On the evening of 13 March 2010, Shaun Histed-Todd was driving a bus along a Dartmoor road when he saw a most unusual creature run down the edge of the moor and stand at the roadside, where the bus’s headlights afforded him an excellent view of it for roughly half a minute before it ran back up onto the moors. (To protect the animal, Shaun has asked me not to make public the precise locat­ion.) Shaun contacted me a few days later, as he was unable to identify it, and provided me with a detailed description. It resembled a young fox and had a bushy white-tipped tail, but its coat was dark silvery-grey; it had noticeably large ears, white paws, and a black raccoon-like facial mask. Reading this, I was startled to realise that Shaun’s description was an exact verbal portrait of a most unusual yet highly distinctive animal – a young platinum fox. After checking photos of platinum foxes online, Shaun confirmed that this is indeed what he had seen.

The platinum fox arose in 1933 as a mutant form of the silver fox (itself a mutant form of the red fox Vulpes vulpes). Its extra­ordinarily beautiful and luxuriant fur meant that it was soon being bred in quantity on fur farms as its pelt became highly prized. But what was a platinum fox doing on Dartmoor, where, as far as I know, there are no fur farms? The platinum condition results from a dominant mutant allele (gene form), and as it has arisen spontaneously in many unrelated, geographically scattered fox litters since 1933, perhaps it has done so again, recently, in a litter of Dartmoor foxes. Shaun has since learned of other sightings of this animal, with one made only two miles away from the site of his own observation. He now plans to continue investigating this intriguing case by looking out for the animal and making discreet enquiries relating to its movements, so we await further news with interest. Shaun Histed-Todd, pers. comms, 17 Mar 2010.