TURNER – If the Maine woods are haunted by a creature of unknown species, that beast remains out there alive and running wild.

A dead animal found last week in Turner was stripped of its “mystery creature” title after results of DNA tests Friday revealed that the carcass was that of a dog.

A boy dog, to be precise.

Early results of the testing at the University of Maine molecular forensics lab showed that the controversial animal had a dog for a mother and most likely a canine father as well.

“Not surprisingly, it has all the indicators to link it to being from canis, a dog,” said Dr. Irv Kornfield of the UMaine lab. “We only have a signature of who the mother of this animal is. We do not know who the father is. We can make no assertions about who fathered this animal. Parenthetically, the animal is male.”

Kornfield and another forensics specialist from Toronto agree that the animal that drew media attention from around the world has the basic foundation of dog DNA.

However, both said more testing would need to be done to determine if the dead animal had genetic material from wolf or any other species.

The results were obtained Friday after the Sun Journal sent tissue from the dead animal last week. The newspaper wanted DNA testing done to settle a debate that raged through Maine and other parts of the country: was the dead animal a mere dog or some exotic species that did not belong here?

Over a period of three days last week, the Sun Journal was flooded with e-mails and phone calls from people offering their opinions on the true nature of the animal. Some insisted it was Maine’s Chupacabra. Others suggested it was a loup-garou, or werewolf. Others offered that the creature might be extraterrestrial in origin, while one suggested that the creature was a Wendigo, a mythological bogeyman in American Indian folklore.

At least half of those people who offered their comments were less fanciful: the so-called mystery creature was a dog and they would hear of no other explanations.

In the end, rationality won the debate. While Dr. Yuri Melekhovets at HealthGene Corp. in Toronto plans to run more tests, the odds of finding anything exotic in the DNA mix seemed remote.

“I’m not startled or shocked by this news, and have tried to prepare the principals involved in this from the beginning,” said Maine cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. “I thought there was a dog in the mix here, and that is visually what I saw and the verdict I was expecting.”

The once mysterious animal was found dead Aug. 12 in the backyard of Debi Bodwell. Her neighbor, Michelle O’Donnell took photos of the carcass before it began to decompose.

O’Donnell, who saw the animal alive a week before it was struck by a car and killed, insisted from the start that the creature did not look like a dog. Her photographs, obtained by the Sun Journal, eventually appeared on television news broadcasts, cryptozoology Web sites, and news pages around the country.

The discovery of the animal cast light on the Maine Warden Service’s role in managing wildlife in the state. Several people were angry because a warden contacted about the find declined to travel from Poland to Turner in order to inspect the beast.

Officials from the Warden Service have staunchly defended their inaction in the case. They said the cost of a warden’s time and the gas he would have burned traveling would have exceeded any benefits from inspecting the animal.

In a letter to the Sun Journal on Friday, Maine Warden Service Col. Thomas Santaguida said his department was convinced it was a dog even without inspecting the carcass.

“We’ve concluded that the animal was a dog and not a wolverine or anything else for that matter,” Santaguida wrote. “We realize that some individuals will continue to take issue with how we handle this incident, but are hopeful that a majority of the public will understand why we responded in this fashion given the circumstances.”

One part of the mystery that remains is the exact breed of dog that caused the uproar. Kornfield said the profile of the DNA is common to many American Kennel Club recognized breeds.

However, he was unable to determine if the dog was a Chow, as many suspected, a German Shepherd or some other breed.

“The sample was really degraded,” Kornfield said. “We were lucky.”

For more than a week, many people clung to the belief that the animal would ultimately prove to be the mystery creature that has hounded the area for more than a decade.

For years, consistent reports have arisen of an unidentified animal with glowing eyes, a chilling cry and the features of a wolverine, a hyena and a Tasmanian Devil. The mystery beast has been blamed for killing a Doberman Pinscher in Wales and mauling a Rottweiler in Greene. It has also been suggested as the cause of missing cats around the region.

Since the turn of the century, the Sun Journal has carried stories about strange creatures emerging from the woods. In 1906, a brief story appeared about a mystery creature then known as “the Injun Devil,” a “strange, dun brown thing with lolling chops and tasseled ears” that roamed the woods of West Gardiner, scaring berry pickers. The creature was also known as the “Lucifee,” or “Indian Devil.”

Two years ago, 72-year-old Leo Doyon was sitting on his deck outside his Perkins Ridge Road home in Auburn when a strange animal came up over the bank. Doyon, who has been hunting the Maine woods for 50 years, said the beast was like nothing he had seen before.

“I said, ‘what the hell is this?’ It was no wolf. It sure as hell wasn’t a fisher and it wasn’t a coy dog,” Doyon said at the time. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it was.”

Coleman, the cryptozoologist, does not believe the animal found in Turner is connected to earlier sightings of Maine’s true mystery beast. Like others, he believes that in this case, a lot of people simply wanted to believe it was.

“Sometimes people are so emotionally involved in trying to ‘solve’ the mystery, there’s a rush to explain the bigger picture with what I call random coincidental events,” Coleman said. “I think there still is a mystery beast out there in the woods around Turner.”

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