One wet night in March 1982, Hans Naarding was surveying snipe in northwest Tasmania when he came face to face with a Tasmanian tiger, a creature believed to be extinct. Naarding is a bushman with many years’ experience in Africa and Australia.
A tall, thin Dutchman now in his late 70s, he sits on a bench overlooking the waterfront of Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, and tries to recapture the moment.
“I had driven down a disused forest track,” he begins in his quiet voice. “The weather was ghastly, so I switched off the engine, climbed into the back of my Land Cruiser and into my sleeping bag. At 2 am I woke up and grabbed my torch. I opened the window, put out my arm, shone the torch around and came to rest on a thylacine [the correct name for a Tasmanian tiger]. I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway. It turned its head – I could see the light reflecting in its eye – and stood there in front of the vehicle, about five yards away.
“He was a healthy male, at least four or five years old. My scientific mind said, I’d better register what I see. So in my head, I weighed him, measured him and counted his stripes [12, on a sandy coat]. Two things stood out: his stripes, and the massive butt of his tail. The end of his rump was overhanging his hind-quarters – not like a dog, but more like the striped hyenas I’d seen so many times in the African savannah.”
Naarding’s testimony is unique, the first recorded by a professional biologist since the last Tasmanian tiger – an Alsatian-sized marsupial with brown stripes, the long stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s – was thought to have died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936.
“I must have seen him for three minutes, as clear as daylight. I wanted to get hold of my camera, but I never got that far. To get it, I had to bring my arm in and that upset him. He disappeared into the bush.”
Naarding continues: “I shot out, but it was a solid wall of undergrowth. I only got that far.” He stretches out his arm. “But I could smell him; a pungent scent similar to hyena. I knew that to try to follow him would be pointless. At first light, I drove to the nearest town and rang the director of Parks and Wildlife.”
Naarding’s sighting was kept secret for 15 months while Nick Mooney, a colleague in Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, conducted an extensive but fruitless survey of the area. Then, when the news became public, “pandemonium broke out.” Within a week, Naarding had TV crews on his doorstep from Japan, Argentina and Europe.
“I couldn’t do my work, I started to hide. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have kept my trap shut. Make no mistake, I was thrilled to have seen a thylacine – it will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse.”
Unlike the loch ness monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger did indisputably exist, and within living memory. Once common on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an arrestingly beautiful island the size of Ireland that lies 225 kilometres off Australia’s south coast.
Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the few people alive definitely to have seen a Tasmanian tiger. Now in his nineties, he was at school in Hobart in the 1930s. “We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,” he says in his small drawing room. “The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards.”
The death of Benjamin, as the “last” of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on the chilly night of September 7, caused so little comment it wasn’t even recorded in the local papers – though the date is now designated National Threatened Species Day.
All that remains of Benjamin, whose pelt and bones were tossed into a rubbish tip, is a mute 62-second clip of black-and-white film taken by a man who was bitten on the buttock while operating the camera. Watched by a man in a hat, Benjamin yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks round with an air of hopelessness and leaps every so often at the cage wire. To add insult to injury, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a month passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the bush. Since 1936, there have been more than 4000 sightings. Indeed, it has been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus.
Take Buck and Joan Emberg, retired university teachers who live near Lilydale, a village in the northeast of the island. One night they were driving home when, according to Buck, “there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine next to the road.” He says, “I braked and as I pulled in I said to Joan, ‘Are you sure of what we just saw?’ She paused for 15 seconds. ‘I just saw two tigers,’ she said. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I replied. We turned round, hoping. But they had moved off.”
Or take Laurelle Shakespeare, a housewife who saw a tiger near a shack in the Great Lakes in central Tasmania. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared on a big ridge in the middle of the day. “It just stood there,” she recalls, “and then it flipped round, disappearing into the bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I said to mum. ‘That’s a Tasmanian tiger.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we’re not telling anyone.’ Can you imagine? There’d be people all over the place.”
Such sightings are compromised by the fact that not much is known about how the animal behaved in the wild. By general consent, the thylacine seems to have been shy, elusive and ungainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It preferred wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its jaws and kill by suffocation. A less messy killer than dogs, it had a taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers. “It would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then rip a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discarding the rest,” says Jackson Cotton, who as a boy took part in a tiger hunt near ., on Tasmania’s east coast.
“They used to roar out at the back of Cranbrook during the night,” 79-year-old farmer Ted Castle recalls in the kitchen of his old shack. Ted himself never saw a tiger in the wild, but his father did – plenty. “My dad was a tiger hunter. He had one as a pet, had it tied up. It had got into the killing shed.”
