a huge wall of dogma and non cooperation

 

All of the fox work, whether looking at Old British foxes (extinct), Irish foxes or trying to identify what the extinct Hong Kong looked like and which species it is related to. It is all bound together. The problem is that zoologists only look at certain things in a very narrow way and for something specific.

Looking at the evidence for there having been an Old fox type in western Europe that was eventually replaced by the red fox (there is enough anecdotal evidence) can cross over with other things. For instance, though separated for 10,000 years after the Doggerbank connection to Europe flooded, were the Old Western European foxes related to the Old British foxes? This brings us to the Sarrazin foxes. 

https://foxwildcatwolverineproject.blogspot.com/2023/06/sarrazin-and-first-two-foxes-shipped.html

Cooperation from the Natural History Museum Paris has been...."absent" so at the moment we are assuming that these were the foxes sent from Canada to France and here we have two possibilities. The first is that the taxidermies show foxes as they looked before anything that could be was shot, trapped, poisoned or clubbed to death to sell. There is not, as far as I am aware, any earlier taxidermy foxes from North America and particularly none before red foxes were imported into the Americas for 'sport' so that the red fox you see today in Canada and the United states are not really the Old native type. You will notice the absence of black markings in the Sarrazin fox which is something that indicates an Old fox type in the UK so is this also true for North America? No such fox exists in modern records from what I can find. 

This would all indicate, as I have theorised before, that red foxes filled the void left by Old foxes that were hunted to extinction. 

There is another possibility that opens up another avenue for study. What if the Sarrazin foxes we have are not from Canada? What if they are from Europe because if they were then the lack of black markings would shout out Old Western European fox. Older than any other foxes we have in our possession. 

Would I cry if they were not the foxes sent from Canada to France but Old European foxes? No. Absolutely not because that gives us far more to go on and, after all, they would be the first Old European foxes we have and older than the ones already held in the collection.

You will see that dogma tells us "the red fox is the British and European fox -their DNA matches" but that is because thousands of European foxes were imported each year to the UK. Dogma is not fact. I suspect that some of the reticence from museums to cooperate may be because they do not want to rock the boat or declare that for a century or more they have been teaching... nonsense. 

Interesting that the Natural History Museum London have always cooperated with me since the 1970s but on foxes and wild cats they have been obstructive and very uncooperative and yet asked me to outline what was in my book (Red Paper: Canids) -in fact they responded to my requests twice with the question "What is in your paper and what is its scope?" Basically that is none of the NHM business and were I to ask one of its specialists what was in the paper they were currently working on I would be told where to go!

You will see none of this is easy and it is why it is up to naturalists in Europe to dig away and try to find out what the Old fox looked like in France, Germany, Netherlands etc etc.

Once you start looking into the history of foxes be warned: it is a can of worms that will set you up against a huge wall of dogma and non cooperation.