This little beast comes from Francisco Núñez de Cepeda's Idea de el buen pastor copiada por los SS. Doctores representada en empresas sacras: con avisos espirituales, morales, politicos y economicos para el govierno de un principe ecclesiastico, though it takes as the source for the animal information the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, 1635.
I believe that Nieremberg's work also has an image of this little beastie, but since the work doesn't seem to have ever been scanned, I can't be sure.
At any rate, this fearsome beast, (with a rather fetching plumed tail) was called a succarath, and Núñez de Cepeda writes that it lived in the southernmost reaches of America, and its skin is used by the natives as a covering. Núñez de Cepeda goes on to call attention to the way in which this fearsome beast cares for its young, for even while chased by hunters, it still takes its young upon its back to try and carry them to safety.
"Mira con tan singular afecto la propagacion de su descendencia, que perseguida de los caçadores, toma sobre su espalda los hijos, y por asegurarlos la vida, aventura la propia: Tanto es el amor con que atiende à su posteridad aun la fiereça de los brutos mas indomitos!"
Núñez de Cepeda's work gives a snippet of the original information from Nieremberg's book, where he calls the animal a ferocious and wild beast ("Succarath apud Patagonas bellua rapax, & torva est.") And it does seem fierce indeed-- it looks a bit like an overgrown dog, but it's bearded (seen more clearly in other images), though most of its hair outside of the beard and the tail isn't terribly long. Nieremberg also mentions its love for its young, and in that, his description seems almost Aesopian.
Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae was one of the two works on natural philosophy/history that he published (the other being the 1649 Curiosa y oculta filosofía), and it was a curious book chock full of really, really strange arcana (to our modern eyes, at least), interspersed with descriptions of natural history, much of it from the new world. Our imaginative Jesuit, it should be noted, never left Spain. He was simply a compiler of information, and his sources for the new world were works by new world historians like Francisco Hernández, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, José de Acosta, Cieza de León, Fernández de Oviedo, and others.* This highly detailed drawing of a creature that neither Núñez de Cepeda, Nieremberg, nor the illustrators of their books had ever seen is to me, what's so cool about these illustrations and their descriptions. How do you describe an animal you don't know?
* Juan Pimentel, “Baroque Natures: Juan Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History,” in Bleichmar, Daniela and Paula de Vos, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2009.
