The Tasmanian Tiger

In the wild interior of Tasmania, a creature is seen lurking in the brush.  A predator with powerful jaws, sharp teeth and tiger-like stripes running down its back.  The animal in question in the thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger.  It is a real animal, no mystery there.  The mystery lies in the fact that the thylacine has been officially listed as extinct for almost 100 years.

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THE TASMANIAN TIGER

Narrated by Jay Nix

Welcome back to Beyond the Fringe, the weekly paranormal podcast where we’ll explore some of the world’s greatest, strangest and most baffling mysteries and then try to make some sense of it all.

On this episode of Beyond the Fringe, we turn our attention away from people who disappeared and never returned to an animal that is thought to have disappeared but may in fact still may be hiding out in the remote corners of Tasmania.  The animal in question is Thylacinus cynocephalus, or thylacine for short.  And while this latinized tongue twister might not sound familiar, its colloquial nickname might ring a bell.  I’m talking about the Tasmanian Tiger.  This apex predator once existed on the island until about 1935, when overhunting sealed its doom.  The last recorded Tasmanian tiger died in captivity in 1936, and since then, no living specimen has been collected or its continued existence confirmed by samples of hair or biological material.  After waiting out the requisite 50-year moratorium before an animal can   be declared extinct, the Tasmanian government did just that in 1986.  In 2013 the animal was stricken from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and thus the thylacine’s demise was complete. 

But the Tasmanian tiger did actually exist.  No mystery there.  We’re not talking unicorns and hydras here.  The thylacine was flesh and blood.  And like the Dodo of Mauritius, Stellers Sea Cow of the Bering Sea and Wooly Mammoth of the Siberian tundra, thylacines were hunted to the brink of annihilation and today are officially considered extinct.  However the creature lives on thanks to taxidermy in museums the world over.  In the lab of the National Museum of Australia, intact thylacine pups, suspended in alcohol, are so well preserved that they appear to be sleeping.  We have tangible proof that the animal was real.  So its not a question of their verifiability.  The mystery lies in whether or not the animal still exists in the wild today, almost 100 years after it was thought to have died out.  Because as strange as it may sound, people all over Tasmania are still reporting seeing the thylacine today.  Here’s an example of a recent sighting:

In 2004, farmer Andrew Orchard was driving in a remote area in the northeastern portion of the island.  As he rounded a bend in the road, Orchard spotted an animal on the shoulder in high grass.  At first he identified the creature as a forest Kangaroo, due to it’s enormous head.  But as the vehicle the approached, the animal popped up on all fours and bounded across the road.  Orchard could clearly make out the long tail and tell-tale markings on the animals back and hind legs.  As the animal vanished into the brush, the farmer slammed on his brakes, hopped out of the car and gave chase.  But in that the grass was as tall or taller the creature itself, it soon disappeared from site.  

Sightings like the one Andrew Orchard reported are rare, but they do happen.  But what is it that people all across the island are actually seeing?  In order to determine that, we’ll to take a closer look not only at the animal itself, but its environment and the challenges it faced leading up to its disappearance.  So let’s begin then with the thylacines’ home turf.  Let’s head to Tasmania.

Tasmania (also knows Tassie or Taz by the locals, and sometimes by its aboriginal name Lutruwita) was first sighted from the deck of the ship Heemskirk by Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasmanon 24 November 1642.  Tasman originally named the territory Anthony van Dieman’s Land (later shortened to Van Deiman’s Land), in honor of his expedition sponsor who was at the time the governor of the Dutch East Indies.  Remember that U2 song from “Rattle and Hum”?  Van Deiman’s Land.  Edge was singing about Tasmania.  Of course, the song was more about when it was a British penal colony and has absolutely zero bearing on what we’re talking about here and getting way off topic.  Anyway, Dutch and French explorers began landing on the island regularly and even began setting up small settlements of the western coast of Taz in the 1700’s.  But it wasn’t until 1856 that the island was officially renamed Tasmania in honor of its discoverer.  Taz is the world’s 26th largest island at just over 26,000 square miles, which is roughly the size of South Carolina.  Human habitation on the island goes back some 30,000 years before the arrival of the colonists.  The Tasmanian aboriginal tribes, nine all told at the time of the European influx, were intimately familiar with all manner of strange creatures that lived on their island, including the thylacine.  But the first verified sighting by a Europeans was recorded in May of 1792 by the French explorer and naturalist Jacques Labillardière.  The first account we have in English as to the animal’s existence comes from the then Governor of Tasmania, William Paterson, who sent a description of the tiger to an Australian newspaper in 1805.  And the first scientific description was made by the Deputy Surveyor-General, George Harris, in 1808.

