The Thylacine: Sightings of the Tasmanian Tiger After Its Extinction

Unlike most creatures in this field guide, the thylacine was an ordinary, well-documented animal. It was a carnivorous marsupial about the size of a large dog, with a stiff tail and dark stripes across its lower back that earned it the name Tasmanian tiger. It once lived across mainland Australia and New Guinea, but it disappeared from the mainland thousands of years ago and survived into modern times only on the island of Tasmania.

European settlers saw it as a threat to their sheep. The Tasmanian government paid bounties on thylacines from 1888 to 1909, and more than two thousand were paid for. Hunting, the loss of habitat, competition from dogs and probably disease brought the species down within a few decades.

The last known thylacine died on September 7, 1936, at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. It is believed to have died of exposure after being locked out of the sheltered part of its enclosure on a cold night. The species had been given legal protection just 59 days earlier. Film of a thylacine pacing its cage at the same zoo, shot in 1933, is the most famous footage of the species.

Searches over the following decades failed to find any more, and the thylacine was eventually declared extinct, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986. The 1936 death remains the last confirmed record of a living thylacine.

People never stopped reporting them. Hundreds of sightings have come from Tasmania and from the mainland, from farmers, bushwalkers, drivers and wildlife workers. The most respected came in 1982, when Hans Naarding, a Tasmanian wildlife officer, said that one night in the far north-west of the island he had watched a thylacine in his spotlight for several minutes. The state's wildlife service searched the area through 1982 and 1983 and found nothing conclusive.

Most sightings are brief, at dusk or night, of an animal crossing a road or slipping into scrub. Foxes, dogs, especially thin or mangy ones, and other animals are easily mistaken for a thylacine by someone who hopes to see one. No photograph, video, body, track or hair collected since 1936 has been confirmed as a thylacine.

In 2023 a team led by Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania published a study in Science of the Total Environment that compiled 1,237 thylacine records from 1910 onward, weighing each by its quality, from physical specimens to sightings by experts and by the public. Their modelling suggested that the species may have survived well beyond 1936, possibly into the late 1980s, and that a few later reports were hard to dismiss.

That is a finding about when thylacines most likely died out, not evidence that they are alive today. Brook himself put the chance that any survive at less than one per cent. Meanwhile a de-extinction project announced in 2022 by the company Colossal Biosciences and the University of Melbourne aims to engineer a thylacine-like animal from the genome of a close living relative, an effort many scientists regard as a long and uncertain undertaking.