A snow-white animal living its life in Maine was identified as an albino porcupine after the critter was spotted near a train museum earlier this week.
“Some people said it’s a Tribble,” Katie Orlando, the Seashore Trolley Museum’s executive director, told The Boston Globe.
Tribbles are fictional aliens that appear in the “Star Trek” series. They look like nondescript balls of fluff, just like the apparent albino porcupuff.
“We don’t know what he is… our first guess was albino skunk, but now we are thinking albino groundhog,” the Kennebunkport museum said in a Facebook post Tuesday, but commenters agreed that the animal was a young porcupine.
White porcupines are rare: About one in 10,000 exhibits albinism, according to The Associated Press.
The museum named it Marshmallow on Friday after a vote held on Facebook.
Most porcupines are brown, gray or caramel colored. They typically exhibit pointy quills, although Marshmallow lacked spikes, suggesting that the animal may have just been born.
Porcupines’ quills usually harden within a few days of birth.
