Mapinguari

The mapinguari is a giant, foul-smelling forest being of the Brazilian Amazon: long reddish hair, upright on its hind legs, a monkey-like face, feet turned backwards and a hide that bullets do not pierce. What makes its file unusual is not the creature but the paperwork. On 20 August 1993, in issue 19 of Goeldiana Zoologia, the ornithologist David C. Oren, of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, argued that those descriptions matched a forest-dwelling mylodontid ground sloth of about 1.8 metres — and a forest being became a species waiting to be found. Oren spent the next fifteen years looking. His witness count grew: none given in 1993, more than fifty in 1999, over eighty plus seven hunters who said they had killed one in 2001, "a couple of hundred people" by 2007. His physical evidence did not grow at all. The hair was an agouti's, one dung sample gave giant anteater DNA, and the footprint casts, he conceded, could be easily faked. By 2001 he had changed the animal's family; by 2007 he had moved it thousands of years into the past.

The mapinguari did not become a cryptid in the forest. It became one in a journal, on a date that can be printed: 20 August 1993. Start with the name. Luís da Câmara Cascudo, in his Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro, derives it from a Tupi contraction, mbaé-pi-guari, "the thing that has the foot twisted, crooked, turned the wrong way round" — an etymology quoted with a page reference (2002 edition, p. 223) by the anthropologist Felipe Vander Velden. Cascudo also called the mapinguari "the most popular of the monsters of Amazonia". The name, then, is about a foot, not a smell. That is worth holding on to, because the New York Times reported in 2007 that the name "is usually translated as 'the roaring animal' or 'the fetid beast'". Two incompatible readings circulate. Only Cascudo's comes with a derivation you can look up. Dating the word is harder than describing the creature. João Barbosa Rodrigues collected Amazonian narratives between 1872 and 1887 and published them in 1890 as Poranduba Amazonense, the great nineteenth-century compendium of the region's folklore. Searched in full — roughly 693,000 characters of digitised text — it returns not one instance of "mapinguari" or "mapinguary", nor of the fragments "mapin", "pingua" or "nguari". In the same file "curupira" appears 129 times and "yurupari" 131, and the scan is perfectly capable of rendering the letters in question: "guari" occurs thirteen times, inside maguari and guariba. So the canonical pre-rubber-boom collection is full of the backwards-footed forest guardian and contains no mapinguari at all. That is a documented gap between two named corpora, not proof that nobody said the word. Something else has to be corrected here, because the error was ours. The claim that the figure was forged in the rubber-boom decades, out of Portuguese, north-eastern Brazilian and indigenous material fused in the forest camps, is not Vander Velden's. It belongs to Valdir Vegini and his co-authors, who wrote that the mapinguari "arose during the rubber cycles in Amazonia at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first five decades of the twentieth". Vander Velden quotes that sentence and immediately declines to endorse it: "As an anthropologist, I fear I lack the tools to discuss this hypothesis." His own 2016 article argues close to the opposite of what we had him saying: he objects to treating the mapinguari as a legend, a myth or a belief at all, and objects just as hard to dissolving it into a zoological specimen. Now the conversion itself. David Conway Oren, an American-born ornithologist at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, first heard mapinguari stories during fieldwork in 1977 and took them for pure folklore. In the 1993 paper he credits the turn to someone else: David Gueiros Vieira, a historian at the University of Brasília and a former deputy director of the Goeldi, who had spent more than a year as chief administrator of the Serra Pelada gold mine and had collected miners' accounts there. "It was during discussions with Vieira," Oren wrote, "that I realized that the creature described as the mapinguari was not a primate, but almost certainly a ground sloth." Vieira is thanked at length in the acknowledgements. He is worth naming, because when Oren retold the story in 2001 the historian had vanished from it and the moment had become a solo epiphany in 1988, listening to a hunter from what is now northern Tocantins. Goeldiana Zoologia number 19 ran to eleven pages and argued the case feature by feature. Human size fitted a forest-adapted mylodontid of roughly 1.8 metres. Reddish hair fitted the mummified sloth pelts Malcolm McKenna had examined. "Feet turned backwards" fitted a gait with the claws curled inward. Invulnerability except "in the belly, around the navel" fitted mylodontid dermal ossicles and an almost imbricated rib cage. Horse-like droppings fitted the Shasta ground sloth coprolite Oren had handled in San Diego. And the single eye — the detail every book repeats — Oren himself set aside, noting that it belongs "in the legend of the mapinguari (rather than first-hand testimony)" and endorsing Câmara Cascudo's 1954 reading of it as the European one-eyed, man-eating cyclops hybridised with native mythology. That part of our old file was right, and it is Oren's, not ours. What our old file got wrong was the arithmetic of the witnesses. The 1993 paper gives no count at all; what it gives is a limit — "No one, to my knowledge, has a first-hand report from the Tapajós River basin that is less than 20 years old." The figure of more than fifty witnesses first appears in Marguerite Holloway's Discover report of September 1999, six field trips and six years later. By June 2001, in Edentata, Oren counted "over 80" face-to-face witnesses plus seven hunters who claimed to have killed one, at Eirunepé, Marabá, the Serra do Divisor park (two hunters), Juína, Manicoré and Carauari; and he stated plainly, "When I wrote the 1993 paper, I had never interviewed anyone who had claimed to have killed one of these supposed animals." By 2007 he told the New York Times he had spoken with "a couple of hundred people", of whom only "a handful" claimed direct contact. The hunter Mário Pereira de Souza belongs to that later phase, not to the paper. Holloway found him living in Itaituba, doing odd jobs for the highway department, and watched Oren visit him for the third time. His encounter dates to 1975, when he hunted for a mining camp on a Tapajós tributary south of Itaituba — the Jamanxim, which Discover printed as "Jamauchim". What Souza is quoted as saying is narrow, and worth keeping narrow: the long-haired creature screamed and came staggering towards him on its hind legs, swaying and unsteady, and what stayed with him was the smell. "The horrible smell entered into me and made me dizzy," he said. "I was not right for two months." The backwards feet, the belly-mouth, the single eye and the footprint casts are not his; the casts belong to a different informant, Dos Santos, on a different trip. By 1999 the material evidence was already in, and already negative. Across six forays since 1994 — "less than four months actually", Oren admitted — the collection came to a clump of hair, several dung samples and some casts of footprints. The hair was an agouti's. The dung yielded no DNA except, in one sample, that of a giant anteater. The casts, as Holloway put it, "don't hold any scientific weight, as Oren readily points out, because they can be easily faked". Then the claim itself moved twice. In 2001 Oren changed the animal's family, writing that "although in the 1993 paper I proposed that if such an animal is a ground sloth then it probably belongs to the Mylodontidae, my suggestion now is that a megalonychid is a better candidate", on the strength of four canine-like teeth and the reported gait, citing the locomotion study of his Goeldi colleague Peter Toledo. He also conceded what did not fit: the hunters described a short tail, and every reasonably complete ground sloth fossil has a well-developed one. By July 2007 the retreat was complete. "It is quite clear to me that the legend of the mapinguary is based on human contact with the last of the ground sloths," Oren told the New York Times — thousands of years ago. "But whether such an animal still exists or not is another question, one we can't answer yet." David Conway Oren died in Brasília on 7 September 2023, aged 70. The Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi's note of condolence records a career in Amazonian ornithology, biogeography and conservation, six bird species described and one named after him. It does not mention the mapinguari once.

