Alleged 'Tasmanian Tiger' skin in the news again

Yes, THAT pelt is once again in the news!

It seems that yet another biologist has aired his doubts over its authenticity as a Tasmanian Tiger skin, according to a San Diego newspaper.

UCSD biology professor J. David Archibald inspected the pelt last Wednesday and wrote in an e-mail that it appeared to be a zebra duiker, a small African antelope.

“While I cannot make any definitive assessment other than the pelt is genuine, I lean toward it being a zebra duiker based on the cumulative evidence,” Archibald wrote in the e-mail provided by its owner, Bill Warren.

“Even if this identification is correct, this is a threatened species, and the pelt might be valuable if it can be sold legally.”

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has denied Warren a permit to send the skin to a Sydney auction house. The department denied his request because he couldn’t prove the species of the pelt. It also questioned the age of the pelt, saying it looked too new to belong to the long-dead species.

Readers of this blog will already know our opinion of the skin and what has transpired thus far.

Stay tuned!

Uncertainty over 'Tassie Tiger' pelt

A Fallbrook man's belief that he owns a valuable Tasmanian tiger pelt has been challenged by a US Fish and Wildlife Service official.

The question of whether Bill Warren's pelt is from a Tasmanian tiger or a Zebra Duiker, as a federal wildlife official believes, could be a costly difference for the Fallbrook resident. He bought the pelt last year at a garage sale for $5 and hopes to sell it in Australia for tens of thousands of dollars.

More pressing for Warren, the uncertainty also prohibits him from sending the pelt to Australia for a DNA test that could clear up the uncertainty.

"They're putting me in a Catch-22 situation, and I can't satisfy it," Warren said.
"I just should give up."
If he does give up, Warren will be out the $100 he has paid for an application to send the pelt out of state, plus the $5 he spent when he bought the skin at a Fallbrook garage sale last year.

But he also could be out much more.
As reported in the North County Times in October, Warren discovered after he bought the pelt, that it may have come from a Tasmanian tiger, often called a thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial considered extinct in its homeland of Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea.

An official at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles said after looking at a photo of the pelt that it looks like it's from a Tasmanian tiger.

The pelts have sold for as high as $270,000 in Australia, where the animals are fondly remembered but considered extinct since 1936, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

As discussed before on this blog, Bill Warren contacted us some time ago seeking help in identifying the skin, which we believe is possibly that of a Zebra Duiker, a small antelope-like creature.

CFZer Mike Williams is seen holding such a skin at the Weird Weekend 2010 (below) - compare it to the skin Bill Warren is holding at the bottom of the page. What do you think?

CFZ given first look at 'Tasmanian Tiger' pelt

Several months ago we were contacted by American Bill Warren with an incredible story - he claimed to have a Tasmanian Tiger pelt in his possession.

We were somewhat dubious as he was, after all, in America - but it was certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility considering several American museums have some very good Thylacine specimens in their collections. Why not a pelt of a highly prized extinct animal in private hands?

Bill emailed us the image above and we began a dialogue about the skin's authenticity.

We advised him that he would need to seek out verification the pelt was in fact of a 'marsupial wolf' before it could be sold, and agreed to keep the matter confidential until such time as Mr Warren went public with his story.

This week his tale is featured in an edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

He picked up the pelt for $5 at a garage sale - $5 is cheap for any kind of animal pelt, particularly one that could be of an extinct animal. The last time anything like it went to auction was in 2002 when a rug made of pelts was sold for $270,000 (that's Australian dollars) to the Tasmanian Museum.

We advised Mr Warren about that auction's results and again suggested he get the pelt tested/analysed by experts before seeking to sell it, and discussed the legalities of trading such a rare skin across borders, given the likelihood of strong interest from Australian museums should the skin be genuine.

Professor John Long - formerly of Museum Victoria in Melbourne and now based at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles - also told Bill that while the skin may appear at first glance to be Thylacine, genetic tests would be needed to confirm the skin's identity.

