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No sorry, I didn't mean your second link there, somehow I managed to miss that one. I was on about the first one written by the kid.

The second one is very good, and the idea itself is excellent.
 
However we saw no leeches in Tasmania. I think it was unseasonably cold when we were there.
 
Tigers in The Weld: The Sequel

Col Bailey. First published Sunday April 7
08.04.13 6:30 pm

Into the wild and untamed interior of the alluring Weld Valley

My second book, ‘Shadow of the Thylacine’ - having finally found a publisher - is due for release on May 1st.

And to coincide with its publication, I would like to enlarge on the circumstances surrounding my quest to locate the thylacine in the Weld Valley in March 1995.

Because of overall restrictions regarding word content there was insufficient room to include all details in the book text, and I feel it important to supplement my earlier account to this widely read electronic newspaper with an in-depth narrative of my entry into the south western section of the Weld Valley and that part which borders the South West National Park.

Surprisingly little has been written about this seldom visited part of Tasmania which is remarkable considering its alluring attraction, and as such it deserves commendable recognition. Despite road building and logging having since taken place to the east and north over the past 18 years, this particular area has to this point in time fortunately been spared such intrusion.

The south-western sector of the Weld Valley is one of the least visited tracts of back country in Tasmania, presenting any bushwalker prepared and equipped to tackle it with something of a genuine challenge.

It is blessed with pure, pristine wilderness; extremely remote, largely uncharted and seldom walked. There are no recognised tracks and it can at times be subjected to powerful weather extremes; rain hail, wind, snow and sleet, along with perfectly clear, sunny days thrown in for good measure. To venture into its mysterious depths is to chance whatever nature chooses to throw at you. Once in its clutches you are tempting fate and your life will never be quite the same again. You will rapidly fall under its spell, captivated by its magnificence, breathtaking beauty and enticing allurement to draw you back time and again. Bounded by the Jubilee and Snowy Ranges to the north and the Western Arthurs to the south, this valley of the Weld is a special place; a rare and wild expanse of untainted primordial splendour where it appears time has stood still.

Continued Here:
http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/art ... the-sequel
 
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A 'quadrupedal kangaroo', do people ever think before they open their mouths? Do people describe wombats as being kangaroo like? Why not ?They're more closely related.


"One researcher is absolutely adamant that an early group of environmentalists took live tigers to the mainland and let them loose," Black said.

Really? Oh that is good news.

"It’s hard to say what I saw, but some of the sightings are unmistakably Tasmanian tigers," he said.

More good news. Oh well that's that settled then.

What an absolute twat.

Take a look at the book's cover. "what'ya mean wrong sort of tiger?"
 
It's been a year and a half. We're ready for that update now. Whatever it is, we can take it. ;)
 
yes - I would like some follow up re the scat samples as well
 
particularly liked the Jolson scat, audio spoor analytics at its best...
 
Is this post supposed to make sense or what? The scat samples are something else. I will say the thethylacine has been one of the most world's most often spotted cryptids from Tasmania, Australia to New Guinea.
 
If you go to the quadraped section, you'll see there's been a long-standing thread on this.

The project was shelved years ago. It was never practical.
 
Interesting article

A Reporter at Large
July 2, 2018 Issue
The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger
Could a global icon of extinction still be alive?
By Brooke Jarvis

180702_r32368_rd.jpg

Like the dodo and the great auk, the Tasmanian tiger is more renowned for the tragedy of its death than for its life, about which little is known. Enthusiasts hope it will be a Lazarus species—an animal considered lost but then found.

