Imagine a bizarre animal that appears to be half wolf and half tiger, with a head like a large dog's, hindquarters like a hyena's, and tiger stripes covering only the rear half of its body. Let's say this beast also has a long, rigid tail and a pouch like a kangaroo's, except that the pouch opens backwards. It sure sounds like a mythical mishmash of different species, similar to a jackalope or minotaur, but guess what? This creature is a real animal. Or at least, it was.
The thylacine was also known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, but it was neither feline nor canine. It was a carnivorous marsupial which was thought to be a distant relative of the opossum. Like so many marsupials, the thylacine was exclusively native to Australia. The species seems to have been driven off the continent's mainland about 12,000 years ago, probably because of a losing battle against dingoes. The thylacine found refuge on the island of Tasmania, which was once connected to the continent by a land bridge, and became the only place on Earth where thylacines were found.
In the 19th century, European settlers on Tasmania vilified the thylacine as a destructive menace responsible for slaughtering sheep and other livestock. Both government and private agencies offered bounties to have them killed. Thylacines were exterminated at a rapid pace, with the animal's strange appearance making it an easy target and public hatred fueling the hunt. By the early 20th century, the thylacine was nearly wiped out and no longer a significant threat, and yet the killing continued. Bounties on the animal were officially ended in 1909, but the thylacine was still being hunted down as late as 1930.
The people of Tasmania finally realized that the thylacine was virtually extinct. In 1933, the last known specimen was captured and kept at the Hobart Zoo, where it was named Benjamin. (A photograph of Benjamin appears on this page.) In 1936, Tasmania declared thylacines a protected species, but only two months later, Benjamin died in captivity. On that day, the thylacine officially became extinct.
But soon after Benjamin's death, the new sightings began. People began seeing thylacine in wild areas across Tasmania, engendering belief that the reports of its extinction was premature. Some experts are willing to concede that a small number of thylacines may survive in hiding somewhere in Tasmania, but despite a vast number of sightings and discoveries of alleged thylacine tracks, no concrete evidence of the species' survival there has yet been produced.
And as if thylacine sightings in Tasmania aren't strange enough, there's also plenty of thylacine sightings outside Tasmania. The island of Tasmania was the sole and isolated habitat of the animal for thousands of years, and now there are reports that the creature is still alive in other places -- most commonly on the Australian continent, but in other parts of the world as well.
In 1981, the Australia government hired professional tracker Kevin Cameron to investigate sightings of a strange animal in Western Australia. Cameron soon reported that he saw the animal and said that it was a thylacine. In 1985, Cameron produced a series of alleged photographs of a living thylacine. The pictures were initially convincing, but analysis cast doubts on their authenticity: the animal's head was never shown, its body never changed position, and the photos were taken from wide variety of angles that were inconsistent with Cameron's story of a 20- to 30-second encounter. Cameron's photos are generally judged to be of a fake or stuffed thylacine, an explanation which raises the possibility that Cameron may have killed a living thylacine and staged these photos, to avoid the government's $5,000 fine that would apply to the killing of a thylacine, which is still listed as a protected species.
The thylacine has also been recently spotted alive and well as far afield as Indonesia and England. These reports have no more credibility than the average Bigfoot sighting, or maybe even less, since there is no documented data on Bigfoot's exclusive habitats. But the thylacine has become one of the favorite topics of modern cryptozoology, even attracting the attention of famous adventure-seekers like Walt Disney, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Ted Turner, who have all searched for the creature. The thylacine truly is the world's most common extinct animal.
This site was protected so I couldn't copy and paste it, check it out:
http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/
http://www.amonline.net.au/thylacine/
http://www.amonline.net.au/thylacine/01.htm
http://users.aristotle.net/~swarmack/thylacin.html
Some pics:
