A taxidermy head originally purchased for £50 at a market has sold at auction for £60,000 after it was discovered to be the only surviving head of an extinct Tasmanian tiger.
The specimen had been listed as a Victorian fox head, but a bidding war erupted at Auctioneum Ltd in Bristol after two auction attendees identified its true identity as a Thylacine.
James Cranfield, a 38-year-old taxidermy and natural history curiosity collector, secured the winning bid of £50,000, with an additional £10,000 in buyer fees bringing the final price to over £60,000. He hailed the purchase as a "holy grail" find.
Taxidermy is the practice of preserving and mounting animal skins for study or display. The Tasmanian tiger, or Thylacine, was a carnivorous marsupial native to Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea before its population collapsed.
Discovery at auction house
An anonymous seller originally bought the head three months ago at the West Country antiques fair. The item was not expected to fetch much more than its initial asking price.
Mr Cranfield said he initially saw the "fox head" listed for sale and thought it looked strange. He spent ten days studying images of the item and researching its features before becoming convinced of what it was.
"The more I looked at it over a period of about ten days I started researching I was adamant it was a Thylacine," Mr Cranfield said.
Unable to confirm the specimen from photographs alone, Mr Cranfield left his home in Essex, a county in East Anglia northeast of London, at 4am on the day of the sale. He drove three and a half hours to reach the auction house in Bristol.
"It was sat on a table surrounded by all sorts of bric-a-brac and pottery," Mr Cranfield said. "It confirmed exactly what I wanted to know."
He added: "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."
Extinction of the Thylacine
The Tasmanian tiger was driven to the brink of extinction by relentless hunting, habitat fragmentation and introduced diseases. The last known Thylacine died in captivity at Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, Australia, in 1936, marking the complete extinction of the species.
Only 756 specimens of the species are known to exist worldwide, and only 101 of those are taxidermy mounts. Over the years, only a handful of specimens, primarily skins made into rugs, have been sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Mr Cranfield said he has already tried to have the taxidermy head valued at other auction houses, but was told it was not possible.
"It is priceless," Mr Cranfield said. "There is nothing else to benchmark it against."
Scientific research plans
Rather than keeping the head solely as a private collector's item, Mr Cranfield stated that his plan is to retain the specimen and make it available for scientific research.
"I just want everyone to know it exists so academics and scientists can contact me to study it," Mr Cranfield said. "It will be invaluable to science and I want to make it available to institutions."
Andrew Stowe, an auctioneer at Auctioneum Ltd in Bristol, said it was a "shock" to discover his team was sitting on something so "special".
"When we broke the news that it was actually a Thylacine, they were in complete shock," Mr Stowe said.
He added: "It is unbelievably rare, even replicas of skulls or bones sell for thousands of pounds. To find a complete item like this, is almost unheard of, especially here in the UK."
Bidding war and final sale
Describing the atmosphere during the sale, which took place earlier this month, Mr Stowe said bids were called out directly from the floor, pushing the price rapidly into the tens of thousands.
"Bids were being called out by bidders in the room, a rare occurrence these days!" Mr Stowe said. "Bids quickly jumped into the tens-of-thousands, and simply kept on going up. The room went silent, everyone crowded in to watch. It was an amazing moment to witness."
The hammer eventually fell to a bidder in the room for £50,000, bringing the total price to over £60,000 including buyer fees.
When the auction house informed the seller of the final price, Mr Stowe said the vendor was overwhelmed by the outcome.
"When we told the vendor how much it had sold for, I thought they were about to pass out," Mr Stowe said. "I actually had to offer them a chair, they couldn't believe it. We both agreed that we'd never look at a fox in the same way ever again."
