Cryptids: Creatures That Might Exist

Es Drac de na Coca

Legendary Dragon (historical crocodile) Palma (Mallorca), Balearic Islands

Es Drac de na Coca is the dragon of Palma, Mallorca, and the dragon is a crocodile. The city has kept a stuffed specimen, about seven spans long, since the seventeenth century: the Rosselló family hung it from their house on the Plaça de Santa Eulàlia every 31 December, the anniversary of the conquest of Palma by King Jaume I. The romantic legend, fixed in the nineteenth century, says the knight Bartomeu Coch, governor of Alcudia, killed the beast in the Carrer de la Portella to win his beloved na Coca, and the creature took her name. Historians of the city, among them Gabriel Llompart and Antoni Quintana, read the story as an etiological legend invented to explain a curiosity crocodile. Today the specimen rests in the Museu d'Art Sacre de Mallorca, a festival dragon walks the streets at Sant Sebastià, and since July 2025 a floating sculpture of the Drac lies in the lake of the Parc de la Mar.

Blemmyes

Monstrous Race / Legendary People Eastern Desert of Egypt and Sudan (Lower Nubia); in legend, Libya and Aethiopia, later relocated to India and the Andaman Islands

The Blemmyes appear twice in the historical record, and the two appearances never meet. One is a real people of the Eastern Desert, attested from the 7th century BC to the 8th century AD, who raided Roman Egypt and bargained with emperors for the right of pilgrimage to the temple of Isis at Philae. The other is a race of headless men with eyes and mouths in their chests, filed by Pliny, Isidore of Seville and the medieval mapmakers at the edge of the known world. The Nuremberg Chronicle woodcut of 1493 is the best-known image of the chest-faced type. Scholars now identify the historical Blemmyes as ancestors of the modern Beja, and the Beja etymology of the name has won acceptance. How the name of a real nation attached itself to a chest-faced marvel has no settled answer.

Mokele-mbembe

River Monster / Possible Surviving Dinosaur Central Africa (Congo, Cameroon, Gabon)

A large, unidentified creature reportedly living in the rivers and swamps of the Congo basin in Central Africa. Local Aka and Bantu communities describe it as the size of an elephant, with a long neck, a small head, and a long tail. Western explorers and cryptozoologists have interpreted the descriptions as a surviving sauropod dinosaur. Multiple expeditions to the Likouala swamp region have found no physical evidence. The creature remains one of the most persistent cryptozoological claims in the world.

Chupacabra

Blood-Draining Cryptid Puerto Rico

A cryptid first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995, where livestock (especially goats) were found dead with small puncture wounds and apparently drained of blood. The name means 'goat-sucker.' Described as a bipedal creature with spines along its back, large dark eyes, and grey leathery skin. Sightings spread across Latin America and the US Southwest. DNA analysis of alleged chupacabra carcasses has identified them as coyotes or dogs with severe mange. The original Puerto Rican sightings remain unexplained.

Almas

Relict Hominid Mongolian, Kazakh, Caucasian traditions

A hominid-like creature reported by Mongolian and Central Asian herders in the Altai Mountains, the Caucasus, and the Pamir range. Described as shorter than a human, covered in reddish-brown hair, with a flat nose and heavy brow. Soviet and Russian researchers investigated reports for decades. Some identified it as a surviving Neanderthal population. No specimen has been recovered. The reports continue from herding communities across Central Asia.

El Mohán

Water Spirit / Wild Man Colombia (Pijao/Muisca roots, colonial transformation)

He lives where the Magdalena narrows. His hair is matted, his beard is wild, his eyes glow in the dark, and he smokes a pipe. He tangles fishing lines, capsizes boats, and steals the catch. He seduces washerwomen at the river with music and gold. He guards the treasure beneath the rapids. Fishermen in Tolima leave tobacco at the water's edge before casting their nets and ask his permission to fish. His name may come from a Chibcha word for shaman: a real human role that became a myth after the people who held it were destroyed.

Barmanou

Cryptid / Wild Man Pashtun, Chitrali (Kho), Shina traditions

The Pashtun and Chitrali peoples of the Hindu Kush describe a large, hair-covered bipedal figure living in the mountain forests at around 6,500 feet. The name comes from Sanskrit Ban-Manus, Man of the Forest. Reports describe a creature six to eight feet tall, dark-haired except on the face, palms, and soles. It abducts women. It wears animal skins. The Spanish zoologist Jordi Magraner conducted systematic field research on the reports from 1987 until his murder in Chitral in 2002.

Songomby

Cryptid / Megafauna Survivor Madagascar (western forests)

An ox-sized creature from western Madagascar with a hornless horse-like head, floppy ears that hang over its eyes, flaring nostrils, and jutting incisors. It sprinkles itchy hair from its nostrils onto prey, causing them to scratch until they fall from trees. Godfrey (1986) concluded the descriptions match the Malagasy dwarf hippopotamus (Hippopotamus lemerlei), which radiocarbon dating suggests may have survived in remote habitat pockets until the 19th century. Burney collected independent accounts from multiple villagers in the 1990s describing what sounds like a living hippo. The last reported sighting at Belo-sur-mer was in 1976.

