Cryptozoology Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger)

Remove this Banner Ad

Pie in the Sky said:
Thylacine footage from South Australia 1973. It's running style and tail look kind of thylacine-ish but hard to tell.

Click to expand...

It's still very doubtful, but this footage is as close as I've come to thinking it may be a Thylacine. As you say, it has the correct running style and build, and it's difficult to completely rule it out. Plus I personally believe South Australia/SA-Vic border would be the most likely place they could still be living.
 

Log in to remove this ad.

This guy reckons he's gonna find one in West Papua:

Another, more recent (2010)organization, headed by Thomas Mendelson of Miami USA, is the Thylacine Recovery and Propagation Project (TRAPP). Their group has been actively investigating reports and interviewing native tribes-persons in remote regions of West Papua, Indonesia for several years. The evidence collected so far is encouraging. Further evidence obtained in Jan.2014 has prompted Mendelson to plan a return expedition to a very remote, undisclosed region of West Papua where he firmly believes Thylacines still exist to this day. The expedition will take place in mid 2014. The expedition's goal will be to bring back irrefutable photographic and physical proof..and as Mendelson was quoted as saying "It's my intention to capture a live one, or two, if the opportunity presents itself..They are here, and I'm 100% positive I can get the proof needed to convince even the most rabid skeptics!" The Thylacine Re-Discovery and Propagation Project even has a Facebook page.
Click to expand...
 
Pie in the Sky said:
Yep big mouth.

Thylacine_gape.jpg
Click to expand...

Went out with a girl like that:)
 
RobbyRoy said:
It's still very doubtful, but this footage is as close as I've come to thinking it may be a Thylacine. As you say, it has the correct running style and build, and it's difficult to completely rule it out. Plus I personally believe South Australia/SA-Vic border would be the most likely place they could still be living.
Click to expand...
Reason I asked where the footage was taken is that it seems to be a hilly area, this could be either Adelaide hills, Flinders ranges, or maybe Port Lincoln, SA is a very flat place, I tried to read the sign the animal ran past but it's too blurry, it actually looks like the Grampians or somewhere similar.
 
I think it's possible that there's still a population out there given how remote a lot of Tasmania is.


There's an interesting doco on Youtube about cloning it (it's about 10 years old iirc) if anyone is interested.
 
This subject is a bit of pet subject for me.
There has been a number of sightings of the Tassie Tiger in the areas south of the great divide in Victoria for a number of years.
The latest I've heard about was on the road between Portland & Heywood in Sth West Victoria about 5 years ago. A bus driver who drove the route regularly claimed he saw one.
It is true that they existed all over the mainland & in PNG.
The introduction of the dingo signed their death warrant on the mainland as they competed for the same food, and the dingo was a better hunter.
As the dingoes did not reach tassie, the tassie tigers survived there.
As for surviving in the deep bush of Sth West tassie, im not so sure.
The tiger was a persistence hunter which meant that it pursued its prey over long distances until the prey became so exhausted the tiger just had to walk up and put its jaws around the preys neck to finish the job.
Im pretty sure the general feeling with scientists was that they were more open country animals.
I really hope they survive, but the evidence is pretty flimsy.
 
There was also a very creditable sighting by a National Parks & Wildlife Ranger who was asleep in his 4wd in the tassie bush. Im pretty sure this happened back in the early 80's. He heard some noise outside his vehicle and turned on his spotlight and shined the light on what he claimed was a tassie tiger, but it was raining heavily so all evidence of tracks etc were washed away.

There has been a large number of sightings over the years, but unfortunately no one has found any real physical evidence like a carcass etc to prove the existence, which is a shame.

There are a large number of sites on the web that document a lot of the sightings if you want to look them up. Some of them are really interesting.

Personally, I reckon it would be great for the ecology in tassie if we could genetically engineer some tigers to put back into the wild.
It would be ok as long as we didnt somehow stuff it up. (wishful thinking I know)
 
Genetic diversity would be an issue. If there are any left, chances are the population is so low that it is likely to die out soon anyway.
 
