The State Road 72 Roadkill Chupacabra

Florida State Road 72 runs 41.582 miles through Sarasota and DeSoto counties. It starts at US 41, the Tamiami Trail, near Sarasota. It crosses the Myakka River inside Myakka River State Park. It ends at SR 70, just west of Arcadia. Its eastern stretch is a two-lane rural highway.

Florida already had a place in chupacabra lore. In March 1996, about 40 animals were reportedly killed northwest of Miami, in what has been called the first wave on the US mainland. This case is different. There was no wave and no living creature. There was one photograph.

May 13, 2020. 14:22, by the camera's clock. Somewhere along State Road 72, a dead four-legged animal. Dick Langer photographed it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX8 at a focal length of 127 mm. A telephoto shot, which suggests the photographer stood some distance from the carcass.

Langer left one line to describe what they saw. "Alleged Roadkill Chupacabra, Rte 72 Florida." Nothing about its size, its colour or its smell. Nothing about what became of the body. The file carries no GPS data, and no source says where on the route it lay.

Langer is known only as a Wikimedia user. Their English Wikipedia edits go back to 2008, mostly on medical articles such as Stethoscope and Bell's palsy. On May 16, 2020, the image was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS6 and converted to black and white. That afternoon, at 16:55 UTC, Langer uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons and added it to the English Wikipedia Chupacabra article. It was their only edit on the subject.

Editors later rewrote the caption to "Alleged chupacabra found on State Road 72 in Florida in 2020." The picture spread to the German, Spanish and Hungarian Wikipedias. On Commons it was filed under "Chupacabra" and "Dead dogs", an editor's choice rather than an expert finding. In 2025, Katie Serena's chupacabra feature for All That's Interesting ran a photo captioned "An alleged chupacabra corpse found along Route 72 in Florida." It carried no credit, and is probably the same image.

No newspaper reported the find. No record exists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, either county, the park or law enforcement.

The English caption now adds that "according to sceptics, it merely shows a dead coyote with scabies." The sceptics are not named. The cited source, a 2023 article in El Cronista, is a general piece on the mange explanation. It quotes University of Michigan entomologist Barry O'Connor, "No creo que haya que buscar más teorías," and Kevin Keel of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia. It never mentions Florida, State Road 72 or 2020.

The background is real enough. Carcasses submitted as chupacabras in the US have generally tested as coyotes, dogs, coyote-dog hybrids, foxes or raccoons with sarcoptic mange. But this animal was never tested. No one has suggested the photo was staged. Langer called it only "alleged".

One photographer. One frame. One caption. It was never an encounter in the usual sense, yet it became one of the images readers meet when they look up the chupacabra. Whatever lay beside State Road 72 that afternoon, the photograph is all that remains.