What is believed to be the last known footage of a thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, has been made available by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) as a “new” lost film (despite being a marsupial and looking nothing like a tiger apart from its stripy back).
When “Benjamin,” the last verified member of the species, passed away in captivity in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo, the species is believed to have gone extinct back in 1936. Less than a dozen films featuring the thylacine are thought to still exist, and they were all shot with captive animals at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, and the London Zoo. The most recent film, which has been digitally saved in 4K, was discovered in the long-forgotten travelogue Tasmania the Wonderland.
It was seen on camera at Beaumaris Zoo sometime in March 1935, a full year after the thylacine’s last confirmed sighting. There hasn’t been a public viewing of the Tasmanian tiger footage in 85 years. The NFSA speculates that the zookeeper may have rattled the animal’s cage to encourage more fascinating behavior from the thylacine or one of its impressive-looking “threat yawns.”
Benjamin passed away about 18 months later, and on September 7, 1936, the species was extinct (though not all scientists agree).
Long after Benjamin passed away, reports of sightings of thylacines in the wild persisted, giving many people hope that they could still be living someplace (stranger things have happened; this giant tortoise was rediscovered ambling on an island in the Galapagos in 2019, 113 years after it had last been sighted).
The Tasmanian government’s Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water, and Environment published a report in September 2019 listing eight potential but unconfirmed sightings during the preceding three years. According to the Thylacine Awareness Group, who occasionally provides blurry video as proof, the species may still still be able to be seen in mainland Australia.
The species is thought to have disappeared from mainland Australia around 3,000 years ago, despite remaining in Tasmania until the 1930s, as Dr. Cath Temper, a mammal expert from the South Australian Museum explained in 2016 after one such sighting: “There’s never been a thylacine specimen from the mainland.”
It’s much more likely the footage depicts a fox or a dog – thylacine roughly translates to “dog-headed pouched dog” after all – as thylacine means “dog-headed pouched dog” Another study in 2018 disagreed with the math but still came down on the side that the animal was probably extinct, though “there is enough uncertainty to at least leave this open as a slight possibility.”
We’ll have to make due with the few film we have of these amazing creatures until researchers, who have so far mapped the animal’s DNA, act quickly and clone it.
Dats real purdy