We could see the shape. It was about the size of a dingo but had a long staight tail with distinctive stripes down its back & sides. The thylacine hunter posted a video sipping a tinny somewhere in Tassie. The only other truly carnivorous marsupials are the Tasmanian devil, which is about the size and shape of a bull terrier, and various species of quoll, the largest of which is about cat-sized. Feb 28, 2021. It was really quick; one second it was there in front of me, next second it was way in the distance. Unlike almost all other marsupials alive today, it didnt subsist on a diet of grass, eucalyptus leaves or invertebrates. The colour was golden-fawn, 60 cm in height and the ears were rounded. Its body fur was a greyish-brown colour and the body stripes, a blackish-brown colour, when first observed, ran from the middle of the back onto the tail rump. But if thats the case, how do you explain the more recent stories, assuming they werent fabricated? The front paw was lifted up near the snout. At one particular spot we came across paw prints unlike any of the others and certainly not those of any dog. ", "During September 1983, I organised a major search for evidence of living Thylacines in the Wollongambie Wilderness, east of Lithgow. (p. 205), Source:Clark, Jerome. It had a very long thin tail that drooped down then lifted up towards the end. The stripes were, she said, wider at the top and narrowed to a point and extended, The animal turned to look at the women in the car. It was early morning around 5.30 to 6.00 a.m. when she heard a commotion outside the house as if a dog was fighting with our cats. The encounter lasted in full no more than 15 seconds. I slowed the car to a walk desperatly trying to follow its progress through the scrub. They decided that it could only be a Tasmanian tiger and phoned the national parks service to report the sighting and where most annoyed when they were not believed and told that they could not possibly have seen such an animal because it is extinct. Leaping from his bed, Mr Pereira went torch in hand to investigate his trap. He said it looked exactly like the Tasmanian tigers he had seen pictures of in books except that it was a lot darker in colouring. "In September 1999, Mr Phil Smith and his wife Kassi were driving from the west on the Great Western Highway at 60 to 70 km an hour, slowing down as they approached a fruit shop at Linden on the left-hand side of the road. According to Mr Pereira the animals body fur was a light brown colour with dark stripes along its body and it had a long thin strait tail which it did not wag.". He described it to us as a short greyish-furred animal, with narrow flanks and a drooping, long thin tail. Then they all descended back through the bananas to head for home. (Thylacinus cynocephalus)", Source:https://web.archive.org/web/20200216184608/https://www.angelfire.com/oz/thylacine/. '&l=' + l : ''; Jeffrey Vanwagenen has lived in Bountiful for 16 years. +(91)-9821210096 | paula deen meatloaf with brown gravy. One of the most significant was from Maureen from Byron Post Office whose husband had spotted one while posting letters in The Pocket. Newcastle Herald, 8 March. A well-known bushwalker who regularly visits the remote south-west, described a sighting during a drive back from Queenstown (near the west coast). Trailing a Tiger. However, sadly, there have been no confirmed sightings documented of the thylacine since 1936. A video rebuttal of Mooneys determination, in which the TAGOA The discovery of the carcase in the area of Eucla, and my observation of the live specimen, convinces me that the animal still exists on the mainland of Australia.". I have rung and reported this to my local veterinarian.". The results sent shockwaves through the wildlife conservation establishment. Supplied:Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia Tas Inc. Fabiola was driving and so Michael was able to examine the animal closely from only 2 metres away and observed that it was 60 to 70 cm high and 1.3m long, the length of the body quite long when compared to its height. Published March 1, 2021. It continued to sniff the dirt road unconcerned by the presence of my vehicle. Copyright 2023 The Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database. It had stripes and blue eyes, and I now realise when I look back that it was a thylacine I reckon. The road is long and straight. ", "2003, Upper Main Arm; bush regenerator Mark had a close observation of a thylacine-like animal at midday and observed its striped back and stiff tail as it stood near the roadside. Robyn was driving near the Club House just before entering Cliff Drive, where a two, roofed house stands amid pine trees, on the corner opposite the golf course and beside a, when in the headlights glare they both saw a Thylacine, According to Robyn, the animal was as large as a, mewhat like a cat. Canton, Michigan: Visible Ink Press. posted a video to YouTube claiming he had discovered a "family" of thylacines on camera traps, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. ", "20th August, 2008, Coast Road between Lennox Head and Suffolk Park; David Hall emailed the ABC North Coast Radio station to describe his sighting. "In May 1984 I received a letter from a Mrs Julie Tonurist, a scientist, who informed me that, back in 1974, she lived at Springwood and travelled home from work on the FISH [a former Blue Mountains train service]. We have