Thinking of the wild English countryside might conjure up images of manor houses , green arena , andsecret garden ; lions , tigers , and bear are from a dissimilar kind of story — but that ’s not actually so , allot to a recent discovery by a team of researchers . The squad take apart the skeleton and mount skin of a previously unknown animal in the basement of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and have found it to be a Canadian lynx , a cousin to housecats and cheetah and tigers — oh my .
A previous curator of the Bristol Museum had mislabeled the specimen as a Eurasiatic lynx , a close - but - not - quite - right identifier for the species of “ large cat . ” The records also indicated that the museum had acquired the brute ’s physical structure in the early 1900s , after a Devonshire property owner dart the animate being for having killed two of his dogs — a surprisingly domestic end for an fauna more potential to be found roaming in dense forests under the cover of mysterious snowfall .
The Canadian catamount obviously is n’t a species aboriginal to Britain , so how did it get there if not by boat or plane ? British big cats are something of an anomaly to set about with : Reports come in every so often of one having been sighted in the wild , despite the impossibility of any instinctive animal migration to the island , but the Bristol Museum ’s long - dead specimen is one of the only classical pillowcase subjected to scientific examination . One hypothesis trace the surge in non - aboriginal species like various self-aggrandizing cat to the metre of theDangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 , pass along when the worrying drift of import alien favorite threatened to conflict on public safety machine . That is , locomote by gravy boat or plane may be exactly how Canadian catamount mother to England . spook by the menace of regularisation and sizable fines , owner then irresponsibly released extraneous puppet into the British wild .
The museum ’s lynx skill , however , date from 1903 — validation that big computerized tomography have tramp English soil for over a century , long before the 1976 law might have win over Panthera tigris - owners to coif their positron emission tomography free . The origins of Britain ’s big cats , and Bristol ’s one Canadian lynx , remain a mystery .
