This is the skull and skin of a Falkland islands wolf or warrah (Dusicyon australis) – one of about a dozen specimens in existence. These particular specimens are held by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and are currently not on public display.

This skin was formerly mounted as a taxidermy (with the skull and foot/lower leg bones still intact), but it was dismounted some time ago and the skull was removed. The foot/lower leg bones and claws are still in place. The animal’s sex and precise location of capture are unknown, but the dark brown fur suggests that it was from the eastern island (according to Charles Darwin; see excerpt below). The fur on the ventral aspect of the body is slightly longer and woollier.

This individual was apparently collected by Captain Burnsee prior to 1859, according to museum records. A quick Google search yields information that one Captain Burnsee from New York was shipwrecked on the Falkland Islands in 1854. Other information about Mr. Burnsee (or his voyage) remains elusive.

Charles Darwin wrote the following account of the warrah in 1834:

“These wolves are well known, from Byron’s account of their tameness and curiosity; which the sailors, who ran into the water to avoid them, mistook for fierceness. To this day their manners remain the same. They have been observed to enter a tent, and actually pull some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman. The Gauchos, also, have frequently killed them in the evening, by holding out a piece of meat in one hand, and in the other a knife ready to stick them. Their numbers have rapidly decreased; they are already banished from that half of the island which lies to the eastward of the neck of land between St. Salvador Bay and Berkeley Sound. Within a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth. Mr Lowe, an intelligent person who has long been acquainted with these islands, assured me, that all the foxes from the western island were smaller and of a redder colour than those from the eastern.”

Darwin was sadly correct: the warrah went extinct approximately 40 years later, in 1876.