For over 100 years, a potentially significant dead cat has been sat in storage in a British museum. Specifically, the specimen – the lynx Ab4458 – has been at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery ever since it was added to the collections there in February 1903, and what makes it significant is that it was [...]

Over the weekend I (with others) visited the Hampshire County Museum Service store at Chilcomb House, Winchester. Lots of fossils, preserved insects, and also taxiderm birds and mammals. I especially enjoy going there because it’s the repository of the famous Hayling Island Jungle cat (or Hayling Island Swamp cat). Here’s a photo of me and [...]

For all their popularity as the subject of dedicated books, cats, dogs, bears and their relatives have never previously been the focus of a single, field guide-style volume that treats all of them together. Luke Hunter and Priscilla Barrett’s A Field Guide to the Carnivores of the World (published 2011) is a beautifully illustrated, comprehensive [...]

Back in 2005, the discovery of a weird reddish, long-tailed mammal, photographed by a camera-trap at Kayan Mentarang in central Borneo, was announced by the Swiss World Wildlife Fund. I covered the case and how it unfolded back at Tet Zoo ver 1 during January 2007. That’s such a long time ago that now is [...]

Matt Wedel kindly passed on the photos you see here. They show the Man-eater of Mfuwe, an enormous male lion Panthera leo that terrorised the small town of Mfuwe (and the surrounds) in the Luangwa River Valley of eastern Zambia. The photos were taken in Chicago’s Field Museum where the specimen has been on display [...]

It’s a sad fact of modern life that thousands of animals of all different kinds get killed on roads every year following collisions with motor vehicles. Here in southern England there’s a list of creatures you see dead at the roadside all the time. In some cases, these animals have to cross roads because that’s [...]