Footage of a mysterious creature roaming by a West Virginia park has left locals and animal consultants stumped — with some residents guessing the enigmatic beast is something from a lemur to a lion.
Brittany Keller mentioned she was driving to work Oct. 24 when she seen an uncommon animal with a darkish coat and lengthy curved tail close to a gaggle of deer in Ritter Park in Huntington, the Mountain State’s second most populous metropolis.
“When I stopped to take a better look, I realized it was nothing I had ever seen here before,” Keller informed WSAZ 3News late final month.
Video taken by Keller exhibits the odd-looking brown and white creature shifting by the park.
When Keller and the TV station requested different locals what they thought the creature could possibly be, they had been equally as perplexed.
“Oh my gosh! But really, what is that?” a girl asks Keller, to which she replies, “I don’t know.”
Two girls pushing kids in strollers had equally involved reactions, with one exclaiming, “Oh, my God!”
One other lady approached Keller and mentioned by suits of laughter that it “definitely looks like a lion cub.”
Keller later shared the unusual sighting on social media, the place many appeared to suppose the mysterious creature was a lemur.
Andy McKee with the Zoology Zone Science Heart squashed these theories, telling the outlet a lemur wouldn’t be present in West Virginia — some 9,000 miles from its house in Madagascar — until it had been a misplaced pet.
“Lemurs are from Madagascar, on the island, so this would be very, very odd that there would be a lemur out in this area unless it was someone’s pet,” McKee mentioned.
Whereas many had been fast to take a position what the weird creature was, McKee tried to place the conspiracy theories to relaxation.
“It looks more like a fox with mange or some type of issue than a lemur,” he informed the outlet.
Mange, an infectious illness in animals which have hair, oftentimes results in hair loss and scabbing, which may clarify the animal’s peculiar look.
