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Olmagon — The First Hidebehind Attack
#bear #prehistoric #forest #alternatehistory #cenozoic #cryptid #cryptozoology #deer #forestlandscape #hidebehind #homo #homoerectus #human #mammal #pleistocene #thriller #ursine #speculativeevolution #fearsomecritters #speculativebiology #ursavus #speculativezoology #sinomegaceros #cryptozoologicon #terrortales #ballusia #cryptidmonster #ursavinae
Published: 2024-10-09 21:41:54 +0000 UTC; Views: 26331; Favourites: 238; Downloads: 5
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Description
Around 700,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene epoch, a Homo erectus man comes across the carcass of a Sinomegaceros pachyosteus stag in what is now northern China and notices something odd: the deer's corpse is mostly intact aside, but its intestines are missing, as seen through the large cut in its belly. And unfortunately for him, the predator that did this is right behind him, hiding behind a tree to avoid his line of sight, and it'll be too late when he finally sees this beast. This unusual creature is a large ursavine bear, whose descendants will move to a new continent keep its same tactics of hiding behind objects while hunting, earning them a fitting name: the hidebehind.
So to clarify, that bear thing is not a real animal: this drawing was privately requested by someone who asked for a Cryptozoologicon-type drawing depicting a hidebehind stalking a Homo erectus. For those who don't know, the hidebehind is a "Fearsome Critter" from North America oral folklore, claimed to be a large nocturnal animal that preys on humans and feeds almost exclusively on the intestines of its prey. The hidebehind is said to stalk its prey while always staying out of the prey's sight, hiding behind a tree or other object when its quarry tries to look at it, and therefore its appearance is unknown. Still, there have been attempts to guess what it looks like, and in the 1939 Fearsome Critters book by Henry Harrington Tryon, there is an illustration depicting the hidebehind as a black mammal resembling a bear or dog standing upright. The person requesting the drawing here asked that I depict the hidebehind as a species of bear, specifically an early-diverging bear lineage around the evolutionary grade of Ballusia or Ursavus, retaining primitive features like a long tail and sorta slender body, making it slightly mustelid-like in appearance, and honestly a basal bear does kinda match the 1939 illustration. Like in that illustration, I depict the hidebehind with black fur, but also add white patterns on its face and chest since such patterns seem to be ancestral to bears as a whole. I did at first think it was odd that the requester asked that I draw a North American folklore creature preying on an early human species known only from Eurasia and Africa, but the requester then specified that in this scenario the hidebehind first evolves in Eurasia before later spreading into North America across the Beringian Land Bridge during the Pleistocene, and then the original Eurasian population dies out, leaving only American hidebehinds surviving into the modern day and preying on lumberjacks. Of course, it's not really reasonable to imagine a large predator species could survive preying entirely on humans so this hidebehind also hunts other animals, and I've included the extinct deer Sinomegaceros pachyosteus as an unlucky victim here (yes it is a real animal and that's actually what its antlers look like).
Also I suck at drawing human faces.





















