A murderer running through the trees

The legend of the mysterious Tshenkutshen 

     South America is a very rich evolutionary land where both placentals, marsupials and monotremes have lived. Dinosaurs reigned for many years, where the conditions gave rise to giant snakes and crocodiles to live and where the diversity of animals is so great that it has not yet been discovered. has been able to discover everything, yet there are several mysteries in South America, such as what we will see today, a very strange animal, some have been described for many centuries and it is not known what it is. Thank you for reading, let's start. 

The mystery of the primate cat 

    Called Tshenkutshen, it is a strange creature between feline and marsupial reported in Ecuador, in the cloud forests of the Sangay National Park and the Cutucu mountain range and in the Amazon Rainforest in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. 

Described with the morphology of a small-sized jaguar, with the exception of having a coat similar in color to the toucan's plumage, in addition to having noticeable stripes of different colors on the chest, which is printed with multicolored stripes of red, yellow and white, although its strangest characteristic is having hands similar to that of the howler monkey, but armed with claws instead of nails, powerfully muscled arms and a large hump on its front quarters and some claim that its canines are longer than those of the howler monkey a jaguar 

Folclore y evidencias 

    This animal appears in legends of the peoples close to the Amazon, they describe it as mostly arboreal and extremely aggressive, they say that it can jump from tree to tree with astonishing ease, the Shuar consider it the most dangerous of all the animals in the jungle, and It appears in his traditional poetry as a proverbial measure of ferocity. 

Among the evidence of its existence was an animal that matched the description of this being that was allegedly shot to death in 1959 by a settler from Macas, who had been walking through the forest of Cerro Quilamo, near the Abanico River, a little more beyond Macas. The animal apparently jumped through the trees towards him and, fearing for his life, the man shot him in the head. Upon examination, he discovered that it was a spotted animal, mostly the size of a white jaguar, with a hump, a rainbow-colored chest, muscular arms, and monkey-like hands with flat palms. 

In another instance in 1998, travel writer Joe Kane mentioned that the Cofán indigenous people knew of a “howling tiger monkey” that had human-like hands in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, Kane claimed that it was possibly an unknown marsupial. , similar in description to the sparassodont family, most sparassodonts, particularly the earlier species, were arboreal, and although most became extinct before the great American exchange this does not rule out the possibility. 

Rosa García Perea, a felid expert at the National Museum of Natural Sciences of Ecuador, was perplexed by the description of the tshenkutshen, but did not rule out the possibility that it is a new species of felid, suggesting that due to its characteristics it could potentially be a larger relative of the margay.

Theories abound, but the most accepted is that this animal is a possible unclassified marsupial, but there is something more strange and that is that unlike other cases, this could still exist, the reports continue to be periodic and according to tribes they still live in the deepest parts of the forest, which is that none of the native hunters described these animals with ghostly, mythical or supernatural characteristics, but rather they spoke of them like any other animal in the forest, so we are facing a truly particular case. and with all my heart I hope it is resolved. 

[[[links of interest]]] 

https://www.superbugtom.com/tshenkutshen

https://mysterious-amazon.blogspot.com/p/rainbow-jaguar.html?m=1