A stuffed head bought for just $70 at an English antiques market turned out to be the head of an extinct Tasmanian tiger and sold at auction for more than $80-thousand. The specimen had been listed as a fox head, googly eyes and all, when James Cranfield, a taxidermy collector from Essex, spotted it in the catalog and suspected otherwise. Using its teeth, he identified it as a thylacine, a striped carnivorous marsupial native to Australia and Tasmania that was driven to extinction by hunting, disease, and habitat loss.
The last known individual died at a Hobart zoo in 1936, and thylacine material almost never comes up for sale; Cranfield believes this is the only known mounted head in the world, calling it the holy grail and the find of multiple lifetimes. At Auctioneum in Bristol, the room went silent as bids soared into the tens of thousands. The auctioneer said the stunned seller nearly fainted and had to be offered a chair when it sold; Cranfield plans to confirm the find with CT scans and make it available to scientific researchers.
Source: Telegraph
