Piasa
The Piasa is a famous painted figure on the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi at Alton, Illinois, long described as a monstrous bird. The legend of a man-eating 'Piasa bird' is a literary invention of John Russell (1836); the original pictograph, later destroyed and repainted, was most likely an Underwater Panther, a cougar with antlers, a scaled body and a prehensile tail.