because the balloon also wrecked a number of conservatories, greenhouses, and windows before finally descending to earth in Honiton. While this could explain the shape of the prints, sceptics have questioned whether the balloon could have travelled such a random zigzag course without its trailing ropes and shackles becoming caught in a tree or similar obstruction. Hopping mice Mike Dash suggested that at least some of the prints, including some of those found on rooftops, could have been made by hopping rodents such as wood mice. The print left behind after a mouse leaps resembles that of a Cloven-hoofed animal, due to the motions of its limbs when it jumps. Dash stated that the theory that the Devon prints were made by rodents was originally proposed as long ago as March 1855, in The Illustrated London News. In the paper's 10 March 1855 issue, Thomas Fox, a brewer and brick maker of Ballingdon, submitted illustrations of rodent tracks in varying snow depths as well as a diagram for how rodents' hind and forelimbs create the "hoof" shaped prints. Kangaroo In a letter to the Illustrated London News during 1855, Rev. G. M. Musgrave wrote: "In the course of a few days a report was circulated that a couple of kangaroos escaped from a private menagerie (Mr Fische's, I believe) at Sidmouth." It seems, though, that nobody ascertained whether the kangaroos had escaped, nor how they could have crossed the Exe estuary, and Musgrave himself said that he invented the story to distract his parishioners' concerns about a visit from the devil: Badgers In a letter to the editor of the Illustrated London News published 3 March 1855, Richard Owen stated the theory that the footprints were from a badger, arguing the animal was "the only plantigrade quadruped we have in this island" and it "leaves a footprint larger than would be supposed from its size". The number of footprints, he suggested, was indicative of the activity of several animals because "it is improbable that one badger only should have been awake and hungry" and added that the animal was "a stealthy prowler and most active and enduring in search of food". Similar incidents Reports of similar anomalous, obstacle-unheeded footprints exist from other parts of the world, although none is of such a scale. This example was reported 15 years earlier in The Times: In the Illustrated London News of 17