James Cranfield is a 38-year-old British collector who seeks "strange and wonderful fox heads" to demonstrate the diversity of taxidermy. While browsing an auction site, he found a taxidermied piece described as "19th-century fox head." Upon examining the image more closely, he realized it was not a common fox. "I immediately thought: This looks like a thylacine," he told the BBC.
The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a carnivorous marsupial that resembled a large dog but had a distinct pattern of stripes on its back. Originally, the species was distributed throughout Australia and reached as far north as Papua New Guinea. When European colonists arrived, the predator was already restricted to the island of Tasmania.
The species was driven to the brink of extinction by hunting, diseases, and habitat loss, and was declared extinct in 1936. After identifying the piece, James Cranfield decided to purchase it for R$ 505 thousand, securing what may be an extremely rare specimen of the extinct marsupial.
