China had two big black and white animals: pandas and tapirs, and the people writing the books weren’t out in the jungle, they were buying dead skins from dealers who hadn’t seen it alive either. Mo started out as a more accurate panda sighting and then gradually turned into a chimera with a tapir nose and panda claws and magical hydrophobic fur like a tapir and eats metal like an exaggerated panda. And then it got even more tapir-like when Europeans found tapirs first and declared them the basis of the Mo.