Neat.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss such things as fairy tales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_of_Gévaudan
It seems to have decent enough accounts.
Many people were uneducated at the time, and prone to exaggeration. However it is not hard to imagine many predators were exterminated by humans as the human population expanded, and that remaining pockets went extinct through competition with humans.
We know of endless numbers of animals in history that are recorded as going extinct in relatively modern times. Humans normally exterminated any and all predators which they viewed as dangerous.
Consider even in the United States all Wolves and Grizzly bears were exterminated from the majority of the United States due to conflict between humans and livestock.
Most modern predators in Africa would be extinct if not for large amounts of money being used to preserve them.
This is also something to consider:
Some experts, however, state that wolves at the time may have been more aggressive than their modern-day counterparts, saying that today's generation of shy wolves is the result of natural selection favoring animals which were less prone to attacking humans with firearms.
Which makes sense. Many modern living predators which are dangerous to humans are the first to be exterminated, with those which kill livestock slightly slower to be killed off.
Now consider some wolves are very intelligent. Wolves have a larger brain than most dogs, and are considerably more intelligent (though less suitable for domestication.) There is some fairly intelligent dogs.
I would venture that many highly intelligent predators, especially pack hunters which came into contact with humans would pose a threat.
I mean consider now that humans have expanded and taken over almost all land. Any animal that wanted to survive and was intelligent enough to realize it would have tried to get rid of the invasive human species, a major competitor. Humans killed off most prey, cleared land, and turned everything into open crop space during the feudal period. Death to any wild predator.
Most of Europe was dense forests before the feudal period, and open fields afterwards. The arrival of humans spelled death for anything in the area. The primary remaining wilderness in many areas was patches set aside by nobility specifically for hunting by nobility.
Most land animals of a lot of intelligence have been killed off, except for apes in remote locations, and most of them are not major carnivores.
Yet we have many modern marine mammals for a clue as to the diversity of intelligent mammals that once existed. Especially predators such as dolphins and orcas.
It is almost certain that similarly intelligent predators on land would have had conflicts with humans and been exterminated as a result.
Meaning those which survived would have certainly had natural selection play a big part. Anything inclined to compete directly with humans would have been hunted down and ceased to exist genetically.
Those which had any chance of survival would have primarily been those which used stealth and avoided human beings at all costs.
Which is why many big cats survived up until modern times. (However even there multiple species like many species of tiger have gone extinct in the last 100 years.)
So comparing modern wolves to even just wolves of the past may not be entirely accurate. Before humans expanded everywhere animals which were aggressive, especially those which worked as a team actually had the best chance of survival. They defeated the competition. Intelligent aggressive pack animals would be more successful. While after the arrival of humans in an area they had the lowest rate of survival.
Something like a lion was simply exterminated in Europe as a threat to humans, and so most such predators went extinct on the European continent much sooner than elsewhere on the planet. Animals which stood thier ground or even advanced when faced with humans ceased to exist. Those which cowered and avoided humans lasted longer. Yet pockets of some aggressive them would be stumbled upon occasionally by peasants. Until the nobility were sent out to eliminate them.
Another thing is some fantasy monsters are linked to folklore originating to explain the sick behavior of some serial killers. Werewolves especially. The uneducated peasants hearing about and seeing gruesome scenes of such killers leading to such folklore to explain it.
Uneducated masses took facts and within a few months the stories could turn into any number of things. However the nobility was often better record keepers.
Yet even they record hunting the animals down and killing them.
