A South American Lemur and a Modern-Day Ground Sloth? A Pair of Puzzling Animal Portraits in an 18Th-Century Artistic Ma…
We’re looking at cryptids of a decidedly earthly nature today, specifically from an incredibly detailed mural kept at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain (Spain’s national museum of natural history). Leave it to Dr. Shuker to find the few portraits that are of questionable origin and identification, starting with what are likely a misidentified lemur and ground sloth. Then he examines Peruvian Bandicoots, Undiscovered Tapirs, Zebra-Striped Carrot Creatures, and Other Neotropical Novelties, Courtesy of Lequanda & Thiébaut. These particular illustrations seem especially hard to identify with certainty, and may have been drawn from either degraded museum specimens or from written descriptions only. Shuker speculates that the mural depicts a number of hitherto undiscovered species, a relevant discovery that was either missed or ignored by scientists of the day. (CM)
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