Mapinguari of Brazil

The mapinguari is a creature from Amazonian folklore. It is described as a hairy, foul-smelling, man-eating beast that walks upright, has claws like hooks and feet turned backwards. Some tellers give it a single eye and a mouth on its belly. Stories place it in the forests of Pará, Amazonas and Acre in Brazil, and in neighbouring Peru and Bolivia. Nothing physical has ever been found, so it remains folklore with one unproven scientific theory attached.

The folklore

The folklorist Câmara Cascudo traced the name to a Tupi-Guarani phrase meaning roughly “the thing with a clubbed, twisted or backward-turned foot”. Different peoples have their own names and stories. The Karitiana call a similar being Kida harara, “laughing beast”. Matsigenka accounts include creatures called the Segamai and the Oshetoniro. Some rubber tapper tales add a Christian moral. In a 1928 account recorded by Wikipedia, a tapper said he came back from hunting to find a companion being eaten and the attack was blamed on breaking the Sabbath. The loud scream and the stench appear in many versions. Cascudo suspected the screaming element was recent, because it shows up in rubber-era tales but not in colonial writing.

The giant ground sloth idea

The zoologist David C. Oren, of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, proposed in a controversial 1993 paper that mapinguari stories might rest on contact with surviving ground sloths. In his 2001 follow-up he said he first heard tales after arriving in the Brazilian Amazon in 1977 and in 1988 heard an account he could not dismiss. He reported seven hunters who said they had killed one, and over 80 people who said they had seen one face to face. Six hunters said they used solid lead slugs aimed at the head, and none kept remains that survive, although three said they had saved hair, claws or a forefoot that were later discarded. Witnesses described a creature about 2 metres tall that is strong, smelly, covered in coarse reddish, brownish or blackish fur, and able to walk on two legs or four. Oren first favoured a mylodontid sloth, then a megalonychid. He admitted that not all the evidence fits, for example the short tail the hunters described.

Why most scientists doubt it

Ground sloths vanished from the American mainland around 12,000 years ago. Small sloths on Caribbean islands lasted much longer, to about 4,800 years ago by radiocarbon dating of Cuban remains. No sloth remains younger than that have been found on the mainland. Paul S. Martin argued in 2005 that survival was not credible. No physical sample has confirmed the animal, and Oren reports that the remains his informants kept were discarded. The single eye and belly mouth do not match any sloth. Bernard Heuvelmans argued instead for an unknown primate. Mário Monteiro suggested the spectacled bear.

Assessment

The mapinguari is a living legend that may have grown from real animals, fear of the forest and older stories. A surviving giant sloth is a hypothesis with no specimen, photograph or bones to support it. Treat reports of a mapinguari as folklore and anecdote until physical evidence turns up.

Sources

• Mapinguari (Wikipedia) - folklore, name origin, indigenous names, Oren’s hypothesis and critics
• Does the Endangered Xenarthran Fauna of Amazonia Include Remnant Ground Sloths? (David C. Oren, Edentata, 2001) - Oren’s own account of his informants and the hunters’ claims
• Ground sloth (Wikipedia) - extinction dates and sizes of ground sloths