Footage of a mysterious creature roaming through a West Virginia park has left locals and animal experts stumped — with some residents guessing the enigmatic beast is anything from a lemur to a lion.
Brittany Keller said she was driving to work Oct. 24 when she noticed an unusual animal with a dark coat and long curved tail near a group of deer in Ritter Park in Huntington, the Mountain State’s second most populous city.
“When I stopped to take a better look, I realized it was nothing I had ever seen here before,” Keller told WSAZ 3News late last month.
Video taken by Keller shows the odd-looking brown and white creature moving through the park.
When Keller and the TV station asked other locals what they thought the creature could be, they were equally as perplexed.
“Oh my gosh! But really, what is that?” a woman asks Keller, to which she replies, “I don’t know.”
Two women pushing children in strollers had equally concerned reactions, with one exclaiming, “Oh, my God!”
Another woman approached Keller and said through fits of laughter that it “definitely looks like a lion cub.”
Keller later shared the strange sighting on social media, where many seemed to think the mysterious creature was a lemur.
Andy McKee with the Zoology Zone Science Center squashed those theories, telling the outlet a lemur would not be found in West Virginia — some 9,000 miles from its home in Madagascar — unless it were a lost 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 said.
While many were quick to speculate what the bizarre creature was, McKee tried to put the conspiracy theories to rest.
“It looks more like a fox with mange or some type of issue than a lemur,” he told the outlet.
Mange, an infectious disease in animals that have hair, oftentimes leads to hair loss and scabbing, which could explain the animal’s peculiar look.
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