This photo of an animal about the size of a fox, but with short brown hair and a long cat-like tail, was taken by Bill and Gayle Kurdian’s motion sensing camera in eastern Randolph County, North Carolina.
“In January, some people reported seeing an unidentifiable creature in southern Asheboro.”
According to the search results, Jaap Hillenius, a biologist at the College of Charleston, concluded that the odd-looking animal spotted in several Piedmont counties in North Carolina was a hairless gray fox.[2][4][5]
Hillenius examined the carcass of a similar animal that had been hit by a car in Charleston, South Carolina, and found that it lacked hair follicles in its skin, indicating it was incapable of growing hair.[2] He determined that the animal was a normal gray fox with a genetic mutation that prevented the growth of its long guard hairs, resulting in a “woolly” or bald appearance.[1][2]
Hillenius presented his findings at the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, confirming that these sightings were not of an exotic cross-species, but rather a naturally occurring genetic variation in the gray fox population.[2]
I’d be fine with this… if the creature was hairless or bald. It clearly is not. It has a nice healthy looking coat of short fur. I will accept the genetic mutation answer, because the animal does not look sick.
I considered that it looks somewhat like a tasmanian wolf, minus the stripes, but the back legs are also notably different. The tasmanian wolf — also called a zebra dog, tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (photo right, video here) — had smaller ears and stripes on its back.
The now extinct thylacine was most closely related to kangaroos. It was a marsupial with a pouch for its young. The last one died in a zoo in 1936. Interestingly, there was an effort to clone the extinct Tasmanian Tiger to bring it back.
Citations
[1] https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/questions/answer/what-are-samson-foxes
[2] https://greensboro.com/professor-identifies-mystery-creature/article_55b26d35-bde9-5a38-889e-a14bff276b5c.html
[3] https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=84523
[4] https://blog.coturnix.org/2007/02/21/hairless_grey_foxes_in_north_c/
[5] https://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/02/21/hairless-grey-foxes-in-north-c
6 comments
There seems to be several of these strange animals living in a highly populated area of Mt. Pleasant, SC. I have several photos taken by different people in the same neighborhood of this bizarre creature. Do you have anys uggestions of who I should contact with these photos? No one seems to know what it is.
Gready
is there any chance that it could just be an immature Zebra Dog type thing?
One of my family members saw on in Kitty Hawk on vacation
so I saw one of these in southern Springfield VA last year. Summer 2011, some time between midnight and 2am. It stole some food from our neighbor’s cat’s bowl and then wandered off, down the street. When I first saw it, I thought it was a small deer but when it got closer I could tell that it was something else.
I saw this thing when I was about 8 years old(12) years ago out in the desert in Oregon. Anyone else seen ’em on the West Coast?
It is a fox but I cant remember the species they have lost their fur due to a mutation