Researchers report faux fox head find

James Cranfield, a U.K. natural-history curiosities dealer, said a taxidermied head sold as a 19th-century fox turned out to contain the skull of a thylacine, the extinct marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger. X-rays confirmed an almost complete skull inside the mount, according to ABC News and ScienceAlert. The find was highlighted again on September 8 in a News from Science social-media roundup that linked to the underlying reporting. The case has drawn attention because surviving thylacine remains are scarce and closely tracked by specialists. ### How did a fake fox become a thylacine find? James Cranfield told ScienceAlert he first noticed the object in an auction listing for a “19th-century fox head” and suspected it was something else when he enlarged the image. He said the mount’s teeth and head shape did not match a fox. Auctioneum, the Bristol auction house, said the object had originally been bought for £50 at an antiques market in southwest England and later sold at its auction for £50,000. (abc.net.au) ABC News reported Cranfield paid £62,000 including fees after bidding rose well above estimate. ### What convinced Cranfield before the scans were done? The teeth were the clearest early signal. (sciencealert.com) ScienceAlert reported Cranfield focused on the incisors: foxes and related canids have six upper incisors, while this specimen had eight, matching thylacine dentition. James Cranfield told ABC News the specimen had been confirmed by experts as “a genuine, previously undocumented” example of the extinct animal. (auctioneum.co.uk) ABC reported the head appears to have been preserved in the late 1800s, though that dating remains part of the object’s documented history rather than a new scientific paper. ### What did the imaging show inside the headpiece? (sciencealert.com) X-rays showed a full, uncut skull beneath stuffing inside the taxidermied mount, ABC News reported. That mattered because the exterior had been reconstructed to resemble a fox, while the underlying skull preserved the anatomy specialists use for identification. ScienceAlert described the object as a mounted “fox head” that had been “masquerading as a fox,” with the morphology of the skull and dentition pointing instead to Thylacinus cynocephalus. (abc.net.au) The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial once found across Australia and New Guinea before surviving only in Tasmania in historical times. ### Why is a thylacine head unusual enough to draw notice? The last known thylacine died in a Tasmanian zoo on September 7, 1936, ScienceAlert said, placing the rediscovered specimen nearly 90 years after the species’ disappearance. Surviving remains are limited enough that newly verified material is cataloged individually. (sciencealert.com) ABC News reported the specimen is expected to be entered in the International Thylacine Specimen Database. The same report said scientists, including people associated with Colossal Bioscience’s thylacine de-extinction work, plan to collect DNA samples. ### What is known next? News from Science resurfaced the story on September 8 in a weekly science roundup, pointing readers to images and source coverage of the faux fox head. (sciencealert.com) The immediate next step in the underlying reporting is database listing and scientific sampling of the specimen by named researchers and participating institutions. (abc.net.au)