The Ahuizotl is a central american water beast, which catches its prey by luring unwary humans to the water's edge, then drowning them and feasting on the eyes, teeth and nails of the victim, but leaving the rest of the body untouched.

The Ahuizotl appears in a set of 12 ancient books collectively called the Florentine Codex. Created under the supervision of Bernardino de Sahagún somewhere between 1540 and 1585, it copies original source myths from records of conversations and interviews with indigenous sources in Tlatelolco, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlan.

In the codex, it states:

"...very like the teui, the small teui dog; small and smooth, shiny. It has small, pointed ears, just like a small dog. It is black, like rubber; smooth, slippery, very smooth, longtailed. And its tail is provided with a hand at the end; just like a human hand is the point of its tail. And its hands are like a raccoon's hands or like a monkey's hands. It lives, it is a dweller in watery caverns, in watery depths. And if anyone arrives there at its entrance, or there in the water where it is, it then grabs him there. It is said that it sinks him, it plunges him into the water; it carries him to its home, it introduces him to the depths; so its tail goes holding him, so it goes seizing him ... the one it has drowned no longer has his eyes, his teeth, and his nails; it has taken them all from him. But his body is completely unblemished, his skin uninjured. Only his body comes out all slippery-wet; as if one had pounded it with a stone; as if it had inflicted small bruises ... When it was annoyed - had caught no one, had drowned none of us commoners - then was heard as if a small child wept. And he who heard it thought perhaps a child wept, perhaps a baby, perhaps an abandoned one. Moved by this, he went there to look for it. So there he fell into the hands of the auítzotl, there it drowned him..."