Boogeymen: The Thunderbird

[Michigan Swamp Buck]

@"Michigan Swamp Buck" - Teratornis merriami seems to be a close match to the bird I saw, with the main exception being the naked head. Now all reconstructions of it necessarily take some artistic license, as there have been no soft tissues preserved to inform the reconstructors, so they took bits and pieces from what they considered related birds to flesh it out, but at best those are best guesses. It's possible that it had a fethered head, and it's also possible that I mistook a heavier, but naked and black head (like a black vulture has) for a feathered head - it didn't really stop and pose for a close examination, you know?

The beak it had does seem to fit pretty closely with the reconstructed skull, shown here:



So it does have potential as a close fit, just as panthera atrox has potential as a close fit for some of the lions reported in the US east, and dire wolves have potential as a close fit for some of the "wolves" reported over the years in areas where there should not be any wolves. I saw one of those, too, a large wolf-like canid a few years ago near Southern Gap in Buchanan County, VA - but I just chalked it up to being a really big coy-wolf, which according to genetic testing ALL of the supposed "coyotes" east of the Mississippi River are. They story is that they cross bred with timber wolves in Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on their way to repopulate the east several years ago, and the current eastern population is descended from those cross breeds. That one was about 5 feet long from the tip of it's nose to the root of it's tail, not counting the tail, and stood around 3 or 3 1/2 feet tall at the shoulder, pretty big for a coyote, but not really out of range for a big timber wolf. It was moving along alone up where the elk live, rather than in a pack.

In the 1820's and 1830's, Osborne Russell ("Diary of a Trapper") trapped for a few years in the Rocky Mountains, and reported in his diary 3 separate species of wolf, where two only live now. The third he called a "prarie wolf", and it answered size-wise to the one I saw in Virginia.

The simplest explanation is small relict populations living in refugia, another, pretty far out there, explanation could be the occasional entry through some sort of time portal. All those suddenly vanished missing people go somewhere, now don't they? maybe they are making an involuntary return trip...

Either way, I have no doubt that people occasionally see just what they see, for whatever reason.

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Yes, the bald headed depictions were very common because the bones are similar to condors, but the newer view is they likely had a feathered head. There were sub species as well with variations. That one website I quoted had a very different illustration and claimed it did some hunting on the ground.

When you compare the skull (your post or mine) to the golden eagle's head, the beak is longer and slimmer with less of a hook at the end. Not to mention it was bigger, but the following picture is comparing shape, not size.