If the Giant, Man-Eating Beaver is a thing at all, it is more of a legend than a cryptid, a vague lake and river monster. I couldn’t find any stories or serious witness accounts of it, even though it is a phenomenon that people seem to truly believe in. But, to be fair, sightings of larger than normal or giant animals are a pretty common, weird thing. Usually, they can be attributed to poorly estimating the size of something at a distance, being surprised at how large the animal is in real life, as well as lacking a frame of reference to judge it by. I did come across one book which claimed to have more information, in addition to actual eye witness accounts of Giant Beavers, linking them to strange, large tunnels, holes, and the fur trade in Manitoba. It was called "Strange Creatures Seldom Seen”, written by John Warms. I haven’t gotten a chance to read it, though, as the book runs from $50 to over $160, and my public library doesn’t have it, nor does Libby, and that’s a bit too steep a price for me. Maybe one day, if I come across it and feel like splurging, I’ll see what it has to say and maybe revisit this topic. 

Big animals on one hand, giant beavers also coincide with another popular cryptozoology topic: extinct animals that might not actually be extinct. In the late Pleistocene, there were giant beavers, animals we discovered from fossils; scientists have named those that lived in the southeastern US Castoroides dilophidus, and those that roamed elsewhere, throughout North America, C. ohioensis. These beavers were big. On average, they grew to be about 6 ft tall, but some fossils reach over 7 ft in length. There is a bit of a dispute on how much they could weigh, some estimating a whopping 276 lb, while others conservatively estimate that it might have been closer to 170 lbs. They had shorter hind legs, longer, less paddle-like tails, wider hind feet, and more prominent teeth, which grew to be 6 inches. We don’t know if they built dams and lodges, or if their feet were also webbed, but there is evidence that they spent a lot of time underwater. The animals’ skull structure hints that they could take in more oxygen, allowing them to hold their breath longer, and data also suggests that they ate aquatic, rather than woody, plants. One of the other major distinctions between North American beavers and these giant, older ones were their teeth; they didn’t just vary in size, but shape and texture. Beavers we see today have teeth with smooth enamel surfaces; these Pleistocene beavers had odd, striated ones. Aside from overall size, all of these traits might be easily overlooked by someone in the modern era, spotting one in a random river or lake, though. Going extinct alongside other North American mega fauna in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, it is just incredibly unlikely that surviving members are somehow still out there surviving, wandering and splashing around. Wetland animals, ones that were doing pretty well a few hundred years ago, find themselves at risk of extinction in the present day. While we probably aren’t passing by ancient beavers, there was a time where people and giant beavers might have rubbed shoulders.

In Ridge Township in Wyandot County, Ohio, there is an archaeological site in a place called Sheriden Cave. Containing artifacts and remains from the late Ice age, the cavern was sealed off from the outside world by a glacier deposit more than 10,000 years ago. Stone and bone tools dating between 11 and 12,000 years ago were found inside, including rare finds, like bone spear points, flint hide scrapers, fluted spear points, and items from the Clovis culture. Scattered alongside these amazing finds were also human feces, gourds, wood charcoal, and the bones of Late Pleistocene animals–the giant short-faced bear, flat-headed peccary, stag moose, and our giant beaver. Some believe humans may be a contributing factor to the giant beaver’s extinction, hunting them unsustainable so, but the changing climate, morphing wetlands probably hurt them just as badly, if not more so. A dent in the human-caused extinction theory, we have never discovered evidence that humans butchered, hunted, or utilized the animals, finding wounds on the animals’ remains. Even if people didn’t eat or use giant beavers, they may have seen them. The fossil record indicates that the last surviving members of the species hung on below the Great Lakes, in the lowlands, in Ohio and New York, where native peoples were living. Some First Nations cultures have a giant beaver in their myths. There is an Algonquin story about a giant beaver that built a dam so high that the resulting lake almost reached the sea. The dam was soon destroyed by a great figure, named Glooscap and his axe, creating a series of rapids found on the modern-day Saint John River, called the Reversing Falls. Glooscap chased the creature upstream, creating several islands as he tried to hit; it evaded, swimming under the ice. It built another dam, creating the Great Lakes, but fled afterwards, not seen again. Another First Nation’s tale features a giant beaver that stood as tall as the tallest man and walked upright. While these stories don’t prove people and giant beavers shared territory, blows, or a stream, some claim that it could be evidence of First Nation contact with the extinct animals, or perhaps, at least, their bones.