Police are investigating a new spate of wildcat sightings, including a puma savaging a full grown deer.

The creature - believed to be the legendary Durham puma - has been reported prowling a remote area of East Durham.

Police are taking the sightings seriously because they coincided with the mysterious death of a deer.

Stanley greengrocer Joe Quinn, 50, says he was confronted by the creature near Northumbria Riding School, past the Jolly Drover, roundabout, on the Consett to Stanley road.

He was delivering flowers last week during the heavy snowfalls so the outline of the big cat in the road was clear. Mr Quinn, said: "It was massive. At first I thought it was a big dog but as I got closer a Shetland pony came to mind. "There was no mistaking the fact that it was a cat."

The cat bounded off the road and ran off across a field. Mr Quinn reported the sighting to Stanley Police.

Durham Constabulary wildlife liason officer Sergeant Eddie Bell said the sighting came within days of a farmer seeing a cat kill a wild deer half a mile away at Iveston.

He said: "A farmer saw the cat chase the deer over a fence into a bit of woodland and kill it.

"They went up later a found a deer carcass, which had a bite in the front of it and appears to been the way it was killed.

"It is probably a cat because it had to get near the deer to attack it. It is easy to tell the difference between a dog and a cat killing and we have recovered droppings from cats in the wilds of the North-East."

Sgt Bell said he had little doubt there are wildcats living in County Durham.

He added: "These are animals which have lived into captivity and kept as pets before 1976. We know they were released into the wild. "We are not talking about yetis or bigfoots here."

One theory is that the puma was a pet that became too big and was subsequently released into the wild.

The Northern Echo ran stories on pet puma during the 1970s and the animals were regularly advertised in Exchange and Mart.

An ITV documentary - In Search of the Durham Puma - will delve into the mystery next Tuesday at 7.30pm. .