“I was like, ‘that’s no fox’, and then just like a bolt of lightning [hit me],” he said.<\/p>\n
He did 10 days of research ahead of the auction and noticed that the head lacked a carnassial tooth, which a fox, dog or jackal would have.<\/p>\n
The discovery pushed him to make the three-and-a-half-hour trip with his fiancee to the showroom in Bristol to do one final check: count its incisors.<\/p>\n
Six would mean disappointment, eight would point to a thylacine.<\/p>\n
“I gave Francesca the nod that it was real,” explained Cranfield. <\/p>\n
“We went and sat in the car, I said ‘this is unbelievable, this is the holy grail, we’ve got to get it’.<\/p>\n
Other stories from Essex<\/p>\n
He said he “almost passed out” when the hammer went down, and still feels emotional when talking about the support from Francesca and his friends.<\/p>\n
“As a man of not enormous wealth, I suddenly realised, ‘wow, that’s a lot of money’.<\/p>\n
“But I knew that I had done the right thing… everything since then has been a whirlwind.”<\/p>\n
He called his friend on the drive home to waxy lyrical about his purchase and its significance, until his pal agreed to loan the money.<\/p>\n
“I keep crying about it because…I just have an amazing group of friends,” said Cranfield, choking up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I was like, ‘that’s no fox’, and then just like a bolt of lightning [hit me],” he said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-743185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}