James Cranfield (@thetaxidermist) noticed something strange about those bulging eyes.
The 38-year-old curiosity dealer found an auction listing in the United Kingdom that simply advertised a “19th-century fox head”. Something didn’t add up: the piece had eight upper incisors instead of six, a tiny detail that changed everything. Foxes don’t have that kind of dentition. Thylacines do.
The thylacine, known as the Tasmanian Tiger, went extinct in the 20th century and is now one of the species that the company Colossal is seeking to bring back through genetic engineering, alongside the woolly mammoth and the dodo. Cranfield had the piece X-rayed and CT-scanned before confirming it: inside the mounting lay a perfect, pristine skull.
What began as a curiosity bought for 50 pounds (about 67 dollars) at a fair turned into a bidding war. The head sold for nearly 85.000 dollars, about a thousand times its original price. “I’ll never find anything better”, Cranfield said, still surprised that he had held a ghost with extra teeth in his hands.