When the British first colonised Tasmania in 1803, there were 2000 to 4000 thylacines on the island. In a bid to protect its sheep flocks, in 1830 the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which owned large tracts of Tasmania, offered a bounty of five shillings (38 cents at current rates) for a male and seven shillings for a female, and appointed a “tiger man” as a full-time tracker. In 1888, the government increased the bounty to £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian government bounty scheme accounted for 2184 skins.
Many were rumoured to have been fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but David Owen, author of Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Allen & Unwin), disputes this: “No such waistcoat is known to exist.” A more popular use was rugs. A rug quilted from the pelts of thylacines and bought for £3 in 1900 sold in September 2002 for £135,000.
In 1909, this bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had drastically reduced the tiger population and sightings grew less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still felt able to advertise “Tiger Shooting” as one of its attractions. Live specimens were sold abroad for up to £150, one of the exporters being film actor Errol Flynn’s father, Professor Theodore Flynn.
The Tasmanian tiger bounded from fact into myth before everyone’s eyes. From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Like unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stands rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s cricket team, the Tasmanian Tigers. “It is – or was – a cunning and aggressive carnivore; a killer,” says the former test cricketer David Boon. “If it still exists, it’s surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.”
Yet all the sightings since 1936 have not produced any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin magazine offered a reward worth AUD1.25 million for a photograph showing a live, uninjured thylacine (“No fuzzy photographs, please”).
Soon afterwards, a German tourist claimed to have captured just such a specimen on his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. The photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding’s sighting and who probably knows more about the thylacine than anyone alive.
The images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney’s conclusion: “The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct.” (Indeed, on September 7, 1986, four-and-a-half years after Naarding’s sighting, the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct.)
Then, last may, incredible news – an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th-century Tasmanian tiger pup (preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. According to the man who led the research, Dr Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, “This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to in-duce a functional response in another living organism.”
In Tasmania, the achievement has renewed fears of “a Jurassic Park-type scenario.” In that film, dinosaurs were resurrected out of prehistoric DNA retrieved from fossilised amber, a notion that has turned out to be not so far-fetched – Dolly the Sheep was created in 1996 from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.
The fact that a thylacine gene has now successfully activated cartilage in a live creature and that the tiger’s surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive response in experts such as Nick Mooney. He has no truck with scientists who seek to clone the thylacine.
“‘Clown it,’ we call it. I think it’s irresponsible. It’s teaching people ‘extinct’ is not forever. Technology should be applied to preventing extinction.”
Indeed, for even now the tiger’s closest relative is under threat. The Tasmanian devil, a pug-sized scavenger that takes its name from a howl that freezes the blood, has replaced the thylacine as the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. But since 2001 a fatal and mysterious cancer has decimated the devil. Bruce Englefield runs a nature park on Tasmania’s east coast that is largely devoted to saving the Tasmanian devil, whose population has plummeted in seven years from an estimated 100,000 to 15,000.
He is scathing of the tiger/mouse experiment. “The DNA won’t contain the innate behaviour of the thylacine and there’s nothing around for it to learn its behaviour from. More likely, it will have the innate behaviour of its host creature. You could have a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger, but behaves like a mouse.”
For most people, there’s a prospect that’s a lot more exciting than creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice: the prospect of finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat, as Hans Naarding did. For years Naarding hoped his sighting would result in the discovery of a few isolated pockets of thylacines in the southwest that might have survived on small kangaroos or carrion. He hoped to hear of other credible sightings. “But the majority are a flash across the road after Friday pub closing. I’ve never met anyone who’s convinced me they’ve seen one.”
So does he believe there are any Tasmanian tigers left? He hesitates, then says in a quiet, sad voice, “Frankly, I don’t think there are.” Still, he has tried to come across another tiger himself, in the same spot south of Smithton. “I’ve often gone bush-walking and spent weeks up there, but I’ve never seen the slightest sign.” Yet.
Source
One
wet night in March 1982, Hans Naarding was surveying snipe in northwest
Tasmania when he came face to face with a Tasmanian tiger, a creature
believed to be extinct. Naarding is a bushman with many years’
experience in Africa and Australia. A tall, thin Dutchman now in his
late 70s, he sits on a bench overlooking the waterfront of Hobart,
Tasmania’s capital, and tries to recapture the moment.
“I had driven down a disused forest track,” he begins in his quiet voice. “The weather was ghastly, so I switched off the engine, climbed into the back of my Land Cruiser and into my sleeping bag. At 2 am I woke up and grabbed my torch. I opened the window, put out my arm, shone the torch around and came to rest on a thylacine [the correct name for a Tasmanian tiger]. I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway. It turned its head – I could see the light reflecting in its eye – and stood there in front of the vehicle, about five yards away.
