In 1999 a farmhouse in the neighborhood of Gradec, Macedonia was being refurbished when a strange discovery was made. The house was originally built in 1874 although the name of the builder is lost, and apparently a number of “charms” were performed to ensure an auspicious future for its inhabitants. Inside the walls were found a full suit of men’s clothing, a number of pairs of lady’s shoes, a mummified cat, a bible in Greek, a couple of tiny scrolls with magical incantations written in Old Church Slavonic and this specimen which is difficult to classify. It had been locked in a small wooden box that had a wax seal upon the lock impressed with the word RODINA , the language is an unknown Slavic tongue written with the Glagolitic alphabet but is believed to mean “safe home”. The pathetic creature must have been imprisoned alive in the hope that she would protect the home from evil. She must have survived only a matter of days or at most weeks before dying of thirst and starvation. Apparently the person or persons who placed the creature there assumed that she was both magic and immortal, but she proved to be neither. The specimen is in rather good condition considering that the mummification was unassisted and in a temperate zone. Portions of its skin and muscle appear to have been eaten by insects at some point in time, but by and large it is complete.

The body is of almost perfectly human proportions with only minor differences. The braincase had a capacity of less than ¼ cc, therefore, it is hard to imagine that the creature possessed human level intelligence, but if not, why the finely developed hands? The feet have no separate toes, but otherwise resemble those of a human being in most ways. Most of the bone structure is far lighter than that of any known mammal and even the larger of the bones are comparable to those of the tiniest shrews or bats in general strength or weight. In life, the creature is believed to have weighed six or seven grams. If the creature actually had a mammalian metabolism, and the presence of the breasts suggests that she did, then she must have had to eat constantly, particularly given her strangest feature, I am of course referring to the wings. In a mammal, one would expect to find wings, if one found them at all, derived from a forelimb like that of a bat. I this case, we are surprised to find a structure much more like that of an insect, specifically those of a dragonfly of the species bradinophyga geminata. The species is native to India but the similarity of appearance is believed to be coincidental. The wings are badly damaged, presumably from beating inside the small box or from injury incurred during the creature’s capture. The musculature that drove these wings is difficult to discern from the single specimen, but perhaps the wings are somehow derived from the ribcage and its associated musculature. The money to do an MRI scan was not forthcoming so that research must await a future time. The stomach was empty but the few tiny fecal pellets revealed a meal of small mites and pollen from populus tremula.

Testing of genetic material from this specimen has proven to be difficult and inconclusive. The creature doesn’t seem to bear a close relationship to anything in the animal kingdom.