£62,600 ‘fox’ head X-rays as a Tasmanian tiger

What happened

BBC News Essex, Aug. 26, 2026, says the mounted animal head James Cranfield bought at auction is officially a thylacine. Cranfield, a natural-history collector from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, spent £62,600 earlier this month at Auctioneum in Bristol on a lot the house had labelled an antique fox head, offered around £50. On Sunday he heard from the International Thylacine Specimen Database that X-ray images had verified it as the head of a rare thylacine, the extinct carnivorous marsupial also called a Tasmanian tiger. “To be vindicated in everything that I said is amazing and also surreal. It’s like a dream. It’s like a movie. You couldn’t write this,” he told the BBC.

He had been bidding against someone else who also thought the fox label was wrong. Cranfield said the other bidder stopped on a 0.01 percent doubt. He told them in the car park he had been 100 percent from the moment he saw it in person. The last thylacine in captivity died at Hobart Zoo in 1936; the BBC recap is hunting, disease, and habitat loss on Tasmania after the mainland populations had already gone. This filing is the auction gag and the X-ray, not a rewilding argument.

Dr Stephen Sleightholme, project director of the International Thylacine Specimen Database, told the BBC that confirming the species from radiographs was “relatively straightforward.” He called it a remarkable find despite a total lack of provenance, “being only the second known example of a mounted head,” and commended Cranfield for recognizing it. Cranfield said the piece will be loaned to museums, kept in public, and eventually shown at Cranfield’s Curiosity Cabinet in Southend-on-Sea. He hopes to get help extracting DNA. ABC News, covering the same scans, described a full uncut skull under stuffing and quoted Sleightholme on the dentition. The BBC number is £62,600. That is the paddle in panel one.

Why it matters

The joke is the catalog. A house can sell a fox for fifty pounds and still be looking at a marsupial if nobody counts the teeth. Cranfield’s punchline is that he did count them, paid a hundred-thousand-dollar-class hammer, then waited on an X-ray so he would not have to “face the public” if he had bought a lumpy fox. The database already holds hundreds of specimens; Sleightholme’s point is that a mounted head is the rare shape. Two known examples is the collector-world jackpot line, which is why this sits on the humor desk instead of in a lab brief: it is a mislabeled lot that turned into a tiger.

The strip stays light. Auction paddle. Wrong teeth. Teal X-ray. A stamp that reads NOT A FOX. No grave-robbing lecture. No politics. Just a Bristol fox that failed the dental exam.

Conclusion

Cranfield paid £62,600 for a Bristol “fox,” the International Thylacine Specimen Database X-rayed it, and Sleightholme called it the second known mounted head. BBC Essex printed the quote, the £62,600, and the Sunday verification. The comic is the paddle, the teeth, the scan, and the stamp. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwl8zk1xjyo