Purple Squirrel a Mystery to English School and Experts

Pete the Purple Squirrel Has Become a Local Celebrity

Outside of a children's plush toy, no one not on the Timothy Leary diet has ever seen a purple squirrel. That has not stopped the school children and administrative staff at Meoncross School in Stubbington, England, from seeing a brightly-furred purple squirrel on school grounds. In fact, the little guy has become such a fixture, the children and staff have taken to calling him "Pete."

Barney the purple dinosaur has competition. Better yet, Pete the purple squirrel is real.

Pete has become somewhat of a local celebrity. Now that his story has hit the internet, Pete will no doubt go global. Like the Montauk Monster, the Puppy Cam, and the dragon millipede before him, Pete will no doubt become an international star.

Because Pete is a mystery. He is strange entity entered into a mundane world. An oddity.

No one is quite certain how his coat became purple. Theories range from running through or falling into purple paint to a strange genetic anomaly that somehow produced purple fur. There is also the theory that it is the result of Pete's ingestion of toner ink. It seems that a good deal of Pete's time is spent in an attic area in one of the school's buildings where some old toner cartridges have been found.

"The old building where we have seen him nipping in and out is a bit of a graveyard for computer printers," Lorraine Orridge, the school's registrar, told the Telegraph. "He may have found some printer toners in there.

"We haven't seen any purple baby squirrels yet."

Although many theories of how the purple squirrel became a purple squirrel have been offered, only a few explain the uniformity of the color of the fur.

TV wildlife expert Chris Packham believes that Pete the purple squirrel will no longer be purple come spring. He also says he has never seen anything like it.

"Squirrels will chew anything even if it's obviously inedible. It is possible he has been chewing on a purple ink cartridge and then groomed that colouring into his fur.

"Alternatively he may have fallen into a bucket containing a weak colour solution that has stained his fur."