In 1920, Swiss geologist Francois de Loys was on an expedition in the jungles of Venezuela and Colombia when his group was ambushed by a pair of threatening animals that appeared to be apes. De Loys' men shot the creatures, and marveling at the strange appearance of these primates, they decided to take a photograph. The crew sat one of the "ape" corpses on a crate and propped it up with a stick under its chin, and the resulting photo is one of the most infamous images in the realm of cryptozoology -- considered at one time possible evidence of a genuine missing link that had actually been captured and documented.

De Loys filed away the photograph with his notes on the expedition and it went unnoticed for years, reportedly because the geologist didn't think the animal was anything more significant than a mild curiosity. His friend George Montandon, a Swiss anthropologist, accidentally discovered the photo in 1929 while looking through de Loys' records. Montandon believed that it depicted an undiscovered species of ape, and that de Loys had unwittingly made an important scientific find.

De Loys and Montandon brought the story and the photograph to the attention of the press and the scientific establishment, arguing that this animal was a previously unknown ancestor of mankind. Skeptics debated de Loys' estimate of the animal's height having been five and a half feet, which was a foot and a half taller than the largest monkeys in the Americas. But careful analysis of scale in the photograph, based on the known dimensions of the type of fuel crate the dead animal had been seated upon, indicated that de Loys was correct in judging its size. Expeditions ventured to South America in hopes of finding further specimens, but came back empty handed.

And so it was accepted, with varying degrees of certainty, that de Loys had documented a new and rare breed of ape, which Montandon had named Ameranthropoides loysi, in honor of its discoverer. This belief persisted for years, until authorities such as Bernard Heuvelmans, Ivan T. Sanderson and others revisited the de Loys photograph and decided that this creature was no mystery ape, but a large spider monkey. The specimen shown is admittedly abnormally big for a spider monkey, and it may be an unidentified variety of that species, but notion of that it might be an ape and some sort of missing link is definitely baloney.

As a bizarre postscript to this story, cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Michel Raynal announced their findings in 1996 that the de Loys photo may have been a tool in a racist pseudoscience agenda on the part of Montandon. It was previously not widely known that Montandon's scientific views were colored by white Aryan supremacy ideology, such as his recommendation in the late 1930s that Jewish women should have their noses cut off to render them less attractive as potential breeders.

Montandon subscribed to a crackpot evolution theory called "polygenism," which held that the various human races had evolved independently from different species of ape, thus rationalizing the superiority of one race over another. Montandon seized upon the de Loys photo as possible way to fill in a missing piece of the polygenism puzzle, because the theory had lacked an American ape that could have evolved into the Native American race. Few of those who supported the "de Loys' ape" hypothesis over the years could possibly have known they were indirectly lending credence to a fallacious and evil-minded theory.