evidence, claimed that he could not bring himself to get close enough to take samples, even when he wrapped his shirt around his face. The smell was so disorienting that, had it not been for the return of a friend who had fled when the mapinguari first appeared, the rubber-tapper would have become lost in the woods. The same expedient was more useful for a rubber-tapper who reported shooting a mapinguari in 1969; a shirt wrapped around his face allowed him to get close enough to remove the claws of what he described as a 'huge, fanged, monkey-like animal with a thick tail.' The claws were eventually given to a local police chief, but by the time of Oren's investigation a quarter of a century later, the chief was dead, and nobody could remember what had happened to them.

Three more hunters had even allegedly managed to capture living mapinguaris in relatively recent years, but all three animals had escaped, as their foul smell made it impossible for the hunters to maintain their focus. Most fascinating of all, in my opinion, are the accounts Oren received of lost mapinguari cubs being taken in and raised by Indians. During one of his first expeditions, the Kanamari of Eirunepé, opposite the mouth of the Rio Tarauacá, told Oren that some hunters had once scared off a mother mapinguari, which left behind two almost-newborn cubs. The Kanamari cared for these infants for a couple of years, initially feeding them on human milk and bananas before moving up to foliage, until, with their maturation, their stench became too much to bear, whereupon they were released into the jungle. In later years, the hunters sometimes saw them, now fully-matured, in the forest; according to Oren, both man and mapinguari would keep at a respectful distance in such situations, with both parties showing clear recognition of one another.

All seven hunters consistently described extremely robust, powerfully-built quadrupedal animals, heavy enough to break thick buttress roots with their footsteps, which could rear up onto their hind legs to walk unsteadily, thus reaching a height of around two metres, or six-and-a-half feet. They were covered in long and coarse hair, variably described as reddish, blackish, or brownish, and their muzzles were compared to those of horses and donkeys, but were shorter, and armed with four large canine teeth often described as fangs. Their tails were short but possibly thick, and their forepaws were armed with claws shaped like those of the giant anteater (strongly curved or hooked), but closer in size to those of the giant armadillo – which, with claws measuring almost eight inches in length, has one of the most disproportionate claw-to-body-size ratios in the animal kingdom.

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