Some Thoughts On The Mountain Fox -Was It A Jackal or Coyote Like Canid?

 The following post is conjecture. I write down what is going through my mind and try to tidy them up. 99.9% of zoologists and naturalists in 2023 have never heard of let alone seen or studied the Old British foxes or Old wild cat.  In fact very few existing museums in the UK have even been interested in the subject and some have been downright obstructive when it comes to the matter (possibly to protect the legacy of dogma they have promoted for more than a century.

In fact, only one large fox type from Scotland was ever subject to study and that was one killed in  1948 and examined (in Bristol of all places) in 1950. It was "larger than the Scandinavian foxes" which is a subject I have dealt with on this blog before. The problem is that the Old British foxes were extinct by the 1860s so it may just be that the foxes referred to in the 1950 paper were simply local foxes that were bigger than normal.  We will come back to this further on.

The only persons to have seen mountain foxes, albeit as taxidermies, are myself and my colleague LM. And LM has become quite an expert at spotting Old fox traits in taxidermy. The following are some thoughts but need science to back them up and that science would be DNA and the money is not available for that type of work. They are, after all, "just foxes". Please bear this in mind as you read the following. THS

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Late yesterday evening I was Just looking at some coyote photos and I've said in the past that I thought mountain foxes filled in the niche that jackals and coyotes covered in their respective countries. We have seen the coyote like masks (see The Red Paper Canids) but I had to chuckle when I thought "What if mountain foxes are not foxes but a canid like a coyote and the masks we call coyote or coyote-like are in fact adult mountain foxes?

Above: Col. Talbot's sketch of a "typical mountain fox"

 I was looking at the masks that according to one expert "Looks like coyote but is odd" and thinking about this and the fact that the 'naturalist-sportsmen' at the time could be  idiotic (they did not have 20th let alone 21st century science) and there was often to-and-fro arguing on statements (one was that the three British types of fox were not three distinct species of canid -this when no one actually claimed they were!)  and the mistakes they made when presented with straight forward facts ... basically they just needed to know where the animal was living and have the right gear to hunt and kill them.                 

“I have examined dead mountain foxes” simply meant that the person writing had looked at the body or what was left of it after the kill or after the fox had been shot. No one has ever studied a mountain fox...or a hill or cur fox. The persons who got to the “guts of the matter” were the taxidermists and they had no real scientific interest. Their job was to clean up and mount the fox and get the money in the bank.  Even if they were naturalists in some form they had no real interest in dentition or other aspects needed to define the diagnostic features of a species. It was a fox. A large fox -often handed to them as a “greyhound” or “mountain” fox but it was “just a fox”  to them to be stuffed and mounted.                

There are a lot of questions and speculating is fine so long as it is understood that DNA can prove you wrong. I just don’t want to discount anything.

Above a coyote in winter coat and below in summer coat. Interesting to note that there are rings on the tail and this is something we have found in UK foxes and far from being "imaginary" we have the photographic and video evidence to prove it is far from rare.

Note that I am not stating that the extinct mountain fox was a coyote but that it filled the niche that in the United States would be filled by the coyote and in Europe and elsewhere filled by the jackal. What we need to find out is whether the mountain fox was Vulpes vulpes which I have some doubts on but DNA testing would show whether it is from the fox family or whether it was another species of canid or not. In 1950 L. T. Harrison Matthews, Sc. D., Research Fellow, University of Bristol, described thje fox he examined as k"larger than the Scandinavian fox" and it seems that today, from contacting people in Scandinavian countries who ought to know, that there is no record of a large fox. I dealt with this in a post https://foxwildcatwolverineproject.blogspot.com/2023/06/swedish-and-norwegian-foxes-were.html

Harrison Mathews dismissed the Hill and cur foxes as being Vulpes vulpes crucigera aka the European red fox. In 1950 that would be accurate since there were so many local names for foxes and even the thousands of imported European foxes that took to hills were called Hill foxes because they were living on hills -the Old hill fox having been exterminated during the 19th century.  Harrison Matthews had never examined any of the three Old British fox types. Harrison Matthews reported:

Again, you have to remember that, as I have reported in The Red Paper 2022 Vol I: Canids there was never any post mortem carried out on a mountain fox. After all it was a fox and there for 'sport' and it was known that the UK had three distinct variants (due to the environments they evolved in) the large mountain fox, the not quite as large but bulky mastiff/hill fox and the smaller cur fox. All that mattered was the duration of the chase and the longer the better even if it meant hunters (horses) and hounds collapsing and dying from exhaustion. That was all that was really important as well as getting the "trophy" from the kill.  

People in the past often named animals after one they were familiar with so the big and chunky Old hill fox was also known as the Mastiff fox.  The smallest of the foxes that inhabited areas around villages, towns and cities were the Cur fox -in other words as with domesticated dogs "cur" meant common.  Imported and released foxes were then given the same names by locals even though most had never seen either type of fox. It was a fox in the hills so a Hill fox. It was a fox around human habitation so was a Cur fox.

And that brings us to the Mountain fox aka the Greyhound fox. It was tall and tough as well as very fast when chased.  How big was a mountain fox?  LM placed a mounted coyote next to the famous Colquhoun mountain fox and the coyote was a lot smaller (it was an adult coyote and we are not sure whether the Colquhoun fox was fully grown or not).  That the mountain fox had a winter coat we know -see Talbot's sketch.  We also see the same type of coat in the Beartooth Mountain fox as noted here:

https://foxwildcatwolverineproject.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-beartooth-mountain-fox-similar-to.html

We know also that the mountain fox had a similar lifestyle  to coyotes in that it wandered and lived on mountains but also moved through forests, farmland and marshes -it was also known as the Marsh fox by locals.  Again, referencing The Red Paper, there are reports of "mountain foxes" that appear to almost describe wolves or wolf-like animals. This is a complex subject but noted as fully as possible in the already mentioned book.

We are discussing a canid that was taller than a coyote (Colquhoun described the fox he killed s a fine specimen) and "put up a good show at the end" (ie when cornered it fought for its life) and moved around over mountain, hills, forests, swamps and coastlines. It was also very fast -hence "greyhound" as greyhound racing would have been very popular back in the day (right up until the 1970s in fact and still continues on a smaller scale). 

In the above photographs the coyote has been raised up a few inches so that it could provide a photo comparison.  LM has the specimens in taxidermy form and together we have put  as complete a picture as we can of the mountain fox. It is possible that other foxes in the Museum are Hill foxes but to move forward and re-write the wildlife history books that have given us such an inaccurate one for over a century we need the science. We need the DNA testing.