The sāapaim, saapai, sayapie, or saypan was a cryptid reported from Tierra del Fuego in Chilean Patagonia by missionary Thomas Bridges, who described it in 1869 as "very shaggy, about as large as a sheep, has very large and powerful claws and front teeth; it lives in the densest forests on the leaves, fungus and sap of trees. It climbs with ease."[1]
Bridges believed the sāapaim to be a sloth,[1] but in 1886 he recanted and described it as an otter (called aiapuk in Yaghan),[2] but his son Lucas Bridges disagreed and wrote that it was not an otter but a nutria (Myocastor coypus), which is also aquatic.[3] Austin Whittall writes that it probably was not a small ground sloth due to the presence of front teeth (although a number of ground sloths did have fang-like anterior caniniforms), and speculates it may have been a large rodent related to fossil megafaunal rodents found in the Cueva del Milodon,[2] although these rodents are now believed to have been mistaken identifications of Macrauchenia bones.
Notes and references[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Bridges, Thomas "Fireland and Its People", The South American Missionary Magazine 3 (July 1869)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Whittall, Austin Mysterious Fuegian creature: Saapaim | Patagonian Monsters patagoniamonsters.blogspot.com [Accessed 29 September 2018]
- ↑ Bridges, Lucas (1947) The Uttermost Part of the Earth