Are These Sightings Fact or Fiction?

Over the previous 80 years, between 1936, when the last known Thylacine died in Hobart Zoo, up until today, there has been over 300 sightings of the elusive Thylacine. Not all of the sightings can be confirmed or from reliable sources however, the areas in which the marsupial has been identified in, do correspond to legitamate breeding grounds and habitat of the Tiger previously, giving some hope that the animal could still be alive in remote areas of Tasmania.

In this video, we see an animal resembling the Thylacine, the stripes on the animals hind are very distinctive and do in fact resemble the Tasmanian Tiger indicationg that this could be the animal labelled as extinct.

Other sightings have occured in written form, lets take a look at some and evaluate the evidence;

Report from 6.12.2015,

In this report a man describes in much detail the exact description of the Tasmanian Tiger, however not in Tasmania. After heading home from camping in Bear Gully Rd, Tarwin Lower VIC a man and his partner encounter what first seems to be a fox, after coming closer to the animal they realise this was not a fox and it wasn’t a kangaroo or dog either.

The man describes himself as “very familiar with our native, feral and wild fauna” due to his camping across Australia and he said he had never encountered an animal like this before, he described the animal as having a “boxy head with pointed ears”. Another distinctive resemblence to the Thylacine is the colour and shape of the body, a “mottly colour” is how it is described with a sloping back that drooped down into its hind legs. A “thin long straight tale” was most distinctive and had a “white tip at the end”.

After this encounter the couple went home and researched the Thylacine, his German partner, had never seen one of these animals before but immediately called it out as being the Tasmanian Tiiger. This experience has changed the Authors beliefs about whether or not the Tiger is extinct on the mainland and in Tasmania, he now has complete faith this was the animal he saw and it is most definitely not extinct.

Was it a Tassie tiger ... but in Victoria?

Venus Bay Caravan Park owner Tony Holgate encountered a Thylacine around a month before January 4, 2016 so maybe, early December of 2015. During is daily inspection at dusk, just before the sun had risen Tony claims to have known exactly the animal that ran off akwardly with a group of kangaroos - A Thylacine.

“They asked me what the animal was that they had seen running around the park, but I didn’t give it a second thought,’’ Holgate told reporters after a few weeks earlier, a group of overseas travellers asked what the strange tiger like animal was they had seen strolling around the park.

The time that Tony saw the aniaml, at dusk, directly corresponds to the feeding times of the Tasmanian Tiger giving more evidence that what he saw was actually what he believed it to be. One of the women that work for Tony, Kylie Anderson, also backed him up by reportedly sighting a Tiger “hanging around a tent.”

There are several stories of reported Thylacine sightings out there, with so many occuring each year how could there not be more of the animal out there? My belief is the Thylacine is Critically Endangered

I strongly believe that somewhere, in the untrekked wilderness of the Australian and Tasmanian bushland that there is a small population living freely, unknown about and blissfully unaware of the great debates about their survival.

I would like to see populations of the Tiger flourish on both the Mainland and in Tasmania but my concerns are for the animals. If, one day a Thylacine is discovered alive in the wild I am worried about scientists and zoologists snatching them away from their habitat to force reproduction and raise numbers.

#thylacine #Sightings