Man Makes Bizarre Discovery on Chicago Sidewalk: 'You Can See Claw Marks'

A man made a skin-crawling discovery during a walk along a seemingly ordinary Chicago street.

Artist Winslow Dumaine was on his way to Transistor Chicago, a shop that sells some of his work, when a close friend he was with pointed something out on the pavement near to 1918 West Roscoe Street.

Dumaine told Newsweek he felt compelled to take a picture of it and share it to social media after being struck by how it represented "such a great example of environmental storytelling."

There, before them, on the concrete pavement appeared the perfect outline of a rodent-like animal. "A perfect rat splat mark," Dumaine said. "It was like something straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon."

"When I saw it I immediately laughed out loud," he said. "It's like seeing a dude slip on a banana peel, it's just such a perfectly distilled visual comedy."

It's perhaps understandable that Dumaine would have assumed the outline was that of a rat. After all, a study conducted by pest control firm Orkin saw Chicago ranked as America's "rattiest" city based on the number of new rodent services being set up to combat the issue.

He even has an idea of how it might have occurred. "My theory is that a rat fell out of a tree or off the top of a building and landed in some wet cement," he said.

However, since sharing the snap with followers on X, where he posts as WinslowDumaine, and Instagram, under the handle Calculations, at least one alternative theory has been put forward.

"I've seen people suggest that it could be a squirrel, whose bushier tail would not show up. I think it's got the distinct rat shape, though, so I'll go with that," he said.

Based on the responses he's received, Dumaine reckons the imprint was made back in 2016 and that the rodent involved likely lived to tell the tale.

"I like to think that it survived, because the impression is so deep that the cement likely was still very wet," he said. "You can see little claw marks near it, indicating that the rat may have made an escape."

Whatever the truth, the post has proven popular on X, where it's been viewed 4.7 million times already. Dumaine's random discovery has had a positive knock-on effect on his work.

"The response has been unbelievable," he said. "Usually when a tweet of mine blows up, I put a link to some of my art in the comments, and it almost never works, but this time I made a ton of sales, so that's been nice. The rat paid my rent this month."

Dumaine is currently in the process of designing a hand drawn card game with plans to launch a Kickstarter this summer. As bizarre and unsettling discovery as it might have been, that rat outline in the concrete may have paved the way to making this next project a reality.

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