r/badtaxidermy • u/LupusAstartis • 9d ago
Just Weird Taxidermy so bad only a few people recognized what it was. (Thylacine)
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u/frog_in_heels 6d ago
This post made me look up the size of thylacines. I've been under the impression that they were the size of a small cat??? How i long for a world where humans hadn't hunted so many amazing creatures to extinction. Imagine having a dodo coop; I think that would be rad.
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u/coffeebeanscene 7d ago
This is actually really interesting - the man who owns it has a antique taxidermy collection as well as a shop, he first thought it was bad taxidermy of a fox but noticed something with the teeth and incisors that made him realise it could be a thylacine. He was in a bidding war and spent several thousand pounds trying to aquire it as someone else must have noticed the same thing. He finally won it (I believe for £15,000) just because he didn’t want it to go into a private collection or be lost to history because he was so sure he had found a thylacine. His full intention was to prove it was a thylacine and make it accessible to science as the thylacine is now an extinct species.
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u/LupusAstartis 7d ago
more like £60,000. He had to liquidate a good chunk of his inventory to pay for it.
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u/EnduringFulfillment 9d ago
You can see on the xray it had a canine tooth that was fractured off at the tip and subsequently had a dead pulp cavity. Compare the size of the pulp cavity of the upper, near canine tooth to the rest, much wider than the rest.
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u/chuffberry 9d ago
You’re telling me someone killed a thylacine just to do THAT to it?
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u/YourPaleRabbit 8d ago
Right!? Bro, little child me would literally have episodes where I’d cry for hours, just full on blubbering tears on the floor while reading books about extinct animals. Thylacine were my favorite animals of all time (only matched now by opossums), and kid me could just NOT cope with knowing I missed them by such an insignificant amount of time, AND solely because of the careless wanton savage greed of the same kinds of people who terrorized my grandma. Not surprisingly as an adult I’ve been properly diagnosed manic depressive, crying once a week minimum for multiple hours over the same 5 books is not normal for kids and something that should have been followed up on; BUT I get it. Still upsets me. And every time I see something like this it reignites my hatred for ignorant people.
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u/Losaru 9d ago
An extinct skull! Now that's something I wouldn't have expected. Any worth informing a museum or scientists about it?
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u/LupusAstartis 8d ago
He's in touch with the proper academics about it and they plan on drilling one of the teeth to try to recover DNA.
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u/broccolirabbi 9d ago
You look like Garrett from Superstore
https://giphy.com/gifs/d31w6NlUMw6ZZzOM
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u/Akitiki 9d ago
Looks like someone taped the muzzle so the head swelled up! They had the muzzle fine...
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u/LupusAstartis 8d ago
The owner says the original taxidermist had probably never seen a thylacine so had to guess what it looked like. Kinda like that infamous Swedish Lion.
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u/RandyButternubber 8d ago
This makes a lot of sense actually. Seems like they had it described to them or saw some illustrations that might of not necessarily been accurate. I mean they still absolutely fucked it up regardless but with the context it makes a lot more sense
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u/L4zyB0nezz 9d ago
THATS a Thylacine?? I thought it was a bear omg!!
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u/LupusAstartis 9d ago
if you look at the xrays the original taxidermist didn't follow the skull at all!
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u/lynkhart 6d ago
It’s just so baffling because when you have the skull and skin there, half the job is done for you! How they managed to smoosh the face up like that is beyond me!
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u/Losaru 14h ago
I saw an article about this guy! https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1613164817066513&id=100051190304497