As mentioned earlier, the thylacine’s nickname was the “Tasmanian Tiger” due to the dark stripes adorning its back and hind quarters.  It was sometimes called the Tasmanian wolf, due to its resemblance to a dog.  But the thylacine was neither cat nor dog.  The animal was in fact a marsupial – animals that carry their young in pouches.  It was one of only 2 marsupials ever recorded in which both sexes were equipped with pouches – the other being the South American water opossum that still exists today.  The pouch of the female was utilized, as in most marsupials, as a carrier for its young.  In the male, it was a flap that protected the external reproductive organs; an evolutionary “jock strap” as it were.  Thylacines stood about 2 feet tall and 6 feet long if you include the tail.  Males weighed 45 pounds on average and the females 30.  Apart from its markings, the most striking characteristic of the thylacine was its disproportionately large head.  The jaws which could open to an astonishing 80 degrees sported rows of sharp, tri-pointed teeth which made the thylacine the islands apex predator.

Before the arrival of European settlers, the diet of the tassie tiger consisted mainly of kangaroos, wallabies and wombats, potoroos and possums, birds and even the now-extinct Tasmanian emu.  Sone morphologists have suggested that the thylacines jaw development and therefore its bite pressure was not strong enough to bring down prey lager than themselves like a sheep.  But this doesn’t jibe with anecdotal evidence of the settlers who blamed the tiger for a large number of dead livestock.  And it was this predation of farm animals that soon placed the thylacine literally in the crosshairs.

European settlers, mostly British, found their way into Australia and Tasmania in the early days of the 19th century, bringing with them firearms, domesticated dogs and livestock.  As more and more settlers poured into the country and settlements grew into towns and then cities, so did the number of livestock needed to support and feed the populace.  But the cattle, goats and sheep meant for the colonists were also easy prey for such a well-adapted predator and the thylacine had a field day feeding on the domesticated stock.  It wasn’t long before flocks and herds across the territory were in danger of being wiped out.  To stem this tide, local authorities first began offering rewards to anyone who killed a thylacine in the 1830’s.  But livestock levels continued to drop.  Then starting in 1888 and continuing through 1909, Tasmanian officials raised the bounty on the tigers to one pound for an adult and 10 shillings for a pup.  One pound in 1900 equals roughly $750 today; a lot of money for poor farmer and this in turn lead to wholesale slaughter of the tigers.  Thousands of bounties were paid, as thylacine numbers began to plummet all over the island.

After 1920, tiger sightings became increasingly rare.  Then in 1930 Wilf Batty a farmer from Mawbanna in the northwest corner of the island shot the last known Thylacine killed in the wild.  The eradication of the thylacine was all but done.  A last-ditch effort to save the species was rushed into action but it came too late.  On September 6, 1936 at Hobart Zoo, the last known surviving thylacine nicknamed “Benjamin” died after being accidentally locked out of his sleeping enclosure and freezing to death – barely 2 months after the legislation to protect the animal was enacted.

Benjamin’s death should have effectively closed the case on the thylacine once and for all.  But within days of animal’s death, sightings of thylacines from farmers living in remote corners of the island began to trickle into the lands department and find their way into newspaper columns.  And people continued seeing thylacines, even decades after they were thought to have vanished.  In fact these animals are still being reported today.  But are these sightings credible, or are they just the wishful thinking of a guilty collective conscience?

When debating the possibility of the thylacine’s survival, we need to take into consideration the various causes (notice I say “causes” plural) that lead to the extinction the Tasmanian Tiger.  So far, I’ve talked about how human overhunting and implied loss of habitat due to colonization hurried the animal’s demise.  But recent studies have suggested that these are not the only factors responsible and, over-hunting and loss of range notwithstanding, the species in all probability would not have survived anyway.  Let me explain.

Thylacines were not indigenous to Tasmania.  The species seems to have evolved on the Australian continent and migrated to Tasmania before the land bridge connecting the two submerged during the recession of the last Ice Age some 12 to 14,000 years ago.  The aborigines of Australia certainly new of the tiger and left drawings behind on rock walls and in caves denoting the large head and tell-tale stripes on the hind quarters.  But the Australian tiger seems to have gone extinct roughly 2,000 years ago.  Their decline on the continent was ushered in by several familiar factors.  The human presence, though not as immediately devastating as the trigger-happy Brits in Taz, placed considerable burden on the limited habitable areas on the eastern coastal areas of the Australian mainland.