“He was a healthy male, at least four or five years old. My scientific mind said, I’d better register what I see. So in my head, I weighed him, measured him and counted his stripes [12, on a sandy coat]. Two things stood out: his stripes, and the massive butt of his tail. The end of his rump was overhanging his hind-quarters – not like a dog, but more like the striped hyenas I’d seen so many times in the African savannah.”
Naarding’s testimony is unique, the first recorded by a professional biologist since the last Tasmanian tiger – an Alsatian-sized marsupial with brown stripes, the long stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s – was thought to have died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936.
“I must have seen him for three minutes, as clear as daylight. I wanted to get hold of my camera, but I never got that far. To get it, I had to bring my arm in and that upset him. He disappeared into the bush.”
Naarding continues: “I shot out, but it was a solid wall of undergrowth. I only got that far.” He stretches out his arm. “But I could smell him; a pungent scent similar to hyena. I knew that to try to follow him would be pointless. At first light, I drove to the nearest town and rang the director of Parks and Wildlife.”
Naarding’s sighting was kept secret for 15 months while Nick Mooney, a colleague in Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, conducted an extensive but fruitless survey of the area. Then, when the news became public, “pandemonium broke out.” Within a week, Naarding had TV crews on his doorstep from Japan, Argentina and Europe.
“I couldn’t do my work, I started to hide. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have kept my trap shut. Make no mistake, I was thrilled to have seen a thylacine – it will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse.”
Unlike the loch ness monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger did indisputably exist, and within living memory. Once common on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an arrestingly beautiful island the size of Ireland that lies 225 kilometres off Australia’s south coast.
Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the few people alive definitely to have seen a Tasmanian tiger. Now in his nineties, he was at school in Hobart in the 1930s. “We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,” he says in his small drawing room. “The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards.” The death of Benjamin, as the “last” of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on the chilly night of September 7, caused so little comment it wasn’t even recorded in the local papers – though the date is now designated National Threatened Species Day. All that remains of Benjamin, whose pelt and bones were tossed into a rubbish tip, is a mute 62-second clip of black-and-white film taken by a man who was bitten on the buttock while operating the camera. Watched by a man in a hat, Benjamin yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks round with an air of hopelessness and leaps every so often at the cage wire. To add insult to injury, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a month passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the bush. Since 1936, there have been more than 4000 sightings. Indeed, it has been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus.
Take Buck and Joan Emberg, retired university teachers who live near Lilydale, a village in the northeast of the island. One night they were driving home when, according to Buck, “there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine next to the road.” He says, “I braked and as I pulled in I said to Joan, ‘Are you sure of what we just saw?’ She paused for 15 seconds. ‘I just saw two tigers,’ she said. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I replied. We turned round, hoping. But they had moved off.”
Or take Laurelle Shakespeare, a housewife who saw a tiger near a shack in the Great Lakes in central Tasmania. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared on a big ridge in the middle of the day. “It just stood there,” she recalls, “and then it flipped round, disappearing into the bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I said to mum. ‘That’s a Tasmanian tiger.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we’re not telling anyone.’ Can you imagine? There’d be people all over the place.”
Such sightings are compromised by the fact that not much is known about how the animal behaved in the wild. By general consent, the thylacine seems to have been shy, elusive and ungainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It preferred wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its jaws and kill by suffocation. A less messy killer than dogs, it had a taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers. “It would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then rip a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discarding the rest,” says Jackson Cotton, who as a boy took part in a tiger hunt near ., on Tasmania’s east coast.
“They used to roar out at the back of Cranbrook during the night,” 79-year-old farmer Ted Castle recalls in the kitchen of his old shack. Ted himself never saw a tiger in the wild, but his father did – plenty. “My dad was a tiger hunter. He had one as a pet, had it tied up. It had got into the killing shed.”
When the British first colonised Tasmania in 1803, there were 2000 to 4000 thylacines on the island. In a bid to protect its sheep flocks, in 1830 the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which owned large tracts of Tasmania, offered a bounty of five shillings (38 cents at current rates) for a male and seven shillings for a female, and appointed a “tiger man” as a full-time tracker. In 1888, the government increased the bounty to £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian government bounty scheme accounted for 2184 skins.
Many were rumoured to have been fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but David Owen, author of Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Allen & Unwin), disputes this: “No such waistcoat is known to exist.” A more popular use was rugs. A rug quilted from the pelts of thylacines and bought for £3 in 1900 sold in September 2002 for £135,000.
