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Description
A Tetrameryx schuleri is bitten by a predator during a night 2 million years ago in the early Pleistocene epoch of what would become the southern United States. It is difficult for some creatures, including us humans to see in the darkness, but to many nocturnal animals able to see UV light, the predatory animal's fur and quills are glowing a blue light invisible to us. This is visible to a large terror bird, Titanis walleri, which turns to look when it sees what appears to it as a blue glow rush past to attack the Tetrameryx. Unusually, this predator is only going to eat a rather small amount of its prey's flesh, but drink a lot of the blood. Generations later its descendants would do the same to human livestock and earn its species the name "chupacabra".

In case you haven't figured out from the last word of the previous paragraph, this is not just normal paleoart depicting real extinct animals. This was privately requested by a guy in my notes, who asked for a Cryptozoologicon-type drawing depicting the Chupacabra, and for the drawing to be set 2 million years ago in Florida and feature the cryptid preying on a white-tailed deer or the extinct antilocaprid Tetrameryx. I chose the latter but only after drawing this did I realize Tetrameryx doesn't seem to have any known record from Florida, so I just had it set in a nondescript part of the southern US instead (maybe Texas, all the real animals in this artwork are known from there and supposed Chupacabra sightings sometimes occur there too).

So in case you don't already know, the Chupacabra is a cryptid that has been supposedly sighted from the southwestern United States down south into South America. The appearance of the Chupacabra kinda varies depending on the person describing it, though usually there's two main forms: an almost reptilian humanoid with huge eyes, and what's practically a mnourished dog with mange (in fact some purported sightings have turned out to be just that). Sometimes it is even described as having wings, and usually with quills along its back. However the single consistent thing about descriptions of the Chupacabra is that it feeds on blood, often of livestock and especially of goats, hence its name is Spanish for "goat sucker".

So, the request was for some speculative evolution take on the Chupacabra kinda like they do in Cryptozoologicon, and the requester asked that I depict the creature as a late-surviving sparassodont. For those who don't know, the sparassodonts are an order of predatory mammals native to South America, which in our real world died out during the Pliocene, and they are metatherian mammals so their closest living relatives are the marsupials. The requester asked that I show the Chupacabra as something like a New World equivalent to a thylacine, with a convergently-evolved slender, dog-like body, and also with quills for defence against larger predators. Some of the more popular sparassodonts include Thylacosmilus and Borhyaena, and among real sparassodonts it seems that the Borhyaenidae family matches the doglike-body best so I based this Chupacabra mainly on borhyaenids, and those are probably its closest relatives. This Chupacabra would have first evolved in South America, and spread into North America when the Isthmus of Panama formed. Of course, being a depiction if the Chupacabra, the requester asked that the creature be hematophagous and feed on blood. However being purely hematophagous is an extremely shitty lifestyle that's very hard to make viable for survival since blood is mostly water and has very little nutritional value, so this Chupacabra does still eat some flesh off its prey along with a lot of the blood in order to plausibly stay alive.

And of course there's probably people confused about the Chupacabra glowing like that since very few if any descriptions of the cryptid mention any glowing. Well this was a feature requested by the guy requesting the drawing. Many nocturnal mammals have been discovered to have fur which glows when exposed to UV light, which would normally be invisible to human eyes but various animals can see. Such mammals include platypuses, flying squirrels, hedgehogs, and many marsupials like wombats, Tasmanian devils and bandicoots, and given that marsupials are the closest relatives of sparassodonts, maybe some nocturnal sparassodonts also glow under UV. Also it kinda looks cool and I like it.

EDIT ON NOVEMBER 13, 2022: I have since been notified that the Titanis in the original drawing was inaccurate and outdated, with a wrong skull shape and with wings too short. I have since updated the Titanis to better reflect our current knowledge of the animal, even if it's in the dark background and a little hard to see.

Description
A Tetrameryx schuleri is bitten by a predator during a night 2 million years ago in the early Pleistocene epoch of what would become the southern United States. It is difficult for some creatures, including us humans to see in the darkness, but to many nocturnal animals able to see UV light, the predatory animal's fur and quills are glowing a blue light invisible to us. This is visible to a large terror bird, Titanis walleri, which turns to look when it sees what appears to it as a blue glow rush past to attack the Tetrameryx. Unusually, this predator is only going to eat a rather small amount of its prey's flesh, but drink a lot of the blood. Generations later its descendants would do the same to human livestock and earn its species the name "chupacabra".

In case you haven't figured out from the last word of the previous paragraph, this is not just normal paleoart depicting real extinct animals. This was privately requested by a guy in my notes, who asked for a Cryptozoologicon-type drawing depicting the Chupacabra, and for the drawing to be set 2 million years ago in Florida and feature the cryptid preying on a white-tailed deer or the extinct antilocaprid Tetrameryx. I chose the latter but only after drawing this did I realize Tetrameryx doesn't seem to have any known record from Florida, so I just had it set in a nondescript part of the southern US instead (maybe Texas, all the real animals in this artwork are known from there and supposed Chupacabra sightings sometimes occur there too).

So in case you don't already know, the Chupacabra is a cryptid that has been supposedly sighted from the southwestern United States down south into South America. The appearance of the Chupacabra kinda varies depending on the person describing it, though usually there's two main forms: an almost reptilian humanoid with huge eyes, and what's practically a mnourished dog with mange (in fact some purported sightings have turned out to be just that). Sometimes it is even described as having wings, and usually with quills along its back. However the single consistent thing about descriptions of the Chupacabra is that it feeds on blood, often of livestock and especially of goats, hence its name is Spanish for "goat sucker".

So, the request was for some speculative evolution take on the Chupacabra kinda like they do in Cryptozoologicon, and the requester asked that I depict the creature as a late-surviving sparassodont. For those who don't know, the sparassodonts are an order of predatory mammals native to South America, which in our real world died out during the Pliocene, and they are metatherian mammals so their closest living relatives are the marsupials. The requester asked that I show the Chupacabra as something like a New World equivalent to a thylacine, with a convergently-evolved slender, dog-like body, and also with quills for defence against larger predators. Some of the more popular sparassodonts include Thylacosmilus and Borhyaena, and among real sparassodonts it seems that the Borhyaenidae family matches the doglike-body best so I based this Chupacabra mainly on borhyaenids, and those are probably its closest relatives. This Chupacabra would have first evolved in South America, and spread into North America when the Isthmus of Panama formed. Of course, being a depiction if the Chupacabra, the requester asked that the creature be hematophagous and feed on blood. However being purely hematophagous is an extremely shitty lifestyle that's very hard to make viable for survival since blood is mostly water and has very little nutritional value, so this Chupacabra does still eat some flesh off its prey along with a lot of the blood in order to plausibly stay alive.

And of course there's probably people confused about the Chupacabra glowing like that since very few if any descriptions of the cryptid mention any glowing. Well this was a feature requested by the guy requesting the drawing. Many nocturnal mammals have been discovered to have fur which glows when exposed to UV light, which would normally be invisible to human eyes but various animals can see. Such mammals include platypuses, flying squirrels, hedgehogs, and many marsupials like wombats, Tasmanian devils and bandicoots, and given that marsupials are the closest relatives of sparassodonts, maybe some nocturnal sparassodonts also glow under UV. Also it kinda looks cool and I like it.

EDIT ON NOVEMBER 13, 2022: I have since been notified that the Titanis in the original drawing was inaccurate and outdated, with a wrong skull shape and with wings too short. I have since updated the Titanis to better reflect our current knowledge of the animal, even if it's in the dark background and a little hard to see.