Climate change also seems to have played a part, for it was in the years after the last ice age that the numbers began to drop.  Have you ever been to Australia in the summer?  135 in the shade.  The interior of the country is in essence a scorching desert, not the lush temperate environment it once enjoyed and not that of the Tasmanian interior today.  As their habitat was pushed further away from the center of the island, competition with humans and other predators only increased and numbers continued to decline.  But could these factors alone lead to the extinction of the animals on an entire continent?  

Let’s take a look at one of the contributing factors of the tiger’s extinction that few outside scientific circles have considered.  And that’s Genetic diversity.  For an animal, any animal, to propagate and maintain sustainability in any environment, there has to be a viable breeding population.  And not only a breeding population in sufficient numbers, but also in genetic diversity.  Remember the old burn where you’d tell someone their family tree looked less like a tree and more like a corn stalk?  Here’s where that comes into play.  As thylacine numbers on the continent continued to shrink, thylacine society became increasing dependent on family groups.

This reliance had a two-pronged effect.  One, it forced breeding within this group to be delayed until the prior generation had reached sexual maturity, which in the case of the thylacine was roughly 3 years of age.  That’s three years in between generations where no offspring were born.  And with an average life expectancy in the wild of just 6 years, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for error in miscarriages, infant mortality or such factors that would prevent them from reaching sexual maturity and becoming capable of breeding.   Assuming the tigers did reach maturity and did begin to breed, they would most likely have been breeding within their own family unit, and it doesn’t take a geneticist to understand the kind of damaging long-term effects this law of diminishing returns would have had on the remaining thylacine population.  Thus, the Australian thylacines continued to dwindle year after year until they faded into history; long before the first white settlers ever reached this new world.  These genetic disparities affected their Tasmanian cousins as well and would have had the same devastating effect on the island as it had on the mainland had not the bounty-hungry Brits hastened the process.

Thus it wasn’t just overhunting that brought about the tigers demise.  While it was a mitigating factor and a big one at that, it was still just one in an interconnected series of influences.  Predation by other animals, loss of food sources (the Tasmania emu had already been hunted to extinction be the 1850’s), changing climate, habitat loss, a rapidly shallowing gene pool, not reaching sexual maturity until half-way through their life span, human encroachment, and the list goes on.  This was not an extinction that resulted solely due to human interference.  It wasn’t just the building of a dam (the snail darters).  Nor was it just the destruction of habitat (California condor?), though this alone is being accounted for the extinction of hundreds if not thousands (you heard me right, thousands) of species every year.  Some of which were never seen by man before they disappeared.  Human interference certainly hastened the fate of the thylacine on Tasmania, perhaps by a factor of 200, but evidence suggests they would have not been able to hang on even if humans had never arrived.  The fortunes of the animal were sealed and their fate all but inevitable.

So with so much working against them, and conventional and scientific wisdom assuring us otherwise, is it conceivable that maybe, just maybe, that crossing off the thylacine may have been premature.  Could there be a small relic population of Tasmanian tigers still roaming the quiet corners of the island?  Believe it or not, hardly a month goes by without someone claiming a thylacine sighting on Taz.  Often, it’s a lone specimen, but there are witness reports of family units as well.  People who have lived and worked on the land their entire lives and know the fauna intimately swear that there can be no mistake.  These are the people who are adamant that they have seen the Tasmanian tiger, and there are precedents that bolster this claim.  

Believe it or not, this scenario of a species surviving after having been declared extinct is not unprecedented.  It’s very real and has happened on more than one occasion.  The poster child of this phenomenon is the coelacanth, a bulky weird-looking and primitive lobe-finned fish.  Biologists theorize that these lobes were the precursor to flippers which would eventually evolve into appendages and ultimately legs, offering scientists a glimpse of how evolution moved animals from the sea onto the land.  But the fish was known only through the fossil record, having died out at the end of the cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago.  But two days before Christmas in 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a curator of the East London Museum, South Africa, was poking through the days catch at the pier looking for interesting and rare species of fish.  Among the haul landed by Captain Hendrick Goosen was a 4-foot-long weird-looking fish with large scales and protruding lobed fins.  Not knowing its identity at the time, Courtney-Latimer purchased the fish, hopped in a cab -- Yeah, gross – and returned to the museum.  Unable to find a refrigerator large enough to accommodate it, and she even tried the morgue – yeah, gross – she had a taxidermist preserve the animal.  She then sent sketches of the fish to ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith of Rhodes College who immediately identified it as a coelacanth.  And the rest is history.  Since then, hundreds of specimens have been caught and filmed, and while it is listed as endangered, that certainly beats being extinct.  So, it is possible for an extinct animal to reappear.  We have ample evidence supporting this.  The coelacanth is not the only instance of this happening but is certainly the best-known example.  But is this what is happening in Tasmania with the thylacine?  Using the coelacanth as a template, it seems plausible that thylacines have survived and are being seen today.  

