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Onza |
 The story of the Onza, as it has come to be known, started centuries ago in the Sierra Madre Occidental range of northwest Mexico. The Aztecs referred to this mystery cat as cutlamiztli, and believed it to be a third species of jungle cat, separate from the big-cats that were known to them, the puma and the jaguar. The cutlamiztli was described as being thinner and having longer ears than other cats. Spaniards, who were witness to the fierceness of this cat, even against armed men, gave it the name Onza, which referred to the Latin Unica (cheetah). Although known to the local people, zoologists and the outside world did not recognize the existence of this animal. At a point in the 1930's an American hunting party, hunting jaguars, treed and killed and Onza. Unfortunately, the hunters did not keep any of the remains of the animal, and later were met with disbelief when they relayed the insodent to zoologists. Later, in the 1950's, Robert Marshall conducted his own investigation into the insodent, while gathering information on a book about the Onza. Robert Marshall's book, entitled "The Onza," was released in 1961 and remained unnoticed for many years. Richard Greenwell, the secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology, contacted Marshall in the 1980's, who gave him a partial skull of an Onza. Ledell Cockrum, a zoologist at the University of Arizona, directed Marshall and Greenwell to two Sinaloa, Mexico, ranchers who presented the men with yet another skull. A third was then recovered from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. On the evening of January 1st, 1986, the search for the Onza took on a new life. Two deer hunters killed and recovered one of these elusive cats from the Sinaloa's San Ignacio District, and Greenwell was soon alerted. Soon afterward, he and Troy Best, a mammalogist from the University of New Mexico, photographed and later dissected the animal at the Regional Diagnostic Laboratory of Animal Pathology in Mazatlan. Greenwell later wrote "...the cat, a female, appeared to be as described by the native people." This was in reference to the earlier reports of the cat being "long, thin, and large eared." In 1998, final test results were made public in the journal Cryptozoology: tissue samples were found not to be of a distinct species, but were indistinguishable from those of the North American puma. Source: Cryptozoology* A to Z, Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark; Fireside Books, Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020; Copyright ©1999. - entry provided by Robert Prevo, r_prevo@yahoo.com
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