In 1909, this bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had drastically reduced the tiger population and sightings grew less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still felt able to advertise “Tiger Shooting” as one of its attractions. Live specimens were sold abroad for up to £150, one of the exporters being film actor Errol Flynn’s father, Professor Theodore Flynn.
The Tasmanian tiger bounded from fact into myth before everyone’s eyes. From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Like unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stands rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s cricket team, the Tasmanian Tigers. “It is – or was – a cunning and aggressive carnivore; a killer,” says the former test cricketer David Boon. “If it still exists, it’s surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.”
Yet all the sightings since 1936 have not produced any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin magazine offered a reward worth AUD1.25 million for a photograph showing a live, uninjured thylacine (“No fuzzy photographs, please”).
Soon afterwards, a German tourist claimed to have captured just such a specimen on his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. The photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding’s sighting and who probably knows more about the thylacine than anyone alive.
The images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney’s conclusion: “The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct.” (Indeed, on September 7, 1986, four-and-a-half years after Naarding’s sighting, the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct.)
Then, last may, incredible news – an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th-century Tasmanian tiger pup (preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. According to the man who led the research, Dr Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, “This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to in-duce a functional response in another living organism.”
In Tasmania, the achievement has renewed fears of “a Jurassic Park-type scenario.” In that film, dinosaurs were resurrected out of prehistoric DNA retrieved from fossilised amber, a notion that has turned out to be not so far-fetched – Dolly the Sheep was created in 1996 from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.
The fact that a thylacine gene has now successfully activated cartilage in a live creature and that the tiger’s surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive response in experts such as Nick Mooney. He has no truck with scientists who seek to clone the thylacine.
“‘Clown it,’ we call it. I think it’s irresponsible. It’s teaching people ‘extinct’ is not forever. Technology should be applied to preventing extinction.”
Indeed, for even now the tiger’s closest relative is under threat. The Tasmanian devil, a pug-sized scavenger that takes its name from a howl that freezes the blood, has replaced the thylacine as the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. But since 2001 a fatal and mysterious cancer has decimated the devil. Bruce Englefield runs a nature park on Tasmania’s east coast that is largely devoted to saving the Tasmanian devil, whose population has plummeted in seven years from an estimated 100,000 to 15,000.
He is scathing of the tiger/mouse experiment. “The DNA won’t contain the innate behaviour of the thylacine and there’s nothing around for it to learn its behaviour from. More likely, it will have the innate behaviour of its host creature. You could have a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger, but behaves like a mouse.”
For most people, there’s a prospect that’s a lot more exciting than creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice: the prospect of finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat, as Hans Naarding did. For years Naarding hoped his sighting would result in the discovery of a few isolated pockets of thylacines in the southwest that might have survived on small kangaroos or carrion. He hoped to hear of other credible sightings. “But the majority are a flash across the road after Friday pub closing. I’ve never met anyone who’s convinced me they’ve seen one.”
So does he believe there are any Tasmanian tigers left? He hesitates, then says in a quiet, sad voice, “Frankly, I don’t think there are.” Still, he has tried to come across another tiger himself, in the same spot south of Smithton. “I’ve often gone bush-walking and spent weeks up there, but I’ve never seen the slightest sign.” Yet.
- See more at: http://www.rdasia.com/the_quest_for_the_tasmanian_tiger#sthash.khbfyMJX.dpuf
“I had driven down a disused forest track,” he begins in his quiet voice. “The weather was ghastly, so I switched off the engine, climbed into the back of my Land Cruiser and into my sleeping bag. At 2 am I woke up and grabbed my torch. I opened the window, put out my arm, shone the torch around and came to rest on a thylacine [the correct name for a Tasmanian tiger]. I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway. It turned its head – I could see the light reflecting in its eye – and stood there in front of the vehicle, about five yards away.
“He was a healthy male, at least four or five years old. My scientific mind said, I’d better register what I see. So in my head, I weighed him, measured him and counted his stripes [12, on a sandy coat]. Two things stood out: his stripes, and the massive butt of his tail. The end of his rump was overhanging his hind-quarters – not like a dog, but more like the striped hyenas I’d seen so many times in the African savannah.”
Naarding’s testimony is unique, the first recorded by a professional biologist since the last Tasmanian tiger – an Alsatian-sized marsupial with brown stripes, the long stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s – was thought to have died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936.
“I must have seen him for three minutes, as clear as daylight. I wanted to get hold of my camera, but I never got that far. To get it, I had to bring my arm in and that upset him. He disappeared into the bush.”
