Revolutionary Jinx-Krаyonist 
1- Fearsome critters
This covers a few different ones but I feel I can lump these together. Fearsome critter stories stared within American logging camps as a way to haze new members and as a way to explain natural phenomena (loggers going missing late at night, strange sounds in the forests, having to be drunk on the job).
Some of them are maneaters and some of them mostly harmless but all are super wacky looking.
The hugag is my favorite
He's like a moose-camel-duck
2-Selkies
Selkies are creatures that can shapeshift between human and seal. Stories of this legend come mostly from Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe islands, and Iceland. A Selkie sheds their seal skin when they turn human and can only turn into a seal again with it. A lot of stories revolve around creepy moids waiting for selkies to turn into a human so that they can steal their seal skin and forcefully marry them. Real moid moment 
I like the theory that the story of Selkies started when Finnish, Sami, and eskimos 
came into contact with the Scottish and they simply believed them to be a whole other species.
3- Set animal
The Ancient Egyptian God Set was identified with this guy
There's not much else to say other than that they made up a whole new kind of animal.
Links 
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokele-mbembe
We don't have stuff like Bigfoot, but many whites conspiracy nuts from southern Africa were very hardcore into the belief of African veliciraptors or seismosaurs still being alive in the deepest darkest central African swamps of places like Angola and the Congo
Since the most infamous discovery of the Coelacanth living fossil
A lot of safricans myth hunters and archaeological r-slurs have launched many expeditions into places like Congo lakes to find supposed living fossils of raptors, river treading seismosaurs or Africa version of commodo dragons, based on ancient central African legends and myths of massive reptiles which had supposedly been hunted to extinction prior to colonialism started there
It should be noted however that Europeans have always taken these myths much more seriously than the black locals, as there have always been very seriously deadly animals in Congo to not need to invent fantasy monsters, like lions hippos and elephants
But the reason why there was any credibility of these central African mega reptiles was that the local inhabitants like the Congolese would so perfectly replicate the body structures of seismosaurs in their retellings, especially since many of Congolese had no awareness of the existence of dinosaurs or archaeology in general
Additionally reptiles (like most famous of these being the Mokele-mbembe) were very grounded mythic creates, instead of being fire breathing dragon fey shit from Ireland, instead they were just scary biological monsters
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!atheists I remember back in the early 2010s internet that it sucked to look up for living dinosaur/dinosaur-esque cryptids, because Amerimutt young earth creationists infested these topics like a plague, in order to prove how Dinosaurs co-existed or still exist thus my 19th-century Amerimutt interpretation is correct checkmate atheists libtard pwned ebic Ken Ham style
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I remember finding this fundie website where they had a bounty for capturing a live pterosaur. It was something like 'go crawl through the jungles of Africa, find and bring back a fricking dinosaur and we'll pay you 10 grand for it as this will PROVE God's existence
'. And it wasn't even a local African church hosting this it was some backwater church in the US South.
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That's great, I remember the youtuber Trey the Explainer did a video on one of those specific dinosaurs people were looking for.
It was especially hilarious how the actual African jungle dwellers they were relying upon knew it to be completely fake and were basically putting on a show giving false testimony so they'd keep coming back to look, and pay them.
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