I've pretty much given up hope for the world's largest marsupial carnivore, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. I consider it true - indeed, unarguable - that a few tigers survived the species' official demise in 1936. However, despite a trickle of modern sightings, my best guess is that the survivors didn't make up a viable population and died out around the 1990s.
Maybe I'm wrong.
British cryptozoologist Richard Freeman is now in northwestern Tasmania looking for it with help from his colleagues of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. He says, "The area is so damn remote, there are so many prey species and we
have so many reliable witnesses who know the bush that I’d say there is a
reasonable population of them left."
Still, experts like the late Dr. Eric Guiler spent decades looking for the thylacine. The odds are not good.
But perhaps they are not hopeless. I wish Freeman and company all the luck in the world.
2 comments:
Fingers crossed. But the one thing that makes me skeptical is that after such a long period of time surely a viable population would have bounced back by now. It isn't like these creatures were all that ellusive.
Hasn't there been some talk lately about recreating the Tasmanian tiger?
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