Strange new foxlike creature in North Carolina

(newsrecord) Published: Jun 3, 2004. Author: Mark Brumley. Strange creature stumps experts. This photo (left) 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." The source is a legit paper, not a tabloid.

This looks somewhat like a tasmanian wolf. 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. I wonder how many large creature are still undiscovered. Bigfoot? Chupacabras?