Naarding continues: “I shot out, but it was a solid wall of undergrowth. I only got that far.” He stretches out his arm. “But I could smell him; a pungent scent similar to hyena. I knew that to try to follow him would be pointless. At first light, I drove to the nearest town and rang the director of Parks and Wildlife.”
Naarding’s sighting was kept secret for 15 months while Nick Mooney, a colleague in Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, conducted an extensive but fruitless survey of the area. Then, when the news became public, “pandemonium broke out.” Within a week, Naarding had TV crews on his doorstep from Japan, Argentina and Europe.
“I couldn’t do my work, I started to hide. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have kept my trap shut. Make no mistake, I was thrilled to have seen a thylacine – it will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse.”
Unlike the loch ness monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger did indisputably exist, and within living memory. Once common on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an arrestingly beautiful island the size of Ireland that lies 225 kilometres off Australia’s south coast.
Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the few people alive definitely to have seen a Tasmanian tiger. Now in his nineties, he was at school in Hobart in the 1930s. “We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,” he says in his small drawing room. “The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards.” The death of Benjamin, as the “last” of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on the chilly night of September 7, caused so little comment it wasn’t even recorded in the local papers – though the date is now designated National Threatened Species Day. All that remains of Benjamin, whose pelt and bones were tossed into a rubbish tip, is a mute 62-second clip of black-and-white film taken by a man who was bitten on the buttock while operating the camera. Watched by a man in a hat, Benjamin yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks round with an air of hopelessness and leaps every so often at the cage wire. To add insult to injury, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a month passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the bush. Since 1936, there have been more than 4000 sightings. Indeed, it has been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus.
Take Buck and Joan Emberg, retired university teachers who live near Lilydale, a village in the northeast of the island. One night they were driving home when, according to Buck, “there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine next to the road.” He says, “I braked and as I pulled in I said to Joan, ‘Are you sure of what we just saw?’ She paused for 15 seconds. ‘I just saw two tigers,’ she said. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I replied. We turned round, hoping. But they had moved off.”
Or take Laurelle Shakespeare, a housewife who saw a tiger near a shack in the Great Lakes in central Tasmania. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared on a big ridge in the middle of the day. “It just stood there,” she recalls, “and then it flipped round, disappearing into the bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I said to mum. ‘That’s a Tasmanian tiger.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we’re not telling anyone.’ Can you imagine? There’d be people all over the place.”
Such sightings are compromised by the fact that not much is known about how the animal behaved in the wild. By general consent, the thylacine seems to have been shy, elusive and ungainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It preferred wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its jaws and kill by suffocation. A less messy killer than dogs, it had a taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers. “It would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then rip a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discarding the rest,” says Jackson Cotton, who as a boy took part in a tiger hunt near ., on Tasmania’s east coast.
“They used to roar out at the back of Cranbrook during the night,” 79-year-old farmer Ted Castle recalls in the kitchen of his old shack. Ted himself never saw a tiger in the wild, but his father did – plenty. “My dad was a tiger hunter. He had one as a pet, had it tied up. It had got into the killing shed.”
When the British first colonised Tasmania in 1803, there were 2000 to 4000 thylacines on the island. In a bid to protect its sheep flocks, in 1830 the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which owned large tracts of Tasmania, offered a bounty of five shillings (38 cents at current rates) for a male and seven shillings for a female, and appointed a “tiger man” as a full-time tracker. In 1888, the government increased the bounty to £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian government bounty scheme accounted for 2184 skins.
Many were rumoured to have been fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but David Owen, author of Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Allen & Unwin), disputes this: “No such waistcoat is known to exist.” A more popular use was rugs. A rug quilted from the pelts of thylacines and bought for £3 in 1900 sold in September 2002 for £135,000.
In 1909, this bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had drastically reduced the tiger population and sightings grew less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still felt able to advertise “Tiger Shooting” as one of its attractions. Live specimens were sold abroad for up to £150, one of the exporters being film actor Errol Flynn’s father, Professor Theodore Flynn.
The Tasmanian tiger bounded from fact into myth before everyone’s eyes. From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Like unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stands rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s cricket team, the Tasmanian Tigers. “It is – or was – a cunning and aggressive carnivore; a killer,” says the former test cricketer David Boon. “If it still exists, it’s surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.”
Yet all the sightings since 1936 have not produced any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin magazine offered a reward worth AUD1.25 million for a photograph showing a live, uninjured thylacine (“No fuzzy photographs, please”).
