[Daltonious]

Look at the tail, thats a Thylacine tail

[rapeWhistle]

Originally Posted by Daltonious ↗

Look at the tail, thats a Thylacine tail

Totally, that tail is distinctly marsupial.

No canine or feline has a rigid tail like that when running.

[THELORDABORTION]

coolio

[bob351]

Who knows, legs seem long.

Id love for them to still be around, extinction sucks. Looking at the videos of live ones and photos of stuffed extinct animals is just creepy for some reason.

[theydontlikeitupem]

looks like santas little helper to me but who knows, the pictures crap

[deanmine]

it could very well be a diseased mangey infested animal.. for this thng to be in such a public area .... we would have many many more sightings and there would have to be a breading population

[RATSMAGIC]

From what I remember reading they did NOT run like this, they had an almost kangaroo-like bounding run, with the long tail used as a kangaroo uses it. From wiki: "The thylacine was noted as having a stiff and somewhat awkward gait, making it unable to run at high speed. It could also perform a bipedal hop, in a fashion similar to a kangaroo—demonstrated at various times by captive specimens.[25] Guiler speculates that this was used as an accelerated form of motion when the animal became alarmed. The animal was also able to balance on its hind legs and stand upright for brief periods."

[deanmine]

last known footage of the animal in captivity

[ForgetMeNot]

A lot of scientists believe that there maybe living t.tigers out there, liking living in New Guinea. I hope if there are, no one ever finds them.

[deanmine]

Although the thylacine had been close to extinction on mainland Australia by the time of European settlement, and went extinct there some time in the nineteenth century, it survived into the 1930s on the island state of Tasmania. At the time of the first settlement, the heaviest distributions were in the northeast, northwest and north-midland regions of the state. They were rarely sighted during this time but slowly began to be credited with numerous attacks on sheep. This led to the establishment of bounty schemes in an attempt to control their numbers. The Van Diemen's Land Company introduced bounties on the thylacine from as early as 1830, and between 1888 and 1909 the Tasmanian government paid £1 per head for dead adult thylacines and ten shillings for pups. In all they paid out 2,184 bounties, but it is thought that many more thylacines were killed than were claimed for. Its extinction is popularly attributed to these relentless efforts by farmers and bounty hunters. However, it is likely that multiple factors led to its decline and eventual extinction, including competition with wild dogs introduced by European settlers, erosion of its habitat, the concurrent extinction of prey species, and a distemper-like disease that also affected many captive specimens at the time. Whatever the reason, the animal had become extremely rare in the wild by the late 1920s. Despite the fact that the thylacine was believed by many to be responsible for attacks on the sheep, in 1928 the Tasmanian Advisory Committee for Native Fauna had recommended a reserve to protect any remaining thylacines, with potential sites of suitable habitat including the Arthur-Pieman area of western Tasmania.
Attachment 497606

The last known Thylacine to be killed in the wild was shot in 1930 by Wilf Batty, a farmer from Mawbanna, in the northeast of the state. The animal, believed to have been a male, had been seen around Batty's house for several weeks.

"Benjamin" and searches
The last captive thylacine, later referred to as "Benjamin" (although its sex has never been confirmed) was captured in 1933 by Elias Churchill and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. Frank Darby, who claimed to have been a keeper at Hobart Zoo, suggested "Benjamin" as having been the animal's pet name in a newspaper article of May 1968. However, no documentation exists to suggest that it ever had a pet name, and Alison Reid (de facto curator at the zoo) and Michael Sharland (publicist for the zoo) denied that Frank Darby had ever worked at the zoo or that the name "Benjamin" was ever used for the animal. Darby also appears to be the source for the claim that the last thylacine was a male; photographic evidence suggests it was female. This thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. This thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing it pacing backwards and forwards in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933 by naturalist David Fleay. National Threatened Species Day has been held annually since 1996 on 7 September in Australia, to commemorate the death of the last officially recorded thylacine.

Attachment 497607

Although there had been a conservation movement pressing for the thylacine's protection since 1901, driven in part by the increasing difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, political difficulties prevented any form of protection coming into force until 1936. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on 10 July 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in captivity.

