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

Museum find proves exotic 'big cat' prowled British countryside a century ago. The rediscovery of a mystery animal in a museum's underground storeroom 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 analysed by a multi-disciplinary team of Durham University scientists and fellow researchers at Bristol, Southampton and Aberystwyth universities and found 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 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.