Palm Springs – When Jim Flood – who lives on Tahquitz Creek Golf Course, just yards from the wash – found a section of his prized BMW 321i shredded and riddled with what looked like teeth marks, he wasn’t sure what to think.

When a neighbor told Flood he’d spotted two animals, “bigger than coyotes,” tearing through the neighborhood in the wee hours the night before, he decided it was time to call the police and report the odd event.

Flood noticed the damage when he went to pick up his newspaper Sunday morning.

“I came walking out of the house on Sunday morning to pick up The Desert Sun,” said Flood, who was not paid to say that.

“I walked outside – probably about 6:30 a.m. I saw a piece of the (convertible) cover was lying on the ground. Then I saw all this damage,” he said.

Damaged BMW

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The wheel well around the car’s front left tire was twisted and had several punctures that could only have been made by teeth.

Large sandy paw prints were visible on his front lawn headed directly to the car.

The police, in an official report, chalked the event up to “suspicious circumstances.”

When Flood talked to neighbors, an insurance adjuster and even a rep at a nearby BMW dealership, he heard more tales of odd coyote-like creatures loping out of the desert to wreak havoc after sundown.

The word “chupacabra” – Latin America’s legendary goat sucker – was mentioned by more than one. Lupine creatures found in Romania were invoked. Others posited a coyote-wolf hybrid.

“I can’t think of a reason why a dog or a coyote or a wolf would bite any kind of metallic object like a BMW,” said Michael Vamstad, a wildlife ecologist based at Joshua Tree National Park.

“We don’t even have wolves in the state of California.”

Jim Flood and his car

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“More likely what you have is a coyote-looking German Shepherd running around,” he said.

Coyotes average about 35 to 40 pounds, so, said Vamstad, it isn’t that hard for a canine to appear larger than a coyote.

And, he said, when a German shepherd is bred with just about any other dog, the resulting mixed-breed dog often looks something like a coyote.

“Someone told me that’s what the biologists would say,” said a skeptical Flood when told that coy-wolves basically can’t exist in California.

So what happened?

“Later on that evening, a woman came by who is taking care of another lady across the street, and she had these fliers in her hand,” said Flood, who may have been engaging in a practice newspaper folk call “burying the lede.”

“And it’s a photograph of her missing cat, and the cat went missing this weekend,” he said.

“Yeah, we had a case like that last year,” said Palm Springs police spokesman Sgt. Mike Kovaleff.

“A bunch of pit bulls basically destroyed the bumper of a car trying to get to a kitten who was holed up,” he said.

As of this writing, the missing cat in Flood’s neighborhood has not been located.