Soon afterwards, a German tourist claimed to have captured just such a specimen on his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. The photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding’s sighting and who probably knows more about the thylacine than anyone alive.
The images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney’s conclusion: “The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct.” (Indeed, on September 7, 1986, four-and-a-half years after Naarding’s sighting, the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct.)
Then, last may, incredible news – an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th-century Tasmanian tiger pup (preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. According to the man who led the research, Dr Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, “This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to in-duce a functional response in another living organism.”
In Tasmania, the achievement has renewed fears of “a Jurassic Park-type scenario.” In that film, dinosaurs were resurrected out of prehistoric DNA retrieved from fossilised amber, a notion that has turned out to be not so far-fetched – Dolly the Sheep was created in 1996 from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.
The fact that a thylacine gene has now successfully activated cartilage in a live creature and that the tiger’s surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive response in experts such as Nick Mooney. He has no truck with scientists who seek to clone the thylacine.
“‘Clown it,’ we call it. I think it’s irresponsible. It’s teaching people ‘extinct’ is not forever. Technology should be applied to preventing extinction.”
Indeed, for even now the tiger’s closest relative is under threat. The Tasmanian devil, a pug-sized scavenger that takes its name from a howl that freezes the blood, has replaced the thylacine as the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. But since 2001 a fatal and mysterious cancer has decimated the devil. Bruce Englefield runs a nature park on Tasmania’s east coast that is largely devoted to saving the Tasmanian devil, whose population has plummeted in seven years from an estimated 100,000 to 15,000.
He is scathing of the tiger/mouse experiment. “The DNA won’t contain the innate behaviour of the thylacine and there’s nothing around for it to learn its behaviour from. More likely, it will have the innate behaviour of its host creature. You could have a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger, but behaves like a mouse.”
For most people, there’s a prospect that’s a lot more exciting than creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice: the prospect of finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat, as Hans Naarding did. For years Naarding hoped his sighting would result in the discovery of a few isolated pockets of thylacines in the southwest that might have survived on small kangaroos or carrion. He hoped to hear of other credible sightings. “But the majority are a flash across the road after Friday pub closing. I’ve never met anyone who’s convinced me they’ve seen one.”
So does he believe there are any Tasmanian tigers left? He hesitates, then says in a quiet, sad voice, “Frankly, I don’t think there are.” Still, he has tried to come across another tiger himself, in the same spot south of Smithton. “I’ve often gone bush-walking and spent weeks up there, but I’ve never seen the slightest sign.” Yet.
- See more at: http://www.rdasia.com/the_quest_for_the_tasmanian_tiger#sthash.khbfyMJX.dpuf
One
wet night in March 1982, Hans Naarding was surveying snipe in northwest
Tasmania when he came face to face with a Tasmanian tiger, a creature
believed to be extinct. Naarding is a bushman with many years’
experience in Africa and Australia. A tall, thin Dutchman now in his
late 70s, he sits on a bench overlooking the waterfront of Hobart,
Tasmania’s capital, and tries to recapture the moment.
“I had driven down a disused forest track,” he begins in his quiet voice. “The weather was ghastly, so I switched off the engine, climbed into the back of my Land Cruiser and into my sleeping bag. At 2 am I woke up and grabbed my torch. I opened the window, put out my arm, shone the torch around and came to rest on a thylacine [the correct name for a Tasmanian tiger]. I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway. It turned its head – I could see the light reflecting in its eye – and stood there in front of the vehicle, about five yards away.
“He was a healthy male, at least four or five years old. My scientific mind said, I’d better register what I see. So in my head, I weighed him, measured him and counted his stripes [12, on a sandy coat]. Two things stood out: his stripes, and the massive butt of his tail. The end of his rump was overhanging his hind-quarters – not like a dog, but more like the striped hyenas I’d seen so many times in the African savannah.”
Naarding’s testimony is unique, the first recorded by a professional biologist since the last Tasmanian tiger – an Alsatian-sized marsupial with brown stripes, the long stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s – was thought to have died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936.
“I must have seen him for three minutes, as clear as daylight. I wanted to get hold of my camera, but I never got that far. To get it, I had to bring my arm in and that upset him. He disappeared into the bush.”
Naarding continues: “I shot out, but it was a solid wall of undergrowth. I only got that far.” He stretches out his arm. “But I could smell him; a pungent scent similar to hyena. I knew that to try to follow him would be pointless. At first light, I drove to the nearest town and rang the director of Parks and Wildlife.”
Naarding’s sighting was kept secret for 15 months while Nick Mooney, a colleague in Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, conducted an extensive but fruitless survey of the area. Then, when the news became public, “pandemonium broke out.” Within a week, Naarding had TV crews on his doorstep from Japan, Argentina and Europe.
“I couldn’t do my work, I started to hide. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have kept my trap shut. Make no mistake, I was thrilled to have seen a thylacine – it will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse.”
Unlike the loch ness monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger did indisputably exist, and within living memory. Once common on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an arrestingly beautiful island the size of Ireland that lies 225 kilometres off Australia’s south coast.
Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the few people alive definitely to have seen a Tasmanian tiger. Now in his nineties, he was at school in Hobart in the 1930s. “We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,” he says in his small drawing room. “The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards.” The death of Benjamin, as the “last” of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on the chilly night of September 7, caused so little comment it wasn’t even recorded in the local papers – though the date is now designated National Threatened Species Day. All that remains of Benjamin, whose pelt and bones were tossed into a rubbish tip, is a mute 62-second clip of black-and-white film taken by a man who was bitten on the buttock while operating the camera. Watched by a man in a hat, Benjamin yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks round with an air of hopelessness and leaps every so often at the cage wire. To add insult to injury, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a month passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the bush. Since 1936, there have been more than 4000 sightings. Indeed, it has been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus.
Take Buck and Joan Emberg, retired university teachers who live near Lilydale, a village in the northeast of the island. One night they were driving home when, according to Buck, “there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine next to the road.” He says, “I braked and as I pulled in I said to Joan, ‘Are you sure of what we just saw?’ She paused for 15 seconds. ‘I just saw two tigers,’ she said. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I replied. We turned round, hoping. But they had moved off.”
Or take Laurelle Shakespeare, a housewife who saw a tiger near a shack in the Great Lakes in central Tasmania. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared on a big ridge in the middle of the day. “It just stood there,” she recalls, “and then it flipped round, disappearing into the bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I said to mum. ‘That’s a Tasmanian tiger.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we’re not telling anyone.’ Can you imagine? There’d be people all over the place.”
Such sightings are compromised by the fact that not much is known about how the animal behaved in the wild. By general consent, the thylacine seems to have been shy, elusive and ungainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It preferred wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its jaws and kill by suffocation. A less messy killer than dogs, it had a taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers. “It would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then rip a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discarding the rest,” says Jackson Cotton, who as a boy took part in a tiger hunt near ., on Tasmania’s east coast.
“They used to roar out at the back of Cranbrook during the night,” 79-year-old farmer Ted Castle recalls in the kitchen of his old shack. Ted himself never saw a tiger in the wild, but his father did – plenty. “My dad was a tiger hunter. He had one as a pet, had it tied up. It had got into the killing shed.”
When the British first colonised Tasmania in 1803, there were 2000 to 4000 thylacines on the island. In a bid to protect its sheep flocks, in 1830 the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which owned large tracts of Tasmania, offered a bounty of five shillings (38 cents at current rates) for a male and seven shillings for a female, and appointed a “tiger man” as a full-time tracker. In 1888, the government increased the bounty to £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian government bounty scheme accounted for 2184 skins.
Many were rumoured to have been fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but David Owen, author of Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Allen & Unwin), disputes this: “No such waistcoat is known to exist.” A more popular use was rugs. A rug quilted from the pelts of thylacines and bought for £3 in 1900 sold in September 2002 for £135,000.
In 1909, this bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had drastically reduced the tiger population and sightings grew less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still felt able to advertise “Tiger Shooting” as one of its attractions. Live specimens were sold abroad for up to £150, one of the exporters being film actor Errol Flynn’s father, Professor Theodore Flynn.
The Tasmanian tiger bounded from fact into myth before everyone’s eyes. From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Like unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stands rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s cricket team, the Tasmanian Tigers. “It is – or was – a cunning and aggressive carnivore; a killer,” says the former test cricketer David Boon. “If it still exists, it’s surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.”
Yet all the sightings since 1936 have not produced any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin magazine offered a reward worth AUD1.25 million for a photograph showing a live, uninjured thylacine (“No fuzzy photographs, please”).
Soon afterwards, a German tourist claimed to have captured just such a specimen on his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. The photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding’s sighting and who probably knows more about the thylacine than anyone alive.
The images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney’s conclusion: “The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct.” (Indeed, on September 7, 1986, four-and-a-half years after Naarding’s sighting, the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct.)
Then, last may, incredible news – an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th-century Tasmanian tiger pup (preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. According to the man who led the research, Dr Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, “This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to in-duce a functional response in another living organism.”