Illustration by Bene Rohlmann
Andrew Orchard lives near the northeastern coast of Tasmania, in the same ramshackle farmhouse that his great-grandparents, the first generation of his English family to be born on the Australian island, built in 1906. When I visited Orchard there, in March, he led me past stacks of cardboard boxes filled with bones, skulls, and scat, and then rooted around for a photo album, the kind you’d expect to hold family snapshots. Instead, it contained pictures of the bloody carcasses of Tasmania’s native animals: a wombat with its intestines pulled out, a kangaroo missing its face. “A tiger will always eat the jowls and eyes,” Orchard explained. “All the good organs.” The photos were part of Orchard’s arsenal of evidence against a skeptical world—proof of his fervent belief, shared with many in Tasmania, that the island’s apex predator, an animal most famous for being extinct, is still alive.

The Tasmanian tiger, known to science as the thylacine, was the only member of its genus of marsupial carnivores to live to modern times. It could grow to six feet long, if you counted its tail, which was stiff and thick at the base, a bit like a kangaroo’s, and it raised its young in a pouch. When Orchard was growing up, his father would tell him stories of having snared one, on his property, many years after the last confirmed animal died, in the nineteen-thirties. Orchard says that he saw his first tiger when he was eighteen, while duck hunting, and since then so many that he’s lost count. Long before the invention of digital trail cameras, Orchard was out in the bush rigging film cameras to motion sensors, hoping to get a picture of a tiger. He showed me some of the most striking images he’d collected over the decades, sometimes describing teeth and tails and stripes while pointing at what, to my eye, could very well have been shadows or stems. (Another thylacine searcher told me that finding tigers hidden in the grass in camera-trap photos is “a bit like seeing the Virgin Mary in burnt toast.”) Orchard estimates that he spends five thousand dollars a year just on batteries for his trail cams. The larger costs of his fascination are harder to calculate. “That’s why my wife left me,” he offered at one point, while discussing the habitats tigers like best.

Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel, shares the country’s colonial history. The first English settlers arrived in 1803 and soon began spreading across the island, whose human and animal inhabitants had lived in isolation for more than ten thousand years. Conflict was almost immediate. The year that the Orchard farmhouse was built, the Tasmanian government paid out fifty-eight bounties to trappers and hunters who presented the bodies of thylacines, which were wanted for preying on the settlers’ sheep. By then, the number of dead tigers, like the number of live ones, was steeply declining. In 1907, the state treasury paid out for forty-two carcasses. In 1908, it paid for seventeen. The following year, there were two, and then none the year after, or the year after that, or ever again. ...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...pJobID=1422307408&spReportId=MTQyMjMwNzQwOAS2
 
I'm sure a lot of you have seen this, but this link from last year claims to have footage of the Thylacine. Thoughts?

http://www.singularfortean.com/news...m-to-have-captured-footage-of-tasmanian-tiger

The people who came up with this are genuine. And the biggest thing about their accounts isn't the footage which definitely shows a spotted tail quoll, but the sighting by one of the Booths sometime previously.

My own position though is that with very good reason I don't believe the thylacine survived the 1930's.
 
As the question is "Does a (implied singular) thylacine still lurk?", well, if there is one thylacine left, the species is pretty doomed without the help of CRISPR and IVF i.e. hardcore human intervention via cloning and genetic manipulation (or perhaps marsupialation?).

Mainland Thylacines
Actually, the most likely spot for any remnant thylacines to be found is a fairly well populated area of farmland on the mainland next to one of Victoria's largest national parks - Wilson's Promontory in South Gippsland.
Apparently a group of thylacines was released in the national park in the early years of the 20th century when field naturalists realised that the critter was in trouble in Tassie. Since then there have been numerous sightings of striped dog-like animals around South Gippsland. Some people believe that there is still a small population of thylacines hanging on in and around the infrequently visited northern part of the park.
Maybe! But I still wouldn't rate the likelihood higher than a 3, and probably lower. :cry:

I heard this rumor too. I also later heard that it wasn't true. I hope it is true though. I know someone who swears they saw a thylacine while on holiday at Wilson's Prom. I hope the facial tumor issue is fixed soon or the Tasmanian Devil could go the same way, but I hear there has been good news on that front recently. I feel we are all immeasurably impoverished by every species we lose.
 
