Tom McArdle
A badly stuffed “fox” head bought at a UK antiques fair has sold for £62,000 ($118,000) at auction after being identified as the head of an extinct Tasmanian tiger.
The anonymous seller bought the head on impulse for £50 three months ago after being amused by its “novelty googly eyes”, and expected to get little more than the reserve price of £28.
But two keen-eyed bargain hunters had unearthed its true identity, and auction staff watched in astonishment as bidding headed into the hundreds – and then the thousands – before surging past £60,000.
“When we told the vendor how much it had sold for, I thought they were about to pass out,” said Andrew Stowe, the auctioneer at Auctioneum in Bristol.
“I actually had to offer them a chair; they couldn’t believe it.”
The successful bidder was James Cranfield, a taxidermy enthusiast from Essex, who suspected the head was not what it seemed when he first saw it catalogued.
Cranfield used the head’s teeth to determine that it was actually the “priceless” head of a Tasmanian tiger – or thylacine – an extinct species formerly found in Australia.
The last known example died in 1936 and only a handful of specimens – mostly skins made into rugs – have been sold over the years.
After a number of sleepless nights, Cranfield, 38, set off at 4am one day last week from his home to the auction house in Bristol before the head went under the hammer.
“It was sat on a table surrounded by all sorts of bric-a-brac and pottery. It confirmed exactly what I wanted to know,” he said.
Cranfield hoped he might snap the item up for the guide price of between £30 and £50, but soon realised he was not the only person in the room who had discovered its true identity.
The packed auction room fell silent as the two bidders battled it out to secure what Cranfield described as “the find of many lifetimes”.
“It is an incredibly rare thing – it is only one of one,” he said.
“There is only one documented specimen on the database and its whereabouts are unknown. But the head I now own is the only one in existence. It is incredible.
“There is no other more significantly known extinct mammal than the thylacine.”
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial native to Australia and New Guinea. Mainland populations disappeared thousands of years ago, but an isolated population survived in Tasmania into the modern era.
Despite its rarity, it was viewed by European settlers in the 19th century as a threat to sheep, and government-backed efforts were made to eradicate it.
The creature was driven to the brink of extinction by bounty hunting, habitat fragmentation and non-native diseases, and the last known individual died at Hobart Zoo in 1936.
“This was undocumented and undiscovered – and is the only known head in the world,” Cranfield said.
“For natural history collectors like myself, this is the find of multiple lifetimes – it really is the holy grail.
“Nobody thought it was possible. I could not believe it. I did not sleep as soon as I saw it. I would wake up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat just thinking, ‘It can’t be, this cannot be real’.”
Cranfield said he was interested in working with Colossal, a biotech company that extracts DNA from fossils, to work on a possible return for the Tasmanian tiger.
“I would like to hear from them, for sure,” he said.
The mounted head is undergoing tests this week to confirm it is a thylacine. Cranfield said he wanted to make the specimen available to anyone committed to “saving it from obscurity”.
Stowe, the auctioneer, said: “It was quite a shock to discover we were sitting on something so special.
“The vendor had purchased it simply because the novelty googly eyes attached to it made them laugh.
“When we broke the news that it was actually a thylacine, they were in complete shock.
“We both agreed that we’d never look at a fox in the same way ever again.”
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