I Thought These Animals Were Extinct

Check out this list of strange prehistoric animals that are still being seen in the remote places of the world. I wouldn't want to run across some of these.

"The moment you hear it, all your hairs stand on end,” said Manuel Vitorino Pinheiro dos Santos of his supposed encounter with the South American cryptid known as the Mapinguari. According to a Discover Magazine article, the Brazilian was hunting in the Amazon when a blood-curdling scream echoed around the forest. Dos Santos, an experienced hunter, immediately ran and hid in a river. He heard the call four more times as the creature moved away.

While some have likened the Mapinguari to a South American Bigfoot, it has also been described as an enormous, sloth-like creature with large curved claws, reddish fur, and a stench to peel paint. This has led cryptozoologists to speculate that the myths actually refer to a surviving species of ground sloth, a group of gigantic, bear-like creatures believed to have gone extinct around 5,000 years ago. In 1994, ornithologist and scholar of the Amazon David C. Oren set out to try and track the Mapinguari in the rainforests of western Brazil, collecting over 100 eyewitness accounts of the creature. Unfortunately, Oren’s expedition was largely unsuccessful, coming away with only some casts of footprints, a clump of fur that turned out to be from an agouti, and fecal matter that was later identified as belonging to a giant anteater."

To check out the full list, follow this link.