The Onza
The Onza is one of the more credible cryptids. No monster here, the Onza is a big cat in northwestern Mexico that is said to be distinguishable from a puma, a species it nevertheless closely resembles. The locals have allegedly known of the Onza since the Aztecs. It is said to be more dangerous and ferocious, but slightly smaller, than the puma. Some locals believe it is a hybrid between a jaguar and puma. Other explanations for the Onza consist of the mundane, a sub-species of puma or offspring of old female pumas, and the fanciful; it is a surviving American Cheetah (both the puma and the jaguarondi are related to the African Cheetah). The American Cheetah:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheetah
Folklorist J. Frank Dobie wrote a story about the Onza in 1931, but it was a tall tale, giving the cat supernatural shape shifting attributes. Big game hunter Russell Annabel wrote an article about the Onza for
Sports Afield in 1961, detailing his killing of the big cat. He described the Onza:
He looked like a heavy shouldered, lean-hipped puma with an uncommonly small head -- except he had a black tail-tip and a black line on his back from the kidney region to the tail. He exactly matched descriptions of the onza that we’d had from scores of vaqueros, meat-hunters, timber scouts, wandering Indians, and wildlife-wise residents of the lost, forlorn wilderness villages. There was no doubt in my mind that the animal would be new to science…. Annabel sent the bones and pelt to
Sports Afield and the magazine forwarded the remains to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for identification. It was determined that Annabel had killed a puma.
In January 1986, an Onza was killed in Sinaola. Cryptozoologists from the International Society of Cryptozoology, Richard Greenwell and Troy Best, investigated. Greenwell described the dead cat:
It had a remarkably gracile body, with long, slender legs and a long tail. The ears also seemed very long for a puma (about 100 mm), and small horizontal stripes were found on the insides of its forelimbs, which, as far as determined to date, are not found in puma. Tissue samples and bones were collected. At Texas Tech, an electrophoresis comparison with a Big Bend puma sample showed no difference between the Onza and the puma. Later, mito-DNA tests were run at the National Cancer Institute in Washington and the results showed that the Onza was genetically indistinguishable from a puma.
Here is a short article from the Cryptid Zoo web site about the Onza:
http://www.newanimal.org/onza.htm
Here is Matt Bille’s web page on the Onza. Bille is one of the few cryptozoologists who has his feet on the ground, most of the time. Here, he argues that the Onza is a puma reality still bodes well for the field of cryptozoology:
http://mattbille.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-onza-success-for-cryptozoology.html
There may be a linguistic explanation for the Onza, more than a biological one. In the June 2008 issue of
Mastozoologia geotropically, Ernesto Alvarado Reyes makes some interesting observations about
The legend of the Mexican onza. He states concerning wild felines in Latin America,
…it is very common that one species receives two different names in the same locality. The name onza is usually applied in this sense. This leads to the common misunderstanding that there are two different species that in fact are just one. Reyes argues,
The word onza in Mexico, when applied together with another common name to refer to the same species in the same locality, is used to distinguish certain varieties or individuals with recessive traits that make them look different to most individuals of their population. Sometimes, as the rarest phenotypes that is called onza is the less frequently found, incredible stories far from reality are created around it.
Whatever the case, I went to central Mexico recently to visit my loving and lovely Mexicana wife, and while hiking the piedmonts with her and her brother, I asked about the onza and they both are sure of its existence. They say it isn't a puma.