Kalanoro

Forest Spirit / Cryptid Madagascar (Betsileo, Lake Alaotra, Ankarana)

A hairy forest dwarf under two feet tall with three backward-facing toes on each foot and hooked, claw-like fingers. In Betsileo tradition, the Kalanoro sleeps on beds of silkworm cocoons inside caves. It steals on behalf of human companions, acts as a clairvoyant, and sometimes takes children into the forest. Villagers leave food at cave entrances to secure their return. Charles Lamberton and later researchers proposed extinct giant lemurs (Hadropithecus, Archaeolemur) as the zoological basis. These primates survived in Madagascar until roughly 1000-1500 CE, overlapping with human settlement.

Ngürüvilu

River Monster / Wekufe Mapuche (south-central Chile)

A river creature with the body of a long scaled serpent and the head of a fox. Its defining weapon is its tail: extremely long, tipped with a snagging claw, capable of generating whirlpools strong enough to pull humans and animals beneath the surface. It makes river crossings appear safe, luring victims into the water, then drags them down to drink their blood. Its name in Mapudungun is its description: nguru (fox) + filu (snake). Only a machi (shaman) can remove one from a river.

Mapinguari

Cryptid / Monster Amazonian Indigenous (Brazil)

A massive creature of the deep Amazon: taller than a man, covered in matted reddish-brown hair, with a single eye and a gaping mouth in its belly lined with teeth. Its hide repels bullets and arrows. Its stench incapacitates anyone who comes near. David Oren, an ornithologist at the Museu Goeldi in Belém, proposed in the 1990s that the Mapinguari might preserve a folk memory of Mylodon, the giant ground sloth, which went extinct roughly ten thousand years ago. The physical overlap is uncomfortable: the claws, the thick hide, the upright stance, the terrible smell.

Maero

Wild Man / Forest Being Māori (Aotearoa / New Zealand)

Forest-dwelling wild men of Māori tradition. They are tall and gaunt, covered entirely in long matted hair. Their most distinctive feature is their fingers: extremely long, bony, ending in sharp claw-like nails. They eat raw food, including raw flesh. They use no fire, no tools, and no cooked food. They live in the densest parts of the forest, hostile to any human who enters alone. They attack by clawing and by hurling stones. Elsdon Best documented them in 1924. They are associated with the deep bush country of Westland, Fiordland, and the Urewera.

Basajaun

Wild Man / Culture Hero Basque (pre-Indo-European)

The 'lord of the forest' in Basque mythology. A tall, heavily built hominid covered in hair, with one normal foot and one round like a tree stump. He was the first farmer, the first blacksmith, and the first miller. Humans did not learn these skills from him directly. The trickster San Martín Txiki stole them through cleverness. The Basajaun warns shepherds of approaching storms and keeps wolves away from flocks. Because Basque is a pre-Indo-European language isolate, the Basajaun may represent the oldest layer of European mythology still in oral circulation.

Olgoi-Khorkhoi

Cryptid / Desert Creature Mongolian (Gobi Desert nomadic traditions)

A thick, blood-red tube the length of a man's arm, with no eyes, no mouth, no legs, and no discernible head. Both ends look identical. Mongolian nomads call it olgoi-khorkhoi, the intestine worm, because it resembles a length of cow gut left in the sand. It lives underground in the western Gobi Desert and surfaces only during the hottest weeks of June and July. Touching it means death. It spits a yellow substance that corrodes flesh and metal. Some accounts say it can kill at a distance, discharging something like electricity through the ground. No expedition has ever found a specimen, a carcass, or a bone. But the legend is consistent across thousands of kilometers of desert, told by herders who have never met each other, and the details barely change. Roy Chapman Andrews heard the description from Mongolia's prime minister in 1922. Czech explorer Ivan Mackerle spent three expeditions and fifteen years chasing it through the dunes. The creature persists at the exact boundary where zoology meets folklore, neither confirmed nor dismissed, a red shape in the sand that no one has caught and no one has stopped looking for.

Mothman

Winged Humanoid / Cryptid American (West Virginia)

On November 15, 1966, two young couples drove into an abandoned munitions plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and saw something standing by the road: seven feet tall, grey, muscular, with wings folded against its back and red eyes that glowed like car reflectors. It chased their car at a hundred miles an hour. Over the next thirteen months, more than a hundred people reported seeing the same thing. On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed during rush hour and killed forty-six people. The sightings stopped. John Keel wrote a book connecting the creature to the disaster. A copy editor at the local paper had named it Mothman, after a Batman villain. The name stuck. The bridge is gone. The statue stands on Main Street. The red eyes have not been explained.

Yowie

Cryptid Hominid / Spirit Being Yuwaalaraay, Kamilaroi, Bundjalung, Kuku Yalanji, Gundungurra, and pan-Aboriginal tradition

A towering, hair-covered hominid standing two to three meters tall, reported across Australia from deep Aboriginal antiquity to last week. It smells terrible, moves through thick bush without breaking stride, and leaves footprints twice the size of a human's. Aboriginal peoples across dozens of language groups have named it independently. Colonial naturalists offered rewards for its capture. A schoolboy who saw one became a senator and never recanted. The problem: Australia has no native apes. No primate fossil has ever been found on the continent. The Yowie is the most biogeographically impossible creature in world cryptozoology.