Goodness, camels make good boogey monsters lol. Thanks for sharing!
I asked an Irish folklorist about the Avus and he said it was probably a later invention.
Ok, another creature I've been looking for...A mouse the size of an elephant found in Chinese mythology. Julius Klaproth apparently documented it, but I'm having a hard time figuring which work it came from. I found a reference to him and this mouse in the book
"The Universe Or, The Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Little By Félix-Archimède Pouchet · 1870" on google books.
That's easy! You're thinking of the Yin Shu (also Tien-schu, Tin-schu, Tyn-schu, and Yn-schu). I covered it already here, and turns out I had used Pouchet as a source (in the original French of course).
Unlike the cyclops and the dragon and the griffin, the yin shu was unquestionably inspired by fossils. In this case, mammoth bones were seen as the remains of enormous mice that tunneled underground and died instantly when they reached the surface. Mammoth bones used in medicine were labeled as yin shu.