Dorset resident Jan Cooper was enjoying her morning coffee when she spotted none other than a wallaby bounding around her garden. After having a good hop between her flower beds, the marsupial leapt over a neighbouring fence and disappeared.

Mrs Cooper spotted the three-foot Australian native outside her window in Lyme Regis just after 7am.

She called animal charity the RSPCA, who cleared up any suspicions that the creature was some kind of illegal resident by pointing out that a number of wallabies live wild in the UK.

Handily, the 61-year-old videoed the animal during the 90 minutes or so it spent leaping around her garden.

'I was having a coffee and first saw a fox and texted my husband, which he wasn't that impressed by, then five minutes later I texted him to say we had a wallaby bounding around,' she said.

'It was a big shock, I didn't know how close to get to it but it seemed happy enough.'

With no reports of any wallabies recently escaped from zoos in the area, both the RSPCA and the police in Dorset are flummoxed as to the origins - and the current location - of the animal.

They advise anyone who spots it not to approach it or touch it, 'not because it will necessarily become violent, but you may do it more harm than good'.

Wild wallaby sightings have been made as far afield as Ashdown Forest in East Sussex to the Lickey Hills outside Birmingham, and a feral population of more than 100 lives on the Isle of Man, fact fans.