Mangy black bear

Mangy black bears aren’t that common, but those that get it do look particularly strange. Oh yeah, and they get confused with sasquatch. Remember Westfall’s rule of cryptozoological confusion: As a soon as a normally furred animal loses its hair for any reason, it will be confused and proclaimed to be some new species or [...]

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Smoky gray side-striped jackal

Side-striped jackals vary a lot in appearance, and some could be mistaken for either golden or black-backed jackals. Or African wolves. At this stage, we are still trying to figure out how to tell the difference between the African wolf and the golden jackal. About the only way I know to identify a side-striped jackal [...]

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Maskless boxer

I’ve never seen a boxer without a black mask before.

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Brindle coyotes

You have to look closely, but you can see the brindling on the legs. My guess is that this color has also been introduced through cross-breeding with those darn domestic dogs. Lots of free love in the genus Canis.

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Orinoco crocodile eats caiman

Source. Crocodilian eats crocodilian. Orinoco crocs are critically endangered.  There could be as few as 250 left in the wild, although the numbers are likely higher than that. They live in the Orinoco River and Meta River basins of Venezuela and Colombia, which are not exactly the most stable countries in the world. As crocodiles [...]

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Shithead

Source. Great name for a dog!

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Another color phase in the black-backed jackal

This is another black-backed jackal of the Cape subspecies. This one is normally colored, but it lacks the distinct saddle back that gave the species its name.  It still has stripes running down its side, but because it doesn’t have a white-tipped tail and a bulbous looking head, we know it is a black-backed jackal. [...]

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Wolpertinger

Wolpertingers are Germany’s answer to the jackalope. In fact, the jackalope may have come from the German wolpertinger legend. Wolpertiners are generally rabbits or hares with horns and/or wings. The Shope papilloma virus causes cottontail rabbits to develop horn-like tumors, so it may be based on something in reality. However, cottontails are found only in [...]

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Coyote marked like a collie

This is a coyote, but it obviously has a dog somewhere in its ancestry. We have a name for these particular white markings in domestic dogs. It is called Irish spotting or Irish markings. No wild canid has this coloration. The existence of these markings is indicative of domestic dog genes within a wild population. [...]

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How the Welsh language was invented

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