Creature record / 1903
Devon. In or before 1903. A strange cat was loose near Newton Abbot. It attacked and killed two dogs. A landowner shot it. The body went to the museum in Bristol, labelled a Eurasian lynx, and was stuffed and tucked away in the stores. There it stayed for more than a century. This case is not a sighting. It is a body. In 2013 a team led by Ross Barnett examined the forgotten specimen and concluded it was most probably a Canada lynx, an escaped or released captive. It is the earliest physical evidence of an exotic cat loose in Britain. Decades before the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, something was prowling the fields of the South West.
Britain has a long tradition of "alien big cats", from the Beast of Exmoor to the Surrey Puma. A popular idea holds that they only appeared after the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, when owners released their exotic pets. The Newton Abbot lynx tells a different story. This case is not a sighting. It is a body.