Holy grail: Antique fox head bought at a flea market turns out to be an ancient extinct species valued at $85K

It was the Fantastic Mr.Faux.A UK antique collector was shocked after realizing a taxidermied “fox head” was actually the supremely rare bust of an extinct predator called a Tasmanian Tiger.“I will never find anything better,” the curious cranium’s owner James Cranfield, a natural history relics dealer, told the BBC of the once-in-a-lifetime find.The incredible saga began innocuously enough when an anonymous seller bought the artifact for around $67 at a county fair because they were amused by its googly eyes and cartoonish smile, Science Alert reported.So they were naturally quite surprised after putting it up for bidding at the Auctioneum in Bristol and seeing it go for 1,000 times that.Cranfield, who specialized in collecting “weird and wonderful fox heads” to demonstrate diversity in taxidermy, had reportedly been intrigued after discovering the “19th century fox head” while scrolling an auction site.Upon taking a closer look, he realized that it was something far more special.

“When I clicked on it and it opened up to a bigger picture, it was like a bolt of lightning to my brain and eyes that it wasn’t a fox,” the 38-year-old exclaimed.“I immediately thought, ‘that looks like a thylacine.'”The thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger was a carnivorous marsupial that resembled a large dog but with a distinctive striped pattern on its back.

Once distributed across Australia and even as far north as Papua New Guinea, the predator had been confined to the island of Tasmania by the time European settlers arrived.It was subsequently pushed to the brink by hunting, disease and habitat loss.The last thylacine died at the Tasmanian zoo in 1936.Unfortunately, Cranfield could not identify it from pictures alone, so, on the day of the sale, he and his fiance got up at the crack of dawn and drove three and a half hours to the auction house to get a closer look.

Thankfully, the head, which was placed on a table among “all sorts of bric-a-brac and pot...