In our discussions with Bill, we also suggested the possibility his skin could be that of the vulnerable Zebra Duiker, a small deer-like animal native to Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. He was adamant it was not.

We' love to believe it's a Thylacine, but the absence of tail skin, and the darkness and number of stripes leave the gate well and truly open to the possibility the skin is that of a Zebra Duiker.

At the recent CFZ Weird Weekend 2010, Dr Lars Thomas brought along a skin that had been bequested to a Danish Museum that he had been tasked to identify (Mike Williams holds the skin in the picture above). At first glance, after Lars extracted it somewhat unceremoniously from a plastic bin bag, most mystery animal enthusiasts were adamant it was the skin of cryptozoology's Holy Grail - the Thylacine. But attendees were also aware of another possible identity for the skin, and over the course of the weekend it ultimately proved to be that of a Zebra Duiker. An important lesson learned!

Only hair and DNA testing can confirm the identity of Bill Warren's pelt. Thank you for sharing Bill, we await the results with interest!

It's a weird, weird world

We're pleased to say the Weird Weekend was brilliant!

We joined an interesting cast of speakers spread over three days, talking about everything from big cats and orang pendeks to UFOs and the Holy Grail - quite a mash-up, but one that ensured there really was something (weird) for everyone.

We were told numbers were down, but there seemed to be more than enough people speaking, filling the pews in each talk and keeping the bar and book tables busy.

In fact the books for sale were hard to walk past.

The CFZ had a heaving table of books on offer, some of them recently authored by speakers at the Weird Weekend - namely Irishmen Ronan Coghlan and Gary Cunningham (The Mystery Animals of Ireland), Andy Roberts (The Berwyn Mountain UFO Crash), Carl Portman (A Daintree Diary), and Richard Freeman (The Great Yokai Encyclopedia).

We were deeply impressed by the quality of the covers (and the contents!) - it’s great to see the CFZ press going from strength to strength, inspiring many researchers to put their work into the public arena.

And the knowledgable men from APRA secondhand books were on hand with an esoteric selection of cryptozoology, folklore, earth mysteries, the occult and paranormal tomes, many of them hard to get. They even purchased two of our books, but just for the record, I think we probably purchased three or four of theirs!

From our perspective, our presentation on Australian Big Cats was well received and we sold out of the books we brought across to the UK for the conference.

We ran slightly over time, which left no time for questions, but we spent the remainder of the weekend catching up with those keen to discuss the presentation and the contents of the book.

We weren’t the only speakers with a colonial flavour.

UK arachnid enthusiast and amateur entomologist Carl Portman gave an interesting and passionate account of his time chasing Australia’s Whistling Spider, a type of tarantula, which he writes about in his new and highly recommended book, A Daintree Diary.

And Danish zoologist and hair analysis expert Lars Thomas tantalised the assembly with a mystery animal skin that just could have been a Tasmanian Tiger hide, although subsequent analysis revealed it to be the skin of a Zebra Duiker (Mike is pictured holding the skin), a small African antelope with a somewhat deceptive pelage.

Lars had a documentary crew in tow who happened to be making a film about him and his work for the Danish equivalent of the nature/science/discovery channel.

Which was lucky as perhaps one of the biggest events of the weekend was the positive identification (by Lars) of hairs collected from Huddisford Woods as ‘leopard’ (which we dubbed the Woolsery Leopard). An astounding development!

The hair ID certainly takes big cat research up a notch, and is a credit to those involved - the CFZ crew and colleagues Lars Thomas and naturalist and big cat researcher Jonathan McGowan.

Jonathan very kindly took us on an excursion to the same location where the hairs were found, testing the mettle of the Aussies who had previously been (good naturedly, of course) dismissive of the physical challenges of the English countryside.

Several bogs, fields and a forest later, we had a newfound respect for those deceptively gentle rolling hills.

It was certainly never dull!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting up additional bits and pieces from the weekend.

But we’d like to say a BIG thank you to the CFZ crew for staging such a memorable weekend - it’ll be hard to top it!