Did Valero’s kintanari look one thing like this? (©
William M. Rebsamen)
American
correspondent Ted Leonard kindly delivered to my consideration some years in the past a
fascinating e-book that mentions two Brazilian thriller cats that have been beforehand
unknown to me.
Written
by Ettore Biocca, first printed in English in 1970 (it was initially
printed in Italian), and based mostly upon firsthand testimony associated to him by its
topic, the e-book is Yanoáma: The Narrative of a White Woman Kidnapped by
Amazonian Indians. It recounts the outstanding true-life story of Helena
Valero, who was kidnapped as an 11-year-old Italian woman by Yanoáma natives again
within the Thirties and reared by them within the Amazonian jungle.
One in every of
these crypto-felids was identified regionally because the rock jaguar, and was briefly
witnessed sooner or later by Valero whereas within the firm of some Yanoáma girls and
hunters. She described it as follows:
It was morning that day and we had seen among the many rocks, as if in a
window, a jaguar’s head. It was a form of jaguar which I didn’t know: it
wasn’t a kind of noticed ones or these pink ones that they name kintanari.
It was a brown jaguar and it had lengthy hair on its head: it was the rock jaguar.
If
this description is correct and genuine, I think that it was not a jaguar
of any type, however quite another, unidentified large-sized cat, brown in
color, with what appears to have been a mane. Intriguingly, that’s not the one
description on file of such a felid from South America, as a maned thriller
cat has additionally been reported from Ecuador (see my thriller cat books for additional particulars).
A taxiderm specimen of an obvious reddish leopard
(seemingly not sun-faded) spied and photographed by Invoice Rebsamen, plus Invoice’s pink
jaguar portray (inset) (each photos © William M. Rebsamen)
However
what of the equally anomalous kintanari or pink jaguar that Valero alluded to?
Sadly, that single temporary point out quoted above is the one time that
this unusual creature is referred to wherever within the e-book.
Simply
as there are freak all-black (melanistic) and all-white (albinistic) jaguar people on file, would possibly there even be
occasional all-red (erythristic) specimens? Definitely, erythristic people
have been documented with sure different felid species, together with the leopard,
tiger, and jaguarundi. Alternatively, maybe it was not a jaguar in any respect, however
as an alternative another massive felid, with reddish fur – a burly rufous puma, presumably?
And simply
in case you have been questioning in regards to the taxiderm specimen of a reddish leopard depicted
above, right here’s what I wrote about it in my e-book Cats of
Magic, Mythology, and Thriller (2012):
THE
BLACK PANTHER THAT WAS RED!
On 12
September 1998, American wildlife artist Invoice Rebsamen was in Springfield,
Missouri, and paid a go to to the Bass Professional Store’s well-known Fish and Wildlife
Museum. It possessed many spectacular reveals – however none extra so, no less than in
Invoice’s eyes, than a sure taxiderm-mounted large cat of fantastic look (as seen in Invoice’s photograph of it above). It
resembled a black panther (i.e. a melanistic leopard), patterned with darkish rosettes – however as an alternative of its
fur’s background colouration being black or darkish brown, it was as an alternative a wealthy
mahogany-red!
I’ve
a number of instances on file of erythristic leopards, i.e. mutant people whose
fur was reddish (together with the rosettes) as an alternative of yellow (with black
rosettes), the newest being the so-called ‘strawberry leopard’ these days
spied inside South Africa’s Madikwe Recreation Reserve and photographed there by
safari information Deon de Villiers (Nationwide Geographic Information, 12 April 2012 [several additional strawberry leopards have ben observed and photographed in Africa since then]),
however no earlier information regarding red-furred black panthers. Generally, a darkish
taxiderm specimen fades in the course of the course of time, the mounted pores and skin changing into
brown in these areas uncovered to daylight – as from a close-by window, for
occasion. Nonetheless, Invoice considered this panther from each angle, back and front,
and will see no signal of fading on any portion of its pores and skin; it was uniformly
pink throughout.
This ShukerNature weblog article is excerpted
and enlarged from my e-book Thriller Cats of the World Revisited (2020),
the greatly-expanded, fully-updated second version of Thriller
Cats of the World (1989), lengthy acknowledged because the definitive
e-book on crypto-felids.
