A Cur or Common Fox?

 I have mentioned the Old fox types from the UK and Ireland (again; I write "Ireland" to cover the entire island since wildlife do not recognise boundaries) and have shown an image of the infamous Colquhoun Mountain fox killed in the mid 1830s. The Extinct Fox and Wild Cats Museum has others but we tried to find out whether any European museums had similar.

As previously noted the responses have been either belligerent ("I've never heard of this before!") or just time wasting because...they cannot be bothered?  Not one single German museum has responded which is a pity.  

However, one museum did respond and that was from the Netherlands. We don't want to name it at the moment for specific reasons but they were very kind enough to search and then take photographs of the fox from 1843. It was gifted to the museum and if you look at the fox it is quite clearly not what we expect from modern Vulpes vulpes.  

It does not look tall or sturdy enough to be a Mountain fox or a Hill fox so could this be the old Cur or Common fox? Notice the lack of black markings and even the "tear-stain" muzzle markings. An overall brown colour is what we would expect to see in Old fox types.  

The importance of DNA testing is clear because the Old foxes of Western Europe, UK and Ireland were either a distinct species or Vulpes vulpes in its  ancestral form before inter-breeding with red foxes that migrated west from the east of Europe.  These foxes were depicted in European and British art and not a case of "a rare or odd colouration" because we have others of the same appearance.   

Somewhere in other parts of the UK and Europe may well lie other old taxidermy of these foxes and those could add so much more to the study of the true history of foxes.