COUNTRY FILE · SOUTH AMERICA

Cryptids of Brazil

What cryptids are in Brazil? The best-known are Mapinguari and Chupacabra.

Brazil’s folklore is as vast and varied as the country itself, weaving together Indigenous, African and Portuguese traditions. Its forests are full of beings with their own rules: the Curupira, the red-haired guardian with backward feet who leads hunters astray; the Boitatá, a fiery serpent; the Saci, a one-legged trickster. Many of these figures are not “cryptids” at all, but living characters in stories about respecting the forest and its limits.

2 cryptids3 recorded sightings

Cryptids reported in Brazil

HOMINID · Pre-colonial

Mapinguari

Brazilian Amazon rainforest

A shaggy, foul-smelling giant of Amazonian tradition with backward feet and a belly mouth – suspected by one scientist of being a ground sloth.

FOLKLORE

OTHER · 1995

Chupacabra

Canóvanas, Puerto Rico

The “goat-sucker” of 1990s Puerto Rico: a spiny, bloodsucking beast blamed for livestock deaths that spread across Latin America and Texas.

WIDELY REPORTED

The legends of Brazil

The best-known contender for a real unknown animal is the Mapinguari of the Amazon – a huge, shaggy, foul-smelling creature with backward or twisted feet and, in many tellings, a single eye and a mouth in its belly. Rubber tappers, hunters and Indigenous peoples such as the Karitiana of Rondônia have their own names and stories for it. In the 1990s the ornithologist David Oren of the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém argued that the legend might preserve memories of giant ground sloths, which roamed South America until around 10,000 years ago. His expeditions collected dozens of testimonies but no proof – hair and droppings turned out to belong to an agouti and a giant anteater.

Brazil was also among the countries swept by later waves of the chupacabra scare, which spread across Latin America from Puerto Rico after 1995. For travellers, the Amazon is the setting of nearly all Mapinguari stories, and the Goeldi Museum in Belém is the place to learn about the region’s real – and remarkable – wildlife.

Hotspots

Acre and western Amazonas

Remote rainforest along the Juruá and other rivers where many Mapinguari reports from rubber tappers and hunters were collected.

Tapajós River, Pará

The river where David Oren based his 1990s expeditions in search of the Mapinguari.

Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Belém

Amazon research museum and zoo-botanical park where the ground-sloth theory of the Mapinguari was born.

Sightings timeline

c. 1930
Inocêncio’s encounter Mapinguari
A man named Inocêncio, lost in the forest, later said he met an upright, roaring animal and fired at it. His story was collected by the cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans and became a staple of Mapinguari literature.
1993
Oren’s ground-sloth paper Mapinguari
David Oren published “Did ground sloths survive to Recent times in the Amazon region?” in the Goeldi Museum’s journal, arguing that witness descriptions matched a large mylodontid sloth.
1990s expeditions
Searching the Tapajós Mapinguari
Oren made several expeditions in the 1990s and gathered testimony from more than 50 witnesses. Hair samples proved to be from an agouti, and DNA from droppings matched a giant anteater rather than any unknown animal.