Museum find proves exotic ’big cat’ prowled British countryside a century ago

The rediscovery of a mystery animal in a museum's underground storeroom by an undergraduate at the University of Bristol proves that a non-native 'big cat' prowled the British countryside at the turn of the last century. The animal's skeleton and mounted skin was rediscovered by Max Blake - now a PhD student at Aberystwyth University - while studying for his undergraduate degree in zoology at Bristol. Analysis by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Durham, Bristol, Southampton and Aberystwyth found it to be a Canadian lynx, a carnivorous predator more than twice the size of a domestic cat. The research, published today in the academic journal Historical Biology, establishes the animal as the earliest example of an 'alien big cat' at large in the British countryside. The research team say this provides further evidence for debunking a popular hypothesis that wild cats only entered the British countryside following the introduction of the 1976 Wild Animals Act. The Act was introduced to deal with an increasing fashion for exotic - and potentially dangerous - pets. The academics believe such feral 'British big cats' as they are known, may have lived in the wild much earlier, through escapes and even deliberate release.