been troubled by irresponsible dog owners whose pets have eaten our free range chooks (now all well fenced) so actually got out of the car to photograph the animal but it calmly loped off and it was too dark to get a photo. She then saw it run as fast as it could down the street towards the cane fields. Efforts to track the animal or animals down were made, it is said but all failed due to the general inaccessibility of the forest country. ", "1988, Cawongla near Kyogle; on the roadside at night, Len saw a thylacine-like animal showing distinct dark brown banding on the rump, hips, and legs and along the tail. They said that about five weeks before, on 27th November 1979, while photographing birds at Mount Mondilla, they found paw prints in mud that appeared to match those of the Thylacine. Nearby we found a pile of day-old excrement containing pig bristles and crushed pig bone. Can I use my account and my site even though my domain name hasn't propagated yet. ", I was past Howes Valley near Howes Mountain, on a stretch of winding road. At the base of the tail there was an orange ring about 50 mm wide and it was followed by 6 to 8 yellow rings about 40 mm wide. It was about 1 metre high and 2 and half metres long with high haunches at the back of the body. And [inaudible], and I still don't have an answer. "Nick Mooney has concluded, that based on the physical characteristics shown in the photos provided by Mr Waters, the animals are very unlikely to be thylacines, and are most likely Tasmanian pademelons," TMAG told CNET at the time. It would have been great if I had been able to get even one photo of the creature.", "I was driving out west of nsw 60 km west of Balranald when I came upon a tassie tiger at 2am. Clive said that there were no foxes up there in the Whian Whian Range. We found wallaby tracks nearby and signs of a scuffle. It stood half a metre tall and was about 1 metre in length from nose tip to tail. The animals were short-lived with a lifespan typically less than a decade meaning there would need to be many individuals roaming the bush for the species to have survived this long. A large excerpt, possibly the entirety of the paper, is given at the Thylacine Museum website: "During the CSIRO Entomological Expedition, November 1949, I had the good fortune of seeing the animal on the route from Bourke to Wanaaring, in an uninhabited area a few miles past the Warrego Rivers, where I was collecting on the right-hand side of the road, only a few yards from the road. As tall as a medium-sized dog, it looked something like a whippet crossed with a kangaroo. The time was approximately 6.15 - 6.30 am and the sun had been up for about 30 minutes. The animal, an obvious Thylacine, then began running along the edge of the highway to vanish into nearby bushes. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world authority on rare and threatened species, the thylacine a dog-sized predatory marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger was extinct in 1982. Much of this part of Tasmania is virtually inaccessible, with dense, tangled thickets of eucalyptus, so they really could be there, albeit in low numbers, below the radar. Then it just loped off the road into the yardbetween the two properties. I had my large driving lights on which clearly picked out an animal in front of my car about 2 kms north past the Lennox Head turnoff. It was only when my other daughter said that her description of the creature sounded like a thylacine that she was able to definitely identify it from pictures that she found on the internet. Its physical appearance matched that of stuffed specimen's preserved in government museums.". Thylacine sighting, Gippsland Victoria, 1990's. It had a long thin straight tail, short sandy brown fur, a greyhound look to it and an odd gait. It was not striped but had 2 large bands or darker colour on its shoulders and hind section. Web3-23-2023 Remains of last known living thylacine found in a cupboard 85 years on 12-5-2022 Should we even be attempting to bring back the thylacine ? (2017). We also found two unusual sets of tracks. ", "November 2005, 9 pm, Coorabell; Samantha saw a lion coloured creature with kangaroo like back legs hop into the bush on the Coorabell Federal Road. Mr Pereira dispatched the casts along with the teeth and blood samples to university zoologists in Sydney, but received little response, other than the explanation that the creature was probably a domestic dog. or maybe they aint.". Does the footage show a thylacine or something else? He reported I can say that what I saw did not look like anything I have witnessed before. The first day we spooked it as we drove by a sheep carcass, which it seemed it was feeding on. while I was speechless at what I saw. It was covered with a fine short brown fur except for the rump and tail, which was bare skinned with individual hairs scattered evenly across it. The City of Hobart's senior cultural heritage officer Brendan Lennard said the name came about much later, in the 1960s. My daughter became frightened, as she said she thought it was a feral dog, and yet it did not look like any dog she had ever seen. Fortean Times 25: 36. To say I was astonished would be an understatement. Newcastle Herald, 2 March. Apart from its size, it was greyhound-like in appearance with narrowing flanks, its body sloping downward to a long, thin tail which followed the slope of the back and seemed