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Hi Paul and welcome to the forum.

I agree that it's extinct in Australia and Tasmania. Australia I think was always a bit of nonsense, despite what Paddle says about a South Australian bounty scheme in the 1800's. Tasmania while you can't be 100% sure they're gone you can be about 99.9% certain. As for New Guinea it's certainly possible that they still survive. People often point out that they weren't rain forest creatures so the majority of the habitat there wouldn't be suitable, this tends to ignore that fact that nobody seems to have told the thylacines this as we know for certain that they were living there. Also the last few captures during the 30's were made in the heavily forested areas of S.W Tasmania.

All of this said though, as has been pointed out wild dogs have been in New Guinea longer than Australia. So as someone who believes that competition with dogs was the main mechanism of their extinction, I wouldn't put their chances of surviving there as being any higher than anywhere else.

we may as well dimiss from consideration every man-beast, lake monster and prehistoric reptile described by natives and modern explorers

As you may guess from the pessimistic tone of this post, I already do.
 
oldrover said:
Hi Paul and welcome to the forum.

Thanks for the welcome!:) Should have responded earlier, but there is so much to read on this message board.

oldrover said:
we may as well dimiss from consideration every man-beast, lake monster and prehistoric reptile described by natives and modern explorers

As you may guess from the pessimistic tone of this post, I already do.

I've got to keep faith that there are still some extraordinary animals out there for us to find, just looking at history, and the sheer quantity of mystery beasts described with relative consistency. I always think that the possibility of any one given mystery beast existing is probably quite low, but taken over all of those described the possibility of at least one or two existing must be quite high. Thylacines were beautiful creatures, and we're lucky to have some good footage and photos of them in zoos. But what a thing it would be for one to be filmed in the wild, as unlikely as that is!
 
Mmmm really enjoyed the documentary although I have to admit I dosed off twice
Thanks again old rover but would like to disagree that these mysterious creatures are
Completely lost and would love dream that there is a possibility they are still out there some where.
 
would like to disagree that these mysterious creatures are
Completely lost and would love dream that there is a possibility they are still out there some where.


I understand the desire to want them to still be there, believe me I have it more than most and have done for the last 25 years or so. And if belief, faith or sheer wanting could make any difference I'm sure that between all of us, we thylacine fanciers we'd have wished the species back into existence a hundred times over. Sadly it can't, nothing can change the fact the animal barely made it into the twentieth century. Even then all it had ahead of it was more habitat loss, disease, hunting and over collecting, and on a small island it had nowhere to go.

There's been no confirmed evidence of the animal since 1937, plenty of rumour and eye witnesses but nothing else. The eye witness accounts are almost entirely unconvincing and even the better ones, i.e those which don't give descriptions that directly contradict a thylacine, seem to describe the modern misconceived idea of what they looked like, rather than the actual animal. Of them all I know of only two that I think could reasonably be taken as possibly being a thylacine, and neither are recent. These are the Naarding sighting, and another by a hiker sometime in the 90's.

Saying that, as sure I am they're extinct I still find myself hoping.

I always think that the possibility of any one given mystery beast existing is probably quite low, but taken over all of those described the possibility of at least one or two existing must be quite high

That reminds me of what Nick Mooney says about thylacine sightings, that you get as good a quality sighting from the mainland as you do from Tasmania. Like him I believe that means there's less reason for hope in Tasmania, rather than it suggesting there's any cause for hope on the mainland.

Excuse my unusual amount of pessimism but my friend returned from Australia today without my dearly hoped for novelty thylacine oven glove.
 
Old rover

Well thanks very much for that old rover feel a little depressed now
Perhaps you should consider why you didn't
Get a oven glove :cry:
 
On a lighter note if you or anyone you know would like to own the much coveted Tasmanian tiger oven glove then I may be able to help as I might have a job opportunity in that neck of the woods apparently they are looking for pilots to spray some chemicals over the bush land let me know
 
It's the wrong shape, overall it's far too compressed front to back, the planter is a poor match, although that would depend, and the digits look too short. Also I wasn't aware that there were any thylacine foot prints on record.

I've no idea of scale but on its own it looks like a dog print to me.
 
