The Blanco, Texas chupacabra carcass

Texas had seen this before. In 2007, Phylis Canion found a strange carcass in Cuero. It was later identified as a coyote with mange. Similar finds featured on History Channel's MonsterQuest had turned out to be dogs or coyotes. Then came the summer of 2009.

July 2009. A barn in southeast Texas, owned by a cousin of Lynn Butler's mother. Reports place it in Brazoria County, or in Rosenberg, roughly 40 miles southwest of Houston. Something got in, and the family thought maybe it was a rodent tearing things up. One account says an unseen predator was heard running around, another that chickens in the barn were being harassed or attacked by a strange animal.

They put out poison. The very next day, the animal was dead. Nobody ever saw it alive.

Butler, a taxidermist from Rosenberg, had hunted most of his life. He had never seen anything like it. The animal was roughly 30 pounds and coyote-like, but grey, with leathery, hairless skin, a little fuzz around the feet and some hair along the backbone. The bones protruded at the hips, and it had a pointed muzzle, prominent fangs and a long, coyote-like tail. To Butler it looked "like a skinless dog."

He kept it frozen for about three months and sent blood samples to Texas A&M. Then he passed it to Jerry Ayer, his former teacher at the Blanco Taxidermy School. "The front legs seem to be a little bit longer than a typical coyote, very irregular," Ayer said.

On 1 September 2009, KSAT-TV in San Antonio broke the story. CNN, NBC, ABC13 and the Los Angeles Times followed, then outlets abroad. Ayer described a "media blitz" of 50 phone calls. The University of Texas and UC Davis asked for tissue samples. The Buckhorn Museum's Hall of Horns in San Antonio expressed interest.

The mount went to John Adolfi's Lost World Museum in Phoenix, New York. It was on display there by October 2009, beside 45 photos of living or killed "chupacabras" and a map of sightings. In May 2010 it was lent to Joe Taylor's Mount Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, Texas. Despite the name, that museum had nothing to do with the town of Blanco.

Nobody said the carcass was faked, and Butler himself raised the leading theory. "I can't tell you one way or another if it's a coyote with mange or if it's a chupacabra," he said. "What I can say is it's a freak of nature." Some sceptics suggested a Xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican hairless dog. Ayer leaned toward "a freak-of-nature coyote, or a hybrid breed with a genetic mutation," though he still said, "I'll just call it a chupacabra too."

Joe Taylor disagreed. "A lot of people say, well, they're mangy coyotes," he said. "But there are a lot of things about them that aren't like a coyote." Adolfi spoke of 600 hours of testing at an unnamed Texas university, and Taylor asked Baylor to look for enzymes. No laboratory result for this animal ever surfaced.

Sceptical investigator Benjamin Radford discussed the case on MonsterTalk. The Mount Blanco Fossil Museum closed in 2023 after Taylor's death, and the mount's whereabouts are unknown. Ayer had called it "an interesting mount and a tremendous conversation piece."