The chupacabra

The chupacabra is a creature blamed for attacks on animals in Puerto Rico, with later finds in Texas. Researchers have tied its best-known description to the film Species, and carcasses called chupacabras to coyotes and raccoons with mange.

The best-known picture of the chupacabra comes from a woman named Tolentino, who said she had seen it at her mother's home in Puerto Rico. Brian Dunning's Skeptoid (2022) points out that the film Species had opened in San Juan about two weeks earlier. In the film, government scientists in a lab in Puerto Rico create a creature from alien DNA that gets loose and kills people, and Skeptoid says it matches her description, spikes included. According to Skeptoid, Tolentino told her interviewers about what she had seen in the film, and said a journalist she did not name had told her such creatures lived in El Yunque National Forest.

Vets pointed to ordinary animals. In 2002 Primera Hora reported that the veterinarians it consulted agreed the attackers were most likely stray dogs or monkeys, passing for chupacabras as they attacked other animals around Puerto Rico.

Other chupacabras were carcasses. In 2010 National Geographic News said nearly every such animal had proved to be a coyote with severe mange, a painful skin disease that can kill and that strips away fur and shrivels the skin. The same year the University of Michigan's University Record reported that scientists who examined carcasses reached the same conclusion. The mite researcher OConnor agreed, and offered a reason why the mites hit wild coyotes so hard. In Live Science in 2014 Benjamin Radford identified the Ratcliffe chupacabra, found in Texas, as a raccoon. He wrote that most Texas chupacabras had turned out to be canids, and that Darren Naish, a palaeontologist at the University of Southampton, had identified another, photographed in Texas in the 1950s, as a raccoon with mange.