Its not like people are seeing thylacines on the Australian mainland where they went extinct 2,00 years ago.  Right?  Well, do you want to hear something strange?  Between 1938 and 1998, the Department of Conservation and Land Management received 203 reported thylacine sightings – in western Australia.  Not Tasmania.  In southern Victoria on the mainland.  When compared to reports coming out of Taz, these sighting are pretty hard to take seriously.  We’re not talking about a relic population on a remote island less than 100 years removed from their extinction.  We’re talking a relic population of animals in an area with a large human presence where the extinction occurred 2 millennia ago.  So, if not thylacines, what are people seeing in southern Australia and more to the point on Tasmania.  This segues nicely into what is likely behind a large number of sightings, both on the mainland and in Tassie, and that is mistaken identity. 

You may be thinking that this sounds like an obvious copout.  But hear me out.  A vast majority of thylacine sightings by locals and visitors to the island alike, are brief in duration, occur in the early morning or evening and often in dense vegetation.  Under these circumstances its completely understandable that a person, even someone intimately familiar with the area and its fauna, could mistake one animal for another.  Could it have been a small kangaroo, or Joey, maybe a padymelon, those small strange but adorable marsupials that look like the result of an unholy union between a rabbit and a rat?  Certainly, dingoes would make a convincing thylacine.  But unfortunately, or fortunately in this case, there are no dingoes on Tasmania.  But there are wild dogs and foxes who have acted as great stand-ins for thylacines.  I’m going to go a bit off topic for a bit, but hear with me.  

Ever hear of the Chupacabra?  If you’re listening to this, I’m sure you have.  In Puerto Rican folklore, the Chupacabra was a creature with dark, scaley skin and fangs that would kill and drain the blood of livestock.  The name itself means “goat sucker”.  And while the legend itself is an old won, it reportedly came to life in 1995 when Madelyne Tolentino claimed the first actual sighting of the creature on the island.  Up until then it was just a legend.  After an interview with researchers, it was determined that the witness was describing the alien creature Sil from the movie “Species”, which Ms. Tolentino had just seen and was convinced was actually happening on Puerto Rico.  And like UFO’s, like Bigfoot, like Nessie, once one person reports a paranormal experience or sighting, 100 people quickly follow.  Soon the Chupacabra was being seen on other Caribbean islands, and then in Mexico, then in Central America, then in Texas and then all the up to Maine and all the way down to Chile.  It wasn’t long before videos of purported Chupacabras started popping up all over the internet and even the bodies of dead specimens were being dragged out in front of news cameras for all to see.  Now I not a zoologist.  I am not a forensic veterinarian.  I’m not a geneticist.  But it certainly didn’t take a scientific study to determine that these so-called chupacabras were nothing more than canids with mange.  That’s what these chupacabras turned out to be.  Coyotes and dogs suffering from Sarcoptes scabiei, the parasitic mite that causes scabies.  Loss of hair, thickening of the skin, rank odor.  Necropsies and DNA sequencing proved this to be the case.  They weren’t legendary vampire demons.  They were dogs and coyotes, sometimes opossums and racoons.  But they weren’t monsters. On rare occasions disease or injury to the animal or a genetic abnormality can result in an otherwise normal looking animal taking on a markedly different and even grotesque appearance.  But these are still known animals, no matter how defiant some arm-chair cryptozoologists want to be.  The proof is in the DNA.  The reason I bring this up is to show how people can mistake a garden variety animal like a canid for a monster, let alone an extinct marsupial.  If animals with deformities can be mistaken for a thylacine, wild dogs afflicted with scabies would be a perfect match.  The loss of hair would make the head look disproportionately larger than normal, the tail pointed and longer and the wrinkled thickening skin folds could easily pass for stripes under the right lighting conditions.  Am I saying that all reported thylacine sightings are nothing more than mangy dogs?  Of course not.  Nor are they all kangaroos, pademelons, opposums or a hundred other animals that in a fleeting glance could be mistaken for the tiger.  But many of them are.  Is that to say there are no solid sightings by credible witnesses that can attest the survival of thylacine?  There are in fact a number of tantalizing reports from unimpeachable witnesses that claim sightings of the Tasmanian thylacine.  I could rattle off half a dozen, but in that they are all pretty similar in tone and context, I’ll just share with you my favorite.

