Mythical Beast? No, Just Coyote

Phylis Canion holds the head of what she is calling a Chupacabra at her home in Cuero, Texas, Friday, Aug. 31, 2007. She found the strange looking animal dead outside her ranch and thinks it is responsible for killing many of her chickens. The results are in: The ugly, big-eared animal found this summer in Cuero is not the mythical bloodsucking chupacabra. It's just a plain old coyote. Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay

SAN MARCOS, Texas (AP) — The results are in: The ugly, big-eared animal found this summer in southern Texas is not the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra. It's just a plain old coyote.

Biologists at Texas State University announced Thursday night they had identified the hairless doglike creature. San Antonio television station KENS-TV provided a tissue sample from the animal for testing.

"The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote,'' biologist Mike Forstner said in a statement. "This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote.''

Phylis Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound (18-kilo) bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles (145 kilometers) southeast of San Antonio, Texas.

Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she could get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

Chupacabra means "goat sucker'' in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Additional skin samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal's hair loss, Forstner said.

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