Eight teeth and a pair of googly eyes

Convergent evolution gave the Tasmanian tiger a dog’s face. It did not give it a dog’s mouth. Foxes and domestic dogs have six upper incisors between the canines; a thylacine, being a marsupial, has eight. That single anatomical fact presented itself through a bad mount, a lumpy forehead and a pair of googly eyes.

At least two people in the country had counted the teeth. A second dealer had independently reached the same conclusion as the eventual buyer, and the lot that had been priced like a doorstop sold for £50,000 on the hammer, and for more than £60,000 once fees were added. The buyer was the UK collector, James Cranfield.

The object has since moved from the saleroom into the scientific record. It has been authenticated as Thylacinus cynocephalus and entered in the International Thylacine Specimen Database, which records roughly 800 known objects, including skeletons and tissue samples. Its teeth may yet give up DNA. Not bad for something originally bought as a joke.

It is easy to call this a lucky find. That reading gets it wrong. The identification took ten days of comparing photographs and cross-checking references, and then a drive from Essex to Bristol to look at the thing in person. The price was not a windfall. It was a correction. A generalist cataloguer working through hundreds of lots a week gave an opinion, and two specialists who knew better gave another.

The market did what markets do when knowledge turns up in the room.

The lesson for the rest of us has two sides to it.

For buyers: the estimate on things is usually an educated but inexact guess by someone who may never have held a skull, so look past the skin to the bone, count the teeth, check the eyes, turn the thing over.

For sellers and salerooms: the next mis-catalogued rarity will not be wearing googly eyes to draw attention to itself….

The last thylacine died in Hobart in 1936. Ninety years later, one turned up on a table of bric-a-brac in the West Country, and very few people in the room knew it. Whatever else 2026 brings, this is the story collectors will still be telling at the end of the year and beyond.