Strange Creature in Panama: Hoax?

Have you seen this news clip from CNN about an alleged finding by four kids in Panama? I was wondering if the Dopers may have other sources revealing any more information. Here’s a link to the CNN video clip:

  • Jinx

Here’s an article suggesting that it’s a three-toed sloth, found throughout Panama. It looks like it’s been in the water for a while. Hair is one of the first thing to go when a corpse is submerged for any significant length of time.

Huh, I thought a sloth looked more like a monkey (with no tail) or koala. I saw one once climbing the ceiling in the tropical rainforest at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. This thing looks like a small dino!

Sloths look more monkey-like when they have all their fur on. It can be surprising to see how much of an animal’s shape is due to its fur or feathers. Google “Montauk monster” for another example - it was ultimately determined that the “monster” was a waterlogged, bloated, dead raccoon, but this was by no means obvious from its appearance.

A similar video link was sent to me by some friends in the US. It’s quite definitely a sloth; you can see the hooked claws on the front forefoot in the video. I haven’t seen clear enough images to be sure whether it is two-toed or three toed.

As cwthree says, decomposing animals will often lose the hair off the skin, which could produce the hairlessness. It has also suggested that it could be a fetus. However, it is probably more likely that it just a dead animal that has been in the water a bit.

There’s more discussion here, including a photo of the corpse after it had decayed more which makes the claws on the feet more evident.

This site gives an account in Spanish:

Quick translation:

The kids were certainly bullshitting about it being alive and pursuing them. It sounds like a dead sloth got stuck in an eddy behind the waterfall, where it lost its hair. When the kids disturbed the pool, it floated out. It may have bumped up against the rocks at the edge of the pool, making them think it was alive. They panicked and “killed” it.

I’d certainly go all Lord of the Flies if that floated out at me wile I was swimming. Very (hairless) sloth-like body. Imagine this sloth baby all bloated with no hair. Or this little horror. They can be seriously freaky even with hair let alone waterlogged and decomposing.

This gives me a chance to trot out one of my favorite recently-learned taxonomic trivia items:

The three-toed sloth, Bradypus sp., is the surviving genus of a family, Bradypodidae, of tree sloths. But its larger, more active distant cousin, the two-toed sloth, Choloepus sp., is, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, an arboreal ground sloth.

There were three families of ground sloth: Megatheriidae, Mylodontidae, and Megalonychidae, the last group having a type specimen named by Thomas Jefferson, who thought they might survive in the upper reaches of the Louisiana Purchase or the Oregon Country, and instructed Lewis and clark to be on the lookout for them.

President Jefferson wasn’t far from wrong. The Shasta ground sloth survived well into Recent times (geologically, that is), and related forms survived in the West Indies later than 3000 BC. But recent revisions to sloth taxonomy have put Choloepus into Megalonychidae, the tree-living member of a family that is otherwise mostly ground sloths (and mostly extinct, of course).

Here’s a good blog all about the Panama find:
tetrapodzoology

Yes, but was it debauched?

I heard recently that the two-toed sloth has three toes.

That was an unexpected twist.

It was never bauched in the first place! :slight_smile:

Panama is filled with strange creatures, Colibri for example.

The article and video said the kids beat it to death, however (implying that it must have been alive before the encounter).

As I once read ‘Watch E.T. , the alien is real. It is the boys who are fakes. Real boys would have beaten an alien to death with rocks’

Third down

I have no doubt at all the kids were lying (or just mistaken that it was alive). The animal is certainly a sloth, and considering its hairless condition was evidently decomposing. It could not have been recently alive in the condition the body was shown in the video.

Any discussion of the three-toed sloth would be incomplete without Flanders and Swann’s ode to slothdom.

If I hadn’t already been convinced, that pic would clinch it.

Exactly. The picture Fubaya linked to looks like the closing scene from 2009: A Sloth Odyssey. :wink: