21 replies to this topic

[evil_kenshin]

Lava_Lady, on 26 November 2012 - 09:50 AM, said:

Saw a Monster Quest episode years ago about sightings of enormous, dinosaur sized lizards in the outback.  Pretty interesting, I found it on YouTube.

Varanus priscus? they have been extinct for quite awhile (around 40000 years) but were a giant gonna that was 7 meters long , very unlikely their still around.

[psyche101]

The best known report of a Thylacine comes from WA. Nice spot, I was there going back geez, 20 years ago or so, but I remember it being a nice clean place with lots of glass in the city, but all the pubs in Freemantle had me catching the train a bit Spent some time in Esperance, top spot. Loved it. Good fishing there.

Are you anywhere near Busselton? Syd Slee (author Lair of the Marsupial Wolf) has a museum there, I bet he could offer a yarn or two. A promising lead came out of WA on the Thylacine in the 80's but after analysis, it turned ou the photos proving the existence of the animal were heavily doctored  however, this does not negate to original claim by a park ranger.

It has been extinct on the mainland for a couple thousand years at least. Most people do not realise this. Only the Tasmanian species survived the introduced Dingo on the mainland, which was then hunted into extinction, on false premisses, by man. I do not think many people realise how treacherous Bass trait is. No Tassie Tiger is going to be taking a leisurely swim to the mainland. Even if one Tiger could, between introduced species like feral cats and dogs, as well as the Dingo, the poor Marsupial Wolf is up against it. I canot see the Tassie version outcompeting mainland established predators that removed all previous versions of the Tiger, which in many cases were larger than the Tassie version we all know and love.

I think ABC's are not out of the question in any place. Many stories abound of WWII Pilots keeping the cats as mascots and letting them go when they reached a certain size. I just hope no population ever establishes itself here. If we have ABC's I'd like to hope there is a decent eradication system in place.

Quote

In 1968 the Tasmania Tiger Center was established, to which people could report their Thylacine sightings. Expeditions continued to beat the brush in the wild lands of Tasmania searching for a remnant population of Thylacines. In the 1970s the World Wildlife Fund set up several automatic camera units at locations where sightings of the Thylacine were often concentrated. Bait was set and infrared beams were used to trigger the cameras, sadly the project ended with failure in 1980, no Thylacines were captured on film.
In his official report, project leader Steven J. Smith of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, stated his view that the Thylacines is extinct. Zoologist Eric Guiler later set up his own hidden camera operation, but this attempt to capture a living Thylacine on film also ended in failure.
Despite the lack of photographic evidence the number of reported sightings shot up between 1970 and 1980, 104 documented sightings total. This gave investigators new hope of finding the Thylacines still surviving in the more remote areas of Tasmania. Reports of living Thylacines also began to come in from southwestern Western Australia, which was very strange as the Thylacines were eliminated from mainland Australia thousands of years ago.
On a rainy night in March of 1982 a NPWS park ranger was sleeping in the back seat of his car when something woke him up. He turned on his spotlight and turned it onto an animal about 20 feet away. The ranger reported what he saw was a Thylacine, "an adult male in excellent condition, with 12 black stripes on a sandy coat." The creature quickly ran off into near by brush, its footprints and all other evidence washed away by the rain.
In order to keep people from going to the area of this sighting and disturbing a possible habitat of the last living Thylacines, the NPWS kept this report from the public until January 1984. This sighting did not prove the existence of living Thylacines to the government's satisfaction though, and no official statement was issued.
Following the rash of Thylacine sightings in Western Australia, the state's Agricultural Protection Board sent Kevin Cameron, a tracker of aboriginal descent, to investigate. Soon Cameron reported that he himself sighted and identified a living Thylacine in Western Australia, but again a simple sighting was not proof enough. Then in 1985 Cameron produced pictures that he claimed where taken of a living Thylacine, along with casts of Thylacine footprints. The pictures showed a dog like animal burrowing at the base of the tree.
The head was hidden from view, but its striped back and stiff tail strongly implied that it was a Thylacine. As these pictures began to spread around the scientific community suspicions began to arise. Cameron would not say where he took the pictures, and would not give permission to have the pictures reproduced for publication. Eventually agreeing, the pictures were presented to zoologist Athol M. Douglas at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. Cameron accompanied Douglas to a photographic laboratory while he made enlargements. Douglas would later report:
"When I saw the negatives, I realized Cameron's account with regard to the photographs was inaccurate. The film had been cut, frames were missing, and the photos were taken from different angles, making it impossible for the series to have been taken in 20 or 30 seconds, as Cameron had stated. Furthermore, in one negative, there was the shadow of another person pointing what could be a 12 gauge shotgun; Cameron stated that he had been alone. It would have been practically impossible for an animal as alert as a Thylacine to remain stationary for so long while human activity was going on in its vicinity. In addition, it is significant that the animal's head does not appear in any of the photographs."
The story and pictures were released in the New Scientist magazine, and its readers were soon criticizing the authenticity of the photographs. They pointed out that the animal seemed to stay dead still from photograph to photograph. And they realized by the differing lengths of the shadows that the pictures were taken over at least an hour. It would seem that the pictures were a hoax, and the specimen was a stuffed Thylacine. But the first picture, the one that showed the shadow of a person holding a gun aimed at the Thylacine, was omitted from the New Scientist story. Douglas feels that,
"The full frame of this negative is the one which shows the shadow of the man with a rigid gun like object pointing in the direction of the Thylacine at the base of the tree. This shadow was deliberately excluded in the photos published in New Scientist. If I am correct in this supposition, the Thylacine was alive when the first photo was taken, but had been dead, and frozen in rigor mortis, for several hours by the time the second photograph was taken."
Douglas hoped that the carcass would surface, but that is doubtful since shooting a Thylacine is punishable by a $5000 fine and Cameron was not being helpful in shedding any further light on it. Either it was a hoax using a stuffed Thylacine, or a living Thylacine was shot, then frozen and later used to take photographs. The fact that the head is not in any of the photographs may be because the animal was shot in the head, if they were using a stuffed Thylacine, then why hide the head?
In 1966 an expedition from the Western Australia Museum found a Thylacine carcass in a cave near Mundrabilla Station. Carbon dating showed the carcass to be 4,500 years old, but that method of dating may be invalid since the body had been soaking in groundwater. Zoologist Athol Douglas reported that along with the Thylacine carcass, they also found a dingo carcass and that the dingo carcass was much more deteriorated than the Thylacine carcass.