kangaroo-like in that it did not appear to wag. All the patients I mentioned it to were not surprised. Is that a thylacine? Contrary to expectations, the inferred extinction window is wide and relatively recent, spanning from the 1980s to the present day, with extinction most likely in the late 1990s or early 2000s, he reported. She stated No stripes, but a distinctly wild animal, reddish brown short hair, above knee-high. Dr. S. J. Paramanov saw a thylacine at 11am along theBourke-Wanaaring Road, while collecting insects close to the road (Paramanov, 1968). . All I thought at the time was, what is this? The animal was in the headlights of my car eating road kill in the middle of a road and then bolted into thick scrub. Both are 100% certain that the animal they saw was a thylacine. It had a large head with golden eyes and widely separated rounded ears. Mr Waters hasn't been the only one to have footage of a purported Tasmanian tiger sighting. I went back to England shortly afterwards but on my recent return to Australia the article by Samela Harris on the sightings of the thylacien and the resulting correspondence makes me wonder whether what we saw could have been a marsupial tiger or wolf. [Available from Lulu]. They said that the depth of impression of the tracks suggested an animal of at least 75 lb weight. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work. Wilfred Batty of Mawbanna, Tasmania, with the last thylacine known to have been shot in the wild. The video was posted by the president of the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia (TAGOA) Neil Waters, whose work centres around reporting sightings of the thylacine also known as the Tasmanian tiger. For 24 hours, the wildlife community was buzzing. The Thylacine ( Thylacinus cynocephalus ), or Tasmanian tiger, is an icon of recent extinctions, but the timing of its final demise is shrouded in controversy. Of particular interest was that the animal that he saw had no stripes on the body, though it did have pale bands along the tail. They had previously observed it on two earlier separate occasions and enquiring of the neighbours, were told that all three families on adjoining properties had observed the animal going back at least ten years but had never bothered to report it. Grabbing his camera Kevin leapt from his car and, as he said later, tore up the embankment after it! The stripes were, she said, wider at the top and narrowed to a point and extendedhalf way down the side of the body. It looked straight at me before moving away. April 2023. To this day I wish I had have got out to speak to the driver of the 'cruiser, but my head was just spinning! The baby is not ambiguous, the baby has stripes, a stiff tail, the hock, the coarse hair, its the right colour, its a quadruped, stocky, and its got the right shaped ears, he said. (1977). It was shaped like a kangaroos tail, but held straight out behind instead of dragging on the ground. Judgements of time and distance, especially when people are excited, vary wildly from precise to woeful, Mooney says. The tail was thicker at the base than at the tip and was about 1ft in length. ", "On 3rd January 1980 I received a phone call from a Mr Roger Handly and his wife. ", "8th October, 2005, 12pm, Shara Boulevard, North Ocean Shores; Russel saw what looked like the same animal that he saw in September and believe it may have been sitting as he only saw its head and shoulders in the grass but was struck by it having rounded ears. Its not a dog, its not a cat. It was huge, almost one metre high. While searching the muddy bank of a remote swamp for signs of animals, we came across tracks left by various marsupials. It was observed from head on and it loped off, almost kangaroo-like with a very unusual movement. Waters believes the images show stripes, a straight tail and shiny, leathery hocks -- all features of the thylacine. Mysterious Australia Newsletter 2022(August): 5. Upon examining the cage, he found that the creature, whatever it was, had escaped by ripping through the chicken-wire covering, leaving a hole 8 by 11 inches in size. The last of thelarge marsupial predator species died in1936, butthe thylacinewas not officially declared extinct until 1982. It was an adult male in excellent condition with 12 black stripes on a sandy coat. It measured 14.3 cm in length by 3c m width.". A friend, Eric, told them that he had seen the same kind of animal cross the road in front of his car near Wooyung and although he applied the breaks he hit the animal. ", Johns third sighting of a tiger took place in March 1984 around 6.10am. ", "Not long after this experience I learnt that, between December 1971 and throughout January 1972, there had been a spate of sightings of an animal, or animals, answering to the description of the Thylacine, near Blackheath along the Great Western Highway in the vicinity of our sighting. This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. These were of a chocolaty-brown colourand not very obvious. He has since co-authored a book on mainland thylacines with his wife: Gilroy, Rex and Gilroy, Heather. ", "Meanwhile, in the Hartley Valley below Mt York, a striped-bodied dog-like creature was reported seen attacking sheep on more than one occasion about this same time. He recalled his father and other old hands from the Pokolbin area, saying there were two different types of native cat the spotted quoll and the rare striped tiger quoll.