The dead animal caught the interest of online detectives (Picture: SWNS)
A woman has been left stunned after she thought a dead animal on the roadside was a puma.
Courtney Roberts, 21, was travelling on the A483 outside of Chester last week when she spotted the carcass by the central reservation.
She later shared her footage with experts and was told it was thought to be the body of a puma, a big cat also known as a ‘mountain lion’ or ‘cougar’.
Courtney, from Wrexham, said: ‘You see so many strange looking animals on the side of the road over here.
‘I had to put my phone on record and point it down to the road, unfortunately it isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be.’
Courtney firmly believes the animal was a puma(Picture: SWNS)
She said in pictures the animal looked ‘like a bobcat’.
‘My partner was just looking and he saw a Scottish wildcat on Google and I think it looks like one of them but in person you can see a spotted pattern on its coat’, Courtney continued.
She shared pictures of the poor dead animal on Facebook where it was seen by a nationwide network of big cat enthusiasts who picked up the case.
Owing to the amount of interest around the mystery, Courtney and her partner returned to the spot to try and identify the animal and possibly even collect the body.
But only an hour later when the pair returned, the animal had vanished despite her driving up and down the A-road, leading her to suspect there could even be a conspiracy at work.
‘So I don’t know what’s happened in the past hour, but I think someone’s seen my post and they’ve taken the animal’, she said.
Canadian wildlife expert Jason Kenzie with experience of exotic cats said the animal is most likely a young puma.
He said: ‘It looks feline, but I believe it’s too large to be a Scottish wildcat.
‘It could be a Bobcat or Lynx, but really this has the markings of a young cougar.’
A recently released documentary about Britain’s mystery big cats called ‘Panthera Britannia Declassified’ has topped the Amazon documentary charts, and claims to have proven once and for all that big cats are living wild in Britain.
The shows producer Tim Whittard said Courtney’s sighting was a fourth report in less than three months he was aware of.
He added: ‘Honestly, as daft as it might sound, I really do think you’d be far less likely to see a Scottish wildcat in this location than a puma.’
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