On March 10, 1982 Hans Naarding was car camping near the Arthur River in northwestern Tasmania.    At about 2 AM, Naarding awoke after hearing something moving about outside his vehicle.  It was dark and raining, so Naarding grabbed a spotlight and shined it out the rear windshield to see what was out there.  Less than 20 feet away, the beam fell on an animal about 5 feet long, with short brown hair and pronounced stripes running along it’s back and hind legs.  At one point the animal opened its mouth revealing rows of sharp teeth.   Its lower jaw hung down below its nose at an almost 90-degree angle.  For 3 minutes Naarding studied the animal in awe, not daring to move and frighten the beast away.  But he wanted proof of his sighting and finally reached for his camera.  But before he could raise the lens to the window, the animal turned and slipped into the brush.  Yeah, this sounds great.  It also sounds just like every other supposed thylacine sighting for the past 80 years.  But for one thing.  The witness in this case, Hans Naarding, was a wildlife biologist with the Tasmanian National Parks Department.  He wasn’t some Lazy-boy expert or some tourist on a walk-about.  Here was a trained scientist on duty in the field, who not only got a good look at the animal in question but was able to study it for 3 minutes at close range.  It’s accounts like this that lend credence to the thylacines continued existence.

So now for the big question.  Does the thylacine still exist on Tasmania today?  

It is difficult question, the answer to which I’m afraid is not one we want to hear.  Remember that during the last ice age when much of the world’s oceans were locked in ice, sea levels were much lower than they are today, and this resulted in a land bridge connecting the Australian mainland with Tasmania.  This allowed the thylacine to migrate to the island and set up shop.  As the ice age came to an end and the oceans began to rise, Tasmania became cut off from Australia and the thylacine became the Tasmanian tiger.  And the pressures that affected their cousins on the mainland would soon begin taking their toll on the Thylacines of Taz.  Their numbers were low to begin with on the island and after the rising waters cut off the migration route, there weren’t going to be any new outside additions to the population.  Thus, it was only natural that the deficiencies in viable breeding stock among them would accelerate their decline.  As such, the thylacines days on Taz were numbered.  It was only a matter of time.  It took roughly 10,000 years after the end of that last ice age for the thylacine to vanish from Australia.  It probably would not have taken that long for the same fate to befall the Tasmanian population, but it was going to happen.  But what would have taken nature a thousand years or more to accomplish, the colonists did in little more than 100.  There is no question that Benjamin was not the last of his kind.  Evidence suggests that small, scattered family units clung to existence in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, but their numbers couldn’t be sustained.  One would think that with the proliferation of infrared imaging equipment and trail cameras, sightings would become more common.  But the opposite has been the case.  Sightings are still reported here and there, but the few scientific expeditions sent to look for the animal have come back with nothing.  A study published in 2021 by Barry William Brook, an ARC Australian Laureate Professor and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania, posits that the thylacine certainly survived beyond the accepted extinction timeline of 1938.  But the steady decline in reports over the intervening decades points to thylacine’s eventual extinction as late as between 1990 and 2000.  The tiger hung on for as long as it could, defying the odds but not overcoming them.  To think that humans missed their chance at redemption with the thylacine by a matter of a few years is heartbreaking.  Had we been able to locate and protect the final remaining few, we might have been able to undo the damage we caused in hastening their departure.   But it appears that we were too late.  It seems all but certain now that the thylacine is truly gone.

Yeah, and then maybe it’s not.  Remember the thylacine pups I mentioned earlier, the ones so well preserved in alcohol that they appear to be sleeping?  Well in 1999, the Australian Museum in Sydney announced they were launching a cloning project aimed at bringing the thylacine back from the dead.  Initially the project was derided as a publicity stunt.  While it’s true that in the 1990’s technology for achieving such a feat was still in its infancy, great strides have been made in recent years that offers renewed hope that the Tasmanian tiger can be cloned.  While there is still much to be learned and new techniques to be developed, there is a good deal of genetic material available that may one day allow the thylacine to live again.  I certainly hope so, and I hope that happens in my lifetime.

But I’m not ready to put the final nail in the thylacines coffin just yet.  Though it seems exceedingly unlikely, I still hold out that somehow, somewhere on Tasmania the animal has learned to avoid man and has since adapted to cope with the environmental and genetic pressures that lead to its official extinction.  At this point all we can do is hope.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Beyond the Fringe as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing it with you.  Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date on new episodes.  Be sure to follow us on twitter at podcastbtf and feel free to shoot us an email at podcastbtf@gmail.com to tell how much you love the show and suggest topics for future episodes.  Until next time this Jay reminding you to keep it real.