The "Oriental Yeti" of Sichuan

Sichuan province, central China. The first English reports placed the story in a forested area. The region has its own legend of a man who became a bear. Coverage at the time also recalled the Yeren, China's wildman.

Locals reported spotting what they thought was a bear. Hunters set a trap. What they caught was four-legged and hairless, with a long, thick tail and visible sores on its skin. "It looks a bit like a bear but it doesn't have any fur and it has a tail like a kangaroo," said the hunter, named in the agency report as Lu Chin. Its voice was more like a cat, and it was calling all the time.

Lu Chin wondered whether it was looking for the rest of its kind. Or whether it was the last one. "There are local legends of a bear that used to be a man and some people think that's what we caught." Local animal experts could not identify it.

Chinese newspapers told it differently. According to the Tianfu Morning Post, the animal broke into a house in Village 13, Jinyuan Township, Daying County, in Suining, to eat live chickens. Villagers caught it in the chicken coop with iron mesh. The trap and the coop are almost certainly the same animal, told two ways.

5 April 2010. The Daily Telegraph ran the story, with photographs credited to the agency CEN. By the next day The Register, The Christian Science Monitor, the Guardian and the Japanese site GIGAZINE had picked it up. Some reports said the animal was going to Beijing for DNA tests.

No result ever came. The head of the wildlife section at the Daying County Forestry Bureau later denied it had been sent to Beijing at all. It had already been released.

Western commentators worked from the photographs. Loren Coleman saw a palm civet with mange. "This is not a true yeti. This is more media madness," Coleman wrote. "If it sounds like a cat, then it probably is a cat."

The Register and John McKay suggested a mangy binturong. Greg Mayer suspected an April Fools joke, then checked the dates and settled on a mangy carnivoran, probably a civet, "not a bear." George McGavin reportedly thought it an ordinary animal that had lost its fur, perhaps even shaved.

Chinese officials saw it differently. The Daying County Forestry Bureau called it an ordinary animal, possibly an Asian badger or masked palm civet. The Suining Municipal Forestry Bureau called it a mutation. Wu Xianzhi, curator of the Chengdu Giant Panda Museum, pointed to albinism, most likely in a young badger. Mange and albinism are different conditions, and the two explanations still stand side by side.

NetEase called it an international joke. The Christian Science Monitor named it among the top 10 weirdest stories of 2010. LiveScience grouped it with the Montauk Monster, and it sits easily beside the Texas chupacabras, mangy coyotes and dogs mistaken for monsters. A furless animal in a chicken coop had become, for a few days in April, the Oriental Yeti.