The results of subsequent searches indicated a strong possibility of the survival of the species in Tasmania into the 1960s. Searches by Dr. Eric Guiler and David Fleay in the northwest of Tasmania found footprints and scats that may have belonged to the animal, heard vocalisations matching the description of those of the thylacine, and collected anecdotal evidence from people reported to have sighted the animal. Despite the searches, no conclusive evidence was found to point to its continued existence in the wild. Between 1967 and 1973 zoologist Jeremy Griffith and dairy farmer James Malley conducted what is regarded as the most intensive search ever carried out, including exhaustive surveys along Tasmania's west coast; installation of automatic camera stations; prompt investigations of claimed sightings; and in 1972 the creation of the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team with Dr Bob Brown, which concluded without finding any evidence of the thylacine's existence.

A number of ongoing search efforts are currently being undertaken; typically these are self-funded initiatives conducted by thylacine enthusiasts who vary in approach, background knowledge and general modus operandi. Some searchers are 'believers', conducting searches on the basis that they firmly believe the thylacine to be yet alive. Other groups have a more practical and pragmatic view, hoping the thylacine to be extant although understanding the probabilities of its being extinct. The two different view points are important when understanding how each group views potential evidence or proof: the 'believers' group tend to err on the side of interpreting evidence with bias toward the thylacine being extant, while the skeptics will look for more plausible explanations regarding any evidence presented. One such group that is relatively active in producing videos for debate and analysis is the Thylacine Research Unit.

The thylacine held the status of endangered species until the 1980s. International standards at the time stated that an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed record. Since no definitive proof of the thylacine's existence in the wild had been obtained for more than 50 years, it met that official criterion and was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is more cautious, listing it as "possibly extinct".

Attachment 497608

Attachment 497609

Unconfirmed Sightings

The Australian Rare Fauna Research Association reports having 3,800 sightings on file from mainland Australia since the 1936 extinction date, while the Mystery Animal Research Centre of Australia recorded 138 up to 1998, and the Department of Conservation and Land Management recorded 65 in Western Australia over the same period. Independent thylacine researchers Buck and Joan Emburg of Tasmania report 360 Tasmanian and 269 mainland post-extinction 20th-century sightings, figures compiled from a number of sources. On the mainland, sightings are most frequently reported in Southern Victoria.

Some sightings have generated a large amount of publicity. In 1973, Gary and Liz Doyle shot ten seconds of 8mm film showing an unidentified animal running across a South Australian road. Attempts to positively identify the creature as a thylacine have been impossible due to the poor quality of the film. In 1982 a researcher with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, Hans Naarding, observed what he believed to be a thylacine for three minutes during the night at a site near Arthur River in northwestern Tasmania. The sighting led to an extensive year-long government-funded search. In 1985, Aboriginal tracker Kevin Cameron produced five photographs which appear to show a digging thylacine, which he stated he took in western Australia. In January 1995, a Parks and Wildlife officer reported observing a thylacine in the Pyengana region of northeastern Tasmania in the early hours of the morning. Later searches revealed no trace of the animal. In 1997, it was reported that locals and missionaries near Mount Carstensz in Western New Guinea had sighted thylacines. The locals had apparently known about them for many years but had not made an official report. In February 2005 Klaus Emmerichs, a German tourist, claimed to have taken digital photographs of a thylacine he saw near the Lake St Clair National Park, but the authenticity of the photographs has not been established. The photos were published in April 2006, fourteen months after the sighting. The photographs, which showed only the back of the animal, were said by those who studied them to be inconclusive as evidence of the thylacine's continued existence. Due to the uncertainty of whether the species is still extant or not, the thylacine is sometimes regarded as a cryptid.

Rewards
In 1983, the American media mogul Ted Turner offered a $100,000 reward for proof of the continued existence of the thylacine.

A letter sent in response to an inquiry by a thylacine-searcher, Murray McAllister, in 2000 indicated that the reward had been withdrawn. In March 2005, Australian news magazine The Bulletin, as part of its 125th anniversary celebrations, offered a $1.25 million reward for the safe capture of a live thylacine. When the offer closed at the end of June 2005 no one had produced any evidence of the animal's existence. An offer of $1.75 million has subsequently been offered by a Tasmanian tour operator, Stewart Malcolm. Trapping is illegal under the terms of the thylacine's protection, so any reward made for its capture is invalid, since a trapping licence would not be issued.

A $250,000 reward for any form of evidence that the thylacine still exists today was offered by tourist entrepreneur Peter Wright. Other rewards were also put out by the World Wide Fund for Nature. This created a spur of researchers and scientists and laymen to look for any kind of evidence of a thylacine alive today.