Dartmoor Beast Identified As New Species Of European Giant Hyrax?

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It's a dog, a bloody dog! Seriously, this is so obviously a dog its stupid to claim otherwise. And it definitely doesn't look like the other animal you link to.

Once again CCS you demonstrate you have no common sense!
 
Hmm...the link says that I have to register. ._.
Here's the Daily Mail article of same event Demon of Dartmoor: Mystery beast seen at hell hound's haunt.

The founder of the national research network Big Cats in Britain, Mark Fraser, said: "It looks like a wolverine or a bear in some shots and a big wild dog in others. It is a very strange animal."
Mr Whitley is adamant that the creature is not a wild dog.
He added: "I have worked with dogs all my life and it was definitely not that.
"I have seen a collie-sized black cat in the area about ten years ago and it was not that - this was a lot bigger.
"You would be surprised at the number of people who have seen black big cats and something resembling a small bear in the area over the course of the years."
 
roflcakes its a dog, looks nothing like whatever that huge rat/rabbit looking thing is
What? You don't reckon it's a dog? Short muzzle and small round ears, just like a hyrax..

Even the Beast of Gevaudan is shown with small ears, lighter underside etc..and here's the biggest clue:

Some pepole believed that the Beast might be a surviving remnants of a Mesonychid seeing how some witnesses described it as a huge wolf having hooves rather than paws.[7]:

modern hyraxes share numerous features with elephants, such as toenails, excellent hearing, sensitive pads on their feet, small tusks, good memory, high brain functions compared to other similar mammals, and the shape of some of their bones.[7]
 
It's a dog. I have three dogs, and some of my pics of them can look a bit odd at times too. At a guess, I would say the dog in question had some old English Sheepdog in it. Hence the coat. Common, you've been debunked yet again!
 
"It looks like a wolverine or a bear in some shots and a big wild dog in others. It is a very strange animal."
So he admits in some photos it looks like a dog so rather than reaching the logical conclusion of "It's a dog which is rather rough looking" he thinks "Its a bear which is rather scrawny looking".

You ever seen a bear CSS? Looks nothing like that, the structure of the hips and legs are different. You'd definitely see it in a video as they move quite differently. It looks closer to a Hyrax than a bear but it still looks like a bloody dog!

Think about it logically. In every place in the world where you have bears, wolves, wild dogs and in fact any animal and humans leave food out the animals invariably realise its easy to scavenge from bins than from a forest etc. They make themselves easier to find, not harder. If you bumped a wolf or bear into the British countryside it might hide from humans initially but it'll eventually become comfortable enough to come into populated area for food. Then its seen, caught and perhaps killed. They don't remain elusive!

The whole "There's a beast of [name of place]!" nonsense requires you to believe animals will avoid a readily available supply of high energy food (ie human food) and deliberately avoid ALL contact or sighting of humans. In every place where humans and animals spend time near one another the animals get comfortable with people and have no problem trotting through built up areas. I once camped in Denali National Park in Alaska and despite there being only a few thousand people in an area 10% larger than Wales we still had a wild wolf walk through our camp site in daylight in front of about 8 of us.

So unless you believe that for some inexplicable reason this 'beast' behaves differently from ALL documented behaviour of wild predators you can't seriously think such an animal exists.
 
That might well be a dog in the photo, but you have to realise that there really was a giant hyrax living on Dartmoor.
Until the local yeti ate it.
 
The Beast of Dartmoor is only slightly more elusive than the Dinosaur of Oxford Street.
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In every place where humans and animals spend time near one another the animals get comfortable with people and have no problem trotting through built up areas.

Exactly right. I grew up in the countryside, surrounded on three sides of the house by farmland, which mostly was used for growing wheat. Never saw much wildlife at night.

Now I live on the outskirts of a city, near a canal that runs from the centre of town, through a park, out to a nature reserve, and passes a McDonalds. I see foxes quite regularly. They use the towpath as a 'fox highway' linking all the great sources of food, from ducks and geese in the park and reserve, to abandoned food outside McDonalds and in the park bins, and often detouring around the houses (saw on on the corner by my place only a couple of weeks ago') to see what people have left out to be collected on 'bin day'.
 
And? I say it definitely IS a dog. Only an idiot would claim otherwise.
You seem to forget that you weren't there were you? The eye-witness was a regular local who also has his own dogs all his life. He's seen big cats, and says that it wasn't the same. He says it didn't MOVE like a dog. How can people here claim to have a better opinion from only a photo, whilst this man saw the evidence in real life!? It's also VERY big, too big for a dog.

Hyraxes on the other hand were prolific during the past, sometimes evolving to the size of a pony. This is the rotund stature of the herbivorous hyrax imo.
 
You seem to forget that you weren't there were you? The eye-witness was a regular local who also has his own dogs all his life. He's seen big cats, and says that it wasn't the same. He says it didn't MOVE like a dog. How can people here claim to have a better opinion from only a photo, whilst this man saw the evidence in real life!? It's also VERY big, too big for a dog.

Hyraxes on the other hand were prolific during the past, sometimes evolving to the size of a pony. This is the rotund stature of the herbivorous hyrax imo.

I know a dog when I see one. Besides, why do you trust that guys say-so?
For all you know he's just making it up to get some attention, or maybe he's an idiot.
Do you ever practice any critical thinking at all? Do you think it looks like a dog?

Tell you what, if you can show that giant hyraxes exist in Dartmoor I will reconsider.
 
It's too big for a dog!

1. Island gigantism can explain the large size. It would an advantage to look like a wolf from a distance and also be very large; it puts off potential predators. Hyraxes were widespread and more diverse in the past:

Evolution
All modern hyraxes are members of the family Procaviidae (the only living family within the Hyracoidea) and are found only in Africa and the Middle East. In the past, however, hyraxes were more diverse and widespread. The order first appears in the fossil record over 40 million years ago, and for many millions of years hyraxes were the primary terrestrial herbivore in Africa, just as odd-toed ungulates were in the Americas. There were many different species, the largest of them about the weight of a small horse, the smallest the size of a mouse. During the Miocene, however, competition from the newly-developed bovids—very efficient grazers and browsers—pushed the hyraxes out of the prime territory and into marginal niches. Nevertheless, the order remained widespread, diverse and successful as late as the end of the Pliocene (about two million years ago) with representatives throughout most of Africa, Europe and Asia.

The descendants of the giant hyracoids evolved in different ways. Some became smaller, and gave rise to the modern hyrax family. Others appear to have taken to the water (perhaps like the modern capybara), and ultimately gave rise to the elephant family, and perhaps also the Sirenians (dugongs and manatees). DNA evidence supports this hypothesis, and the small modern hyraxes share numerous features with elephants, such as toenails, excellent hearing, sensitive pads on their feet, small tusks, good memory, high brain functions compared to other similar mammals, and the shape of some of their bones.[7]

Hyraxes are sometimes described as being the closest living relative to the elephant.[8] Although relatively closely related, not all scientists support the proposal that hyraxes are the closest living relative of the elephant. Recent morphological and molecular based classifications reveal the Sirenians to be the closest living relatives of elephants, while hyraxes are closely related but form an outgroup to the assemblage of elephants, sirenians, and extinct orders like Embrithopoda and Desmostylia.[9]


(Also note that they are forbidden to be eaten in Jewish law, and so would achieve evolutionary advantage from non-human hunting in Isreal)
 
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