Mapinguari

[1] Others claim that it is a modern-day sighting of a giant ground sloth, an animal estimated to have gone extinct at the end of the Late Pleistocene.

[2][3] These later descriptions may be attributed to David C. Oren, an ornithologist, who heard stories of the creature and hypothesized they might be the extinct sloths.

This was met by criticism by scientists at the time, but an article Oren published in 1993 was picked up by major news papers despite no evidence.

[4] A 2023 academic study of the 1995 discovery of giant sloth bones “modified into primordial pendants” suggested that humans lived in the Americas contemporaneously with the giant sloth, specifically that “it may have served as inspiration for the Mapinguari, a mythical beast that, in Amazonian legend, had the nasty habit of twisting off the heads of humans and devouring them.”[5] According to Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden, its name is a combination of the Tupi-Guarani words "mbappé", "pi", and "guari", meaning "a thing that has a bent [or] crooked foot [or] paw".

[2][3] A reference to Mapinguari occurs in the 2020 animated film The Red Scroll, during the final scene when the character Wupa transforms into a giant sloth monster.