Shock turned to surprise when an Oxfordshire woman whose flat was broken into discovered that the culprit was a wallaby.

The news comes after a dead wallaby was found by police on the M40 in Oxfordshire during the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend.

And an unconfirmed sighting of one of the native Australian creatures hopping along the A34 was also reported to Oxford City Council's dog warden on Monday.

In a bizarre twist to the list of sightings, a police burglary investigation has revealed that an intruder they have been tracking is not a human, but an Australian mammal.

Police were called to a ground-floor flat in Fair Mile, Henley, on Monday, May 27, after a householder reported that her basement window had been broken and was covered in blood.

Samples of the blood were taken away by scenes of crimes officers for DNA testing. But the results revealed that the offender was a wallaby.

Police believe the animal, which has not yet been traced, fell through the basement window.

Despite evidence which suggests that the animals may be roaming free in Oxfordshire, the Blue Cross Animal Rescue Centre, in Burford, near Witney, has not received any reports of wallabies living in the wild.

A spokesman for the Blue Cross animal welfare charity said he was not aware of any laws preventing people keeping wallabies, because they were not classed as dangerous animals.

He said the creatures, which stand about 3ft tall and are naturally timid, were capable of surviving in the wild, however. The Blue Cross spokesman said a population of wallabies was known to be living and breeding in the Ashdown Forest, in Sussex.

A spokesman for the Cotswold Wildlife Park, in Burford, said: "All our wallabies are individually identified and checked every morning, so we'd soon know if one had managed to get out."