It’s been over a year since the story about a deformed mountain lion in Southeast Idaho spread across the world.
However, state wildlife officials are still not sure why an extra set of teeth was growing out the side of the cougar’s head.
It all started on Dec. 30, 2015, when Tyler Olson reported that a mountain lion had attacked his dog near his front porch at his rural Weston Canyon home. The cougar then ran off. Though injured, the dog involved in the attack survived.
After Olson’s wife wrote a post about the attack on Facebook, a group of mountain lion hunters and neighbors quickly congregated at the scene. Within hours of the attack, the cougar was tracked through Weston Canyon, which is located about 8 miles southwest of Preston, where it was eventually treed and killed by one of the hunters. By law, officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game were not allowed to release the identity of the hunter.
As the group of hunters examined the mountain lion’s carcass, they quickly realized that this cat was unique.
Fully-formed teeth, including what appeared to be small whiskers, were growing out of hard, fur-covered tissue on the left side of the animal’s forehead.
Pictures of the cat’s strange deformity quickly made the rounds on social media sites. Within a week, the story about the mountain lion and its freaky deformity was picked up by news outlets from around the world, including CNN, Fox News and the Huffington Post.
Jennifer Jackson, the regional conservation educator with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, said her Pocatello office was flooded with phone calls and e-mails inquiring about the deformity.
“We had people contacting us all the way from California to France,” she said. “I lost track of how many interviews I did and how many emails I responded to in the days following the discovery.”
Idaho Fish and Game released a press release regarding the mountain lion soon after the story broke. In the release, the department’s wildlife biologists said the deformity was either the result of a teratoma tumor or the remnants of a conjoined twin that died in the womb and was absorbed into the other fetus.
The former reason is probably the most likely explanation, according to officials, because teratoma tumors can actually contain hair, teeth and bones. In rare circumstances, these type of tumors can sprout more complex body parts, such as eyes, fingers or toes. Though extremely unusual, there have been well-documented cases of these tumors in humans, canines and horses.
But to this date, Fish and Game officials are not entirely sure.
The lack of definitive answers regarding the cause of the deformity hasn’t stopped people on the internet from providing their own explanations.
On YouTube, there are multiple videos blaming radiation from the Idaho National Laboratory, which is well over 100 miles away, for the abnormality.
Other online commenters took some jest in the situation. One person said the mountain lion was the legendary chupacabra creature, while others jokingly blamed either Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for the deformity.
Among the mountain of inquiries submitted to Fish and Game, Jackson said that some people, particularly those from the Eastern United States and foreign countries, were simply unaware that hunting mountain lions was legal in Idaho.
But there was one thing that Fish and Game officials said the deformity was not — a hoax.
Shortly after the mountain lion was killed, the hunter reported the harvest to Fish and Game. A conservation officer went to the scene and confirmed that the harvest was performed legally.
The officer also confirmed that the deformity was authentic and not the product of Photoshop.
The only way for biologists to know for sure what caused the deformity is to get an X-ray of the mountain lion’s head. Fish and Game officials said they asked the hunter to bring the cougar in for testing.
However, the hunter never brought the animal in and is not required to by state law.
Local rumor says that the cougar, with its bizarre deformity intact, has been taxidermied and is sitting in somebody’s home, but that has not been confirmed either.
Until wildlife biologists can get a closer look at the cougar’s deformity, the mystery of what caused an extra set of teeth and whiskers to grow out of the side of the freaky mountain lion’s head will most likely remain just that — a mystery.