There is nothing to visit. The mapinguari is a being, not a site, and the coordinates on this page are a marker for the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, not an address. The geography the documents actually name is the Tapajós river basin in Pará — Itaituba, and the Jamanxim river to its south, where Mário Pereira de Souza placed his 1975 encounter — together with Acre, Amazonas, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and northern Tocantins, the states Oren's later witnesses came from. These are working river towns and forest municipalities reached by road and boat from Santarém, Rio Branco or Porto Velho, and none of them offers anything mapinguari-related to see. Two specific places do appear in the sources, and both need a caveat. The New York Times reported in July 2007 that a statue of a mapinguary had been erected in a public plaza in Rio Branco, the capital of Acre. Whether it is still standing has not been verified for this file, so treat it as a 2007 report and not as a current attraction. And the Karitiana indigenous land in northern Rondônia, whose residents supplied the accounts at the centre of Vander Velden's fieldwork, is not open to visitors: entering indigenous land in Brazil requires prior authorisation, and the cave in the Serra Moraes that the Karitiana associate with the creature is a place they themselves avoid. The institution behind the whole story is real and public: the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, Pará, which published Goeldiana Zoologia and employed David Oren. Its Parque Zoobotânico, in the city centre, receives visitors; check the museum's own site for current opening times and admission, which are not reproduced here because they change. The honest recommendation is that this is a reading visit, and it is free. Oren's 1993 paper is scanned in full on the Internet Archive, and his 2001 follow-up is a free PDF from the IUCN xenarthran specialist group. Vander Velden's 2016 article is open access on SciELO, and Barbosa Rodrigues's 1890 collection is a public-domain scan. Between them they hold every primary claim summarised on this page, and reading the 1993 and 2001 papers side by side is the single most informative thing anyone can do with this subject. One access note, because it shaped this file: the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira, the Brazilian National Library's digitised newspaper archive and the obvious place to date the word's first appearance in print, did not respond at all while this review was being written.