In Tasmania, the achievement has renewed fears of “a Jurassic Park-type scenario.” In that film, dinosaurs were resurrected out of prehistoric DNA retrieved from fossilised amber, a notion that has turned out to be not so far-fetched – Dolly the Sheep was created in 1996 from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.
The fact that a thylacine gene has now successfully activated cartilage in a live creature and that the tiger’s surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive response in experts such as Nick Mooney. He has no truck with scientists who seek to clone the thylacine.
“‘Clown it,’ we call it. I think it’s irresponsible. It’s teaching people ‘extinct’ is not forever. Technology should be applied to preventing extinction.”
Indeed, for even now the tiger’s closest relative is under threat. The Tasmanian devil, a pug-sized scavenger that takes its name from a howl that freezes the blood, has replaced the thylacine as the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. But since 2001 a fatal and mysterious cancer has decimated the devil. Bruce Englefield runs a nature park on Tasmania’s east coast that is largely devoted to saving the Tasmanian devil, whose population has plummeted in seven years from an estimated 100,000 to 15,000.
He is scathing of the tiger/mouse experiment. “The DNA won’t contain the innate behaviour of the thylacine and there’s nothing around for it to learn its behaviour from. More likely, it will have the innate behaviour of its host creature. You could have a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger, but behaves like a mouse.”
For most people, there’s a prospect that’s a lot more exciting than creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice: the prospect of finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat, as Hans Naarding did. For years Naarding hoped his sighting would result in the discovery of a few isolated pockets of thylacines in the southwest that might have survived on small kangaroos or carrion. He hoped to hear of other credible sightings. “But the majority are a flash across the road after Friday pub closing. I’ve never met anyone who’s convinced me they’ve seen one.”
So does he believe there are any Tasmanian tigers left? He hesitates, then says in a quiet, sad voice, “Frankly, I don’t think there are.” Still, he has tried to come across another tiger himself, in the same spot south of Smithton. “I’ve often gone bush-walking and spent weeks up there, but I’ve never seen the slightest sign.” Yet.
- See more at: http://www.rdasia.com/the_quest_for_the_tasmanian_tiger#sthash.khbfyMJX.dpuf
“I had driven down a disused forest track,” he begins in his quiet voice. “The weather was ghastly, so I switched off the engine, climbed into the back of my Land Cruiser and into my sleeping bag. At 2 am I woke up and grabbed my torch. I opened the window, put out my arm, shone the torch around and came to rest on a thylacine [the correct name for a Tasmanian tiger]. I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway. It turned its head – I could see the light reflecting in its eye – and stood there in front of the vehicle, about five yards away.
“He was a healthy male, at least four or five years old. My scientific mind said, I’d better register what I see. So in my head, I weighed him, measured him and counted his stripes [12, on a sandy coat]. Two things stood out: his stripes, and the massive butt of his tail. The end of his rump was overhanging his hind-quarters – not like a dog, but more like the striped hyenas I’d seen so many times in the African savannah.”
Naarding’s testimony is unique, the first recorded by a professional biologist since the last Tasmanian tiger – an Alsatian-sized marsupial with brown stripes, the long stiff tail of a kangaroo and jaws that open wider than a snake’s – was thought to have died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936.
“I must have seen him for three minutes, as clear as daylight. I wanted to get hold of my camera, but I never got that far. To get it, I had to bring my arm in and that upset him. He disappeared into the bush.”
Naarding continues: “I shot out, but it was a solid wall of undergrowth. I only got that far.” He stretches out his arm. “But I could smell him; a pungent scent similar to hyena. I knew that to try to follow him would be pointless. At first light, I drove to the nearest town and rang the director of Parks and Wildlife.”
Naarding’s sighting was kept secret for 15 months while Nick Mooney, a colleague in Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service, conducted an extensive but fruitless survey of the area. Then, when the news became public, “pandemonium broke out.” Within a week, Naarding had TV crews on his doorstep from Japan, Argentina and Europe.
“I couldn’t do my work, I started to hide. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have kept my trap shut. Make no mistake, I was thrilled to have seen a thylacine – it will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse.”
Unlike the loch ness monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger did indisputably exist, and within living memory. Once common on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an arrestingly beautiful island the size of Ireland that lies 225 kilometres off Australia’s south coast.
Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the few people alive definitely to have seen a Tasmanian tiger. Now in his nineties, he was at school in Hobart in the 1930s. “We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends,” he says in his small drawing room. “The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards.” The death of Benjamin, as the “last” of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on the chilly night of September 7, caused so little comment it wasn’t even recorded in the local papers – though the date is now designated National