A new research has found a "big cat" that roamed the British countryside during the last century.
The skeleton of the Canadian lynx - a cat about twice the size of a domestic cat - was examined by researchers from Durham University scientists and their colleagues at Bristol, Southampton and Aberystwyth universities.
The study debunks the myth that big cats were introduced in the 1970s in Britain. Researchers said that there is evidence of exotic cats roaming the British countryside many decades back. Also, there is no evidence that the cats were able to successfully breed in the wild.
A popular assumption about the "British big cats" is that their release in the wild was the result of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, which prohibited people from owning dangerous animals as pets. However, the rediscovered specimen of the cat shows that it lived well before the Act.
Researchers also found that the cat specimen from Bristol Museum and Art Gallery had been previously mislabeled by the Edwardian curators in 1903 as Eurasian lynx, which happens to be a close relative of the Canadian lynx.
"This Edwardian feral lynx provides concrete evidence that although rare, exotic felids have occasionally been part of British fauna for more than a century," said lead researcher Dr. Ross Barnett, of Durham University's Department of Archaeology, according to a news release. "The animal remains are significant in representing the first historic big cat from Britain."
The study is published in the journal Historical Biology.