Hi again
There are sketches, i think some were taken at the time of the 'offical' existance. I'll need to check on that though, i think it was in Paddle's book but i don't have it to hand.
Ive seen thousands of dog prints of all kinds of breeds but none that look like that. It seemsthe best match to the thylacine paw outline the guy draws.
The thylacine research guys are fairly skeptical about most stuff, especialy the younger guy.
 
Paddle's book is probably less than two feet away from me as I type but due to my unique and, as some have noted, revolutionary filing system it may take a while to find.

Sorry to yet again be the naysayer but if that is as the video says the front paw of a thylacine then where's the fifth digit? Granted it won't be as prominent as the others but on a surface like that it would definitely show. The guys at the thylacine research unit should know this. Another thing which for me writes them off as totally unreliable is the statement 'if it's not dog it's thylacine', that isn't true and it doesn't show the necessary critical attitude that's needed to carry out any sort of research.

Also their entire analysis is so subjective it's worthless, for example much of it depends on the relative sizes of the outlines used, and that the digits remain fixed in the same relative positions. A further problem is as they're all hand drawn their shapes aren't any use a reliable comparison either. Aside from that if you just enter dog prints on Google you get these on the images section;

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/somkk ... cement.jpg

Which, especially the left, are pretty much an exact match for the mud print.
 
Sorry but to my eyes they don't look at all alike.
I can't say this is a thylacine print but it strikes me as odd looking to say the least.
I do know that stuffed thylacines tended to have very badly preserved paws. A guy in the Leeds Natural history museum exlaned that to me as a student. The fet were damaged by the mounting process.
 
Sorry but to my eyes they don't look at all alike.

Fair enough, I accept that in saying they are a match I'm now being subjective.

The fact remains though this can't be a thylacine front paw, as they suggest, because we're a digit down. Thylacines had five digits on their fore paws whatever left this print had four. So however unusual this may appear for a dog print, though I have t say that to me it's totally characteristic of one, it would be completely deformed were it from a thylacine.
 
The people who made this video don't do themselves many favours by comparing the thylacine print. It's not that close. They do themselves more favours by carefully selecting a dog print outline from the wide variety available that looks nothing like the print in the video. I've been sitting looking through a selection of dog prints just now, and apart from it being clear that the one used in the video is hardly typical, it's also clear dog prints vary a great deal. I came across a mastiff hind paw print that looks identical as far as I can see. It's a dog, isn't it? :lol:
 
lordmongrove said:
I do know that stuffed thylacines tended to have very badly preserved paws. A guy in the Leeds Natural history museum exlaned that to me as a student. The fet were damaged by the mounting process.

There are a few pickled thylacines in existance. There's one in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Their paws should be in perfect condition, bar the smell...
 
In my opinion this has wrecked whatever credibility Bailey ever had. To have kept quiet about it for 18 years, then pipe up when he's got a new book coming out, even if it were true, which it isn't, it looks so damn dodgy.

Never mind at least the Prague find is a major boost.
 
I read Col's first book Tiger Tales and it seemed quite restrained and not bonkers in any way.
 
I don't think he's mad or anything like it, after all he's probably done years worth of valuable research by interviewing the old bushmen, also he's got quite an input into the thylacine museum. But, I don't believe he saw a thylacine on either of the occasions that he claimed. The first sighting he relates without any embellishment, it's the timing though of his revealing the second sighting that I think is seriously misguided.
 
Good find makes fascinating listening. I was just thinking the other day whether there was anyone left who had regular contact with it.

Interesting that he says he thinks the animal was put down, although as he says that was just an impression of his. What's more interesting is that he says he remembers it as being in good health, especially as after it died the skin wasn't preserved because of its poor condition.

Also of course the Washington pair never bred, that's only known to have happened once in captivity and that was at Melbourne Zoo.

The Westbury Zoo animal needs a bit of looking into though.
 
In fact 2013 has been a good year for thylacines so far, this, four preserved pups discovered in Prague and with hopefully a new photo about to surface before long.
 
" I was just thinking the other day whether there was anyone left who had regular contact with it."

With a lot of luck, me in November.
 
Well I'd certainly like that to be the case. By the way what do you make of the throw away little comment about there being another animal kept at Westbury Zoo, I'm looking into that one.
 
No idea but it would not surprise me. Until recently zoo records in most collections have been wanting.
Wombwell's Travling Menagery once exhibited things they called tiger wolves or zebra wolves. These may have been striped hyenas but they could have been thylacines.
 
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