Could this be the real Beast of Gevaudan??

Extremely unlikely. The Tasmanian Tiger had very thin/fragile jaws, with most of its prey being the size of a sheep or smaller (and possibly relying mainly on a diet of carrion). There were also no recorded incidents of human beings being attacked by the creatures despite over a hundred years cohabitation before the species went extinct.

It's probably hard to judge from those photos, but the creature was actually quite small, nowhere near as bulky or powerful as a regular wolf.

The beast in the movie seemed to have the face of a lion, but the size and gait of a rhino. I don't think this means anything other than that's how the visual effects animators made it, and fits in perfectly with how stupid the rest of this movie is.

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The beast in the movie was a lion (Panthera leo) dressed up in a suit of armor, but the real beast was probably a spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta. A nobleman of the right time and place had a private zoo with a hyena in it. In the 1990s a hyena skin was found in a royal storehouse from the 1760s, so it is likely that the real Bete du Gevaudan was a hyena.

Some say, based on reports of the Bete having hooves, that it was a Mesonychian, which is a woolly whale that has mooselike legs and a wolflike face, but those have not been seen in the fossil record for 30 million years (only the sea whales like Moby Dick lived on after that time), so wolf, lion and hyena are all infinitely more plausible than a Mesonychian.

So, in all seriousness, the Bete was most likely a hyena. The movie changed it to a lion for artistic license.

Looks way too small, I think.

Way to small...The history states it was a very large wolf and in the film it states that some animals were brought back from a foreign land which looking at all the African masks, spears etc etc in the hunting lodge at the end then you can put your money on it being a lion in a type of armour also have a look at the beasts eye in one part of the film where its in it's cage, it has a totally feline look to it.









"Put your clothes back on Carol I can't concentrate" The Great Father Dougal McGuire

A long shot, but the 'real' beast may have been a prehistoric hanger-on having wandered back into human territory for... whatever reason.

Face of a lion, size of a rhino?

European Cave Lion. Last ones were thought to have been killed around the time of Christ, but who knows? Maybe a few survived in the backwoods of Europe, and this particular animal simply got too close to people.

Since time began,
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.

Serial killer and the natural follow up, copy-cat. Throw in a few opportunistic murders. An animal that slits throats, doesn't attack or kill animals and preys on women and children?



Don't trust reality. After all, it's only a collective hunch.

I'm guessing the real beast was most probably half a particularly voracious wolf and half legend. An ordinary wolf (or maybe a particularly large one) kills a couple of kids, people get scared, the priests start talking about a punishment from God, some kid makes a report of the wolf being twice as large as a normal wolf, some poor girl gets the fright of her life and imagines it has spikes, people repeat the story on and on and before you know you have a beast weighing two tons, with spikes and crazy hair, who can fly and shoot fire out their a.. and so on. Most likely, it was just an over-active wolf or perhaps even a pack of them that made people make too much use of their imagination. Add to that that people get so scared any unnatural death is blamed on the beast, bringing the toll of deaths up. We're talking 18th century, in a very remote part of France (still is quite remote and we now have motorways), very rural, full of people who were superstitious, illiterate and uneducated that Enlightenment hadn't quite reached yet.

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