Biologist Recalls Sighting Big Cat on Exmoor in 1982
In a letter to The Guardian, Steve Jones corroborates Max Lury’s recent account of seeing a big cat on Dartmoor by sharing his own similar experience from 1982. Jones, a biologist and teacher trainee at the time, was walking across Exmoor with a college friend who is also a biologist. They observed a large, tan-colored, low-slung animal running away from them through a ditch in good visibility conditions. The creature possessed a blunt face and a long tail with a bushy tip that curved upwards. As it ran, the animal arched its back, allowing its front legs to project further forward, a movement characteristic of felines. Both witnesses observed the animal for approximately six to eight seconds before it disappeared into the landscape. Immediately after the sighting, both men independently identified the creature as a very large cat, specifically convincing themselves it was either a puma or a mountain lion. Jones uses this anecdote to support the existence of big cats in the UK during the 1980s, validating Lury’s childhood memory and suggesting that such sightings were not isolated incidents but part of a broader phenomenon involving non-native large felines in the British countryside.
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Biologist Recalls Sighting Big Cat on Exmoor in 1982
In a letter to The Guardian, Steve Jones corroborates Max Lury’s recent account of seeing a big cat on Dartmoor by sharing his own similar experience from 1982. Jones, a biologist and teacher trainee at the time, was walking across Exmoor with a college friend who is also a biologist. They observed a large, tan-colored, low-slung animal running away from them through a ditch in good visibility conditions. The creature possessed a blunt face and a long tail with a bushy tip that curved upwards. As it ran, the animal arched its back, allowing its front legs to project further forward, a movement characteristic of felines. Both witnesses observed the animal for approximately six to eight seconds before it disappeared into the landscape. Immediately after the sighting, both men independently identified the creature as a very large cat, specifically convincing themselves it was either a puma or a mountain lion. Jones uses this anecdote to support the existence of big cats in the UK during the 1980s, validating Lury’s childhood memory and suggesting that such sightings were not isolated incidents but part of a broader phenomenon involving non-native large felines in the British countryside.
The Guardian