The park ranger sighting was believed to be very credible, sadly that's over 30 years ago now so even if they did persist until then, they may well no longer. I know David Fleay found evidence of thylacines in the late 40's early 50's, he was attempting to trap a breeding pair and believed he had one in a trap at one point, but it escaped.
 
hellboy1975 said:
Genetic diversity would be an issue. If there are any left, chances are the population is so low that it is likely to die out soon anyway.
Click to expand...
Well it's not hard to believe they survived into the 40's and 50's, possibly even if to the 70's. But to still be surviving now, in populations large enough to keep them going all this time...probably too unlikely for that to happen in such secrecy.
 
The only issue I have with particularly mainland survival but also Papua New Guinea is that there obviously hasn't been a fossil or anything found since they where predicted to have gone extinct. I'm no expert but surely if one hasn't been seen there would at least have been something along these lines found?

I really hope I'm wrong though, it's such an awesome animal
 

(Log in to remove this ad.)

I remember reading an article about someone who found a tiger in a WA cave that still had all the skin/fur, turned out that it was quite old and the salts in the cave preserved the tiger (or something along those lines, I read this more than 10 years ago).
 
RobbyRoy said:
It's still very doubtful, but this footage is as close as I've come to thinking it may be a Thylacine. As you say, it has the correct running style and build, and it's difficult to completely rule it out. Plus I personally believe South Australia/SA-Vic border would be the most likely place they could still be living.
Click to expand...

Why is that? Keen to know.
 
MaddAdam said:
Why is that? Keen to know.
Click to expand...
I know that area of the world quite well.
Im not sure which area in particular the robbyroy is referring to, but the lower Glenelg national park seems to have the sort of habitat that a tiger may like.
Its a large piece of bush, pretty isolated, not much in the way of human interference. There are some areas that are not heavily treed that may be suitable for a tiger to hunt prey.
Its between Portland & Mt Gambier, near Dartmoor (Jeremy Cameron country)
 
Bulldog Banana said:
I know that area of the world quite well.
Im not sure which area in particular the robbyroy is referring to, but the lower Glenelg national park seems to have the sort of habitat that a tiger may like.
Its a large piece of bush, pretty isolated, not much in the way of human interference. There are some areas that are not heavily treed that may be suitable for a tiger to hunt prey.
Click to expand...
There's plenty of fossil records in the area that suggest they lived around there, but in my opinion it's no where near isolated enough that there would be no sightings of it.
 
Bulldog Banana said:
I know that area of the world quite well.
Im not sure which area in particular the robbyroy is referring to, but the lower Glenelg national park seems to have the sort of habitat that a tiger may like.
Its a large piece of bush, pretty isolated, not much in the way of human interference. There are some areas that are not heavily treed that may be suitable for a tiger to hunt prey.
Its between Portland & Mt Gambier, near Dartmoor (Jeremy Cameron country)
Click to expand...
Yeah pretty much. From Adelaide down to Warrnambool there are countless national parks and reserves. As Bulldog says, there are also lots of open areas which would suit Thylacines. Basically, huge areas of isolated bushland combined with open grasslands which would provide both hunting and hiding areas for Thylacines. That, and the fact that the fossil records show they have existed there, leads me to believe it would be the most likely place now. But like hellboy, I find it very unlikely nothing has been categorically found or seen.
 
I think they're extinct everywhere. Hopefully they can be regenerated using cloning and such as has been proposed with the wooly mammoth and there was an extinct breed of goat that recreated although the offspring died from an infection, I think. The Tassie Tiger is definitely an animal that deserves to be brought back. It wasn't nature's doing, it was ours.
 
Engimal said:
I think they're extinct everywhere. Hopefully they can be regenerated using cloning and such as has been proposed with the wooly mammoth and there was an extinct breed of goat that recreated although the offspring died from an infection, I think. The Tassie Tiger is definitely an animal that deserves to be brought back. It wasn't nature's doing, it was ours.
Click to expand...
Interesting ethical perspective. And I'm not being facetious. It'd be interesting to see how they'd cope in the environment after a lull like that.
 
Stories about the tiger have popped up every now and then with credence given to the witness.
Parks have always rried to shut down these stories for obvious reasons.
But there is definitely a core group of rangers.hobbyists and uni students that believe the tiger is still around.
 
For them still to be alive, then there'd need to be at least 1 viable pair still living in the wild....And given the amount of tourism & people in Tassie nowadays, can't see how that's at all possible.....Probably just a wild dog that's escaped, would be my best guess.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Remove this Banner Ad

Back
Top