Identifying the CAPacabra (Part 2)

Well, it’s been a long summer, but we’re going to get in the spirit of Spooky Season with the follow-up everyone has been waiting for: what is the CAPacabra?

If you missed Part 1, the CAPacabra is a mummified animal discovered in the ceiling of MSU’s Cook-Seever Hall during renovations in 2018. While there is a CAP 3D image on SketchFab calling it an opossum, this has been debated, with others arguing it may be a large rat, or even a small dog or cat. In Part I, we looked at the gross anatomy to make an estimation of age and species. We looked at the skull shapes for raccoon, opossum, cat, and dog, and successfully ruled out some options: the CAPacabra is definitely not a cat, rat, or opossum!

Since then, I have taken some radiographs of the CAPacabra to share with you all. If you’ve never read a radiograph before, here is Radiography 101:

• Radiographs take a three-dimensional object and smash it down into 2D, so we end up looking at everything layered one on top of another
• This affects the density of the image, which is essentially what we’re looking at: denser areas show up as brighter and whiter in the radiograph

I mentioned in Part 1 that the forelimbs look more like raccoon hands than dog paws. Below is the full-body image of our CAPacabra. The head is to the left, and the tail is to the right.

One of the forelimbs is twisted under the body which makes it harder to see, but the other is beautifully positioned! One of the first things we can see is that there are 5 digits positioned in a manner fairly similar to what we have as humans. In the image gallery below, you can see a close up of the CAPacabra’s hand, along with a dog paw and a raccoon hand for comparison.

If this were a forensic case, I would immediately rule out the dog as a possibility – there are inconsistencies (number of digits) that cannot be explained by natural variation. That leaves us with the racoon as the most likely possibility.

But just to be extra sure, here is a radiograph of a juvenile (living) raccoon:

The similarities to our CAPacabra are pretty pronounced, beyond just the structure of the hand. For instance, check out the jaw structure, the braincase dimensions (red arrow), and the dental arcade (especially molars indicated by yellow arrow).

I feel pretty confident in making a final call: the CAPacabra is a raccoon!