LINK

Edited by psyche101, 28 November 2012 - 05:40 AM.

[Zeta Reticulum]

psyche101, on 28 November 2012 - 05:39 AM, said:

The best known report of a Thylacine comes from WA. Nice spot, I was there going back geez, 20 years ago or so, but I remember it being a nice clean place with lots of glass in the city, but all the pubs in Freemantle had me catching the train a bit Spent some time in Esperance, top spot. Loved it. Good fishing there.

Are you anywhere near Busselton? Syd Slee (author Lair of the Marsupial Wolf) has a museum there, I bet he could offer a yarn or two. A promising lead came out of WA on the Thylacine in the 80's but after analysis, it turned ou the photos proving the existence of the animal were heavily doctored  however, this does not negate to original claim by a park ranger.

It has been extinct on the mainland for a couple thousand years at least. Most people do not realise this. Only the Tasmanian species survived the introduced Dingo on the mainland, which was then hunted into extinction, on false premisses, by man. I do not think many people realise how treacherous Bass trait is. No Tassie Tiger is going to be taking a leisurely swim to the mainland. Even if one Tiger could, between introduced species like feral cats and dogs, as well as the Dingo, the poor Marsupial Wolf is up against it. I canot see the Tassie version outcompeting mainland established predators that removed all previous versions of the Tiger, which in many cases were larger than the Tassie version we all know and love.

I think ABC's are not out of the question in any place. Many stories abound of WWII Pilots keeping the cats as mascots and letting them go when they reached a certain size. I just hope no population ever establishes itself here. If we have ABC's I'd like to hope there is a decent eradication system in place.


LINK

I know Sid Slee and was a guest of his family on their dairy farm 4 years ago. A nicer family you couldnt meet. Sid has many artifacts and also a lot of great information about
thylacines from his long life just outside of Bussleton.

[DKO]

Here's a video of a few apparent ABC's in Australia. Could easily be a large feral cat though.



I said this before on a different thread but the thing that puzzles me about the ABC footage is they are pure black in every shot, If they were a feral cat wouldn't they be more likely to have mottled colouring? I've seen a few feral cats out in rural areas and they were all mottled, even in the suburbs/cities I don't see many black cats.

[DKO]

I just found this article on a recent spike in big cat sightings in Victoria. Here's the latest photo of one of these:



Still could easily be a feral cat though.

http://www.heraldsun...x-1226457733792

And another video about ABCs in Australia, Shows a lot of dead animals that were killed in a way that apparently only a cat could do.

[psyche101]

Zeta Reticulum, on 28 November 2012 - 07:42 AM, said:

I know Sid Slee and was a guest of his family on their dairy farm 4 years ago. A nicer family you couldnt meet. Sid has many artifacts and also a lot of great information about
thylacines from his long life just outside of Bussleton.

I would very much like to visit the museum should I ever head back that way, however even more tantalising is the very fact that David Fleay managed to trap one in 1946, well after the extinction date. Although it was the "one that got away" hair from the trap was analysed, and the suspicion confirmed.

LINK

Debbie Hyne from Thylacoleo has put together a theory that Thylacine reached the mainland. Personally I find it a weak hypothesis and based on hearsay. She never explains why a couple of escaped Thylacines might survive mainland Australia when the Dingo already wiped out the entire population, and is still here, not to mention the influx of feral animals from escaped pets. The Poor old Thylacine is up against it on the mainland.

LINK

Gosh, I find you so much more pleasant on this board. Your hit and run posts in ET do not show your best side.

[flareobox]

Thankyou guys for all that info! It's good to know there are more Perth enthusiasts than just me, sometimes I question that. As for the Slenderman originating in Perth, very interesting and I never knew that.

Thanks all.