As the question is "Does a (implied singular) thylacine still lurk?", well, if there is one thylacine left, the species is pretty doomed without the help of CRISPR and IVF i.e. hardcore human intervention via cloning and genetic manipulation (or perhaps marsupialation?).

That's a lot of rubbish and a very ill informed comment to make. If the species survived all those years without human hands it doesn't need human intervention.

This crap about low gene pool has been doing the rounds for years. This would be to justify a possible very recent extinction which would be due to habitat loss and farmers practices, nothing more.
 
This thread is being established to house miscellaneous content relating to thylacines (variously labeled as Tasmanian tiger, Tasmanian wolf, or marsupial wolf).
 
I've just been catching up with episodes of Extinct on Channel 4. I started watching the episode about thylacines (with some pretty average CGI) but I found it so upsetting I had to turn it off. No idea why, I've watched the Irish Elk and Great Auk episodes without so much as shedding a tear, just a generalised interest. But there was something about the thylacine, maybe it reminded me of my dogs? It was reducing me to tears.
 
I've just been catching up with episodes of Extinct on Channel 4. I started watching the episode about thylacines (with some pretty average CGI) but I found it so upsetting I had to turn it off. No idea why, I've watched the Irish Elk and Great Auk episodes without so much as shedding a tear, just a generalised interest. But there was something about the thylacine, maybe it reminded me of my dogs? It was reducing me to tears.

There is a good chance they are still around.
 
There is a good chance they are still around.
Anecdotes and fuzzy pictures constitute "a good chance"? I strongly disagree. That's very wishful thinking when one considers the need for a certain number of individuals to sustain the population these past 100 years, the fact that they were long extinct on mainland Australia by thousands of years and declining in Tasmania when the colonists arrived. I'd say it's an extreme view to say they are still around. False hope (and perhaps deep feelings of guilt) aren't going to bring it back. Maybe cloning will but not for a while and not really. The population is gone.
 
Anecdotes and fuzzy pictures constitute "a good chance"? I strongly disagree. That's very wishful thinking when one considers the need for a certain number of individuals to sustain the population these past 100 years, the fact that they were long extinct on mainland Australia by thousands of years and declining in Tasmania when the colonists arrived. I'd say it's an extreme view to say they are still around. False hope (and perhaps deep feelings of guilt) aren't going to bring it back. Maybe cloning will but not for a while and not really. The population is gone.

Just to clarify, the thylacine population was stable when the Europeans arrived. The big decline came around the turn of the 20th century. With functional extinction occuring then in my opinion.
 
I've just been catching up with episodes of Extinct on Channel 4. I started watching the episode about thylacines (with some pretty average CGI) but I found it so upsetting I had to turn it off. No idea why, I've watched the Irish Elk and Great Auk episodes without so much as shedding a tear, just a generalised interest. But there was something about the thylacine, maybe it reminded me of my dogs? It was reducing me to tears.

The tiger's extinction is tragic, but tjat documentary is not a good description of it. The cgi animal's backstory and condition was totally fabricated. The evidence for disease for example is almost non existent.
 
the thylacine population was stable when the Europeans arrived

It was? I guess you could say that. Evolutionarily speaking, being exclusive to Tasmania at that point, the species seemed in trouble. That's the way I was thinking about it. Wouldn't that small distribution space suggest that its long-term existence is far more tenuous?
 
It was? I guess you could say that. Evolutionarily speaking, being exclusive to Tasmania at that point, the species seemed in trouble. That's the way I was thinking about it. Wouldn't that small distribution space suggest that its long-term existence is far more tenuous?

In terms of its massive reduction in range yes. I think it'd be very hard to argue that it wasn't on the skids. But, in terms of the Tasmanian population itself as far as I'm aware there's nothing to suggest a decline in the population prior to European arrival. Realistically though we have no real idea what the population was in 1804, nor at other time that century.

Once Europeans arrived though yes I'd agree that the tiger's restricted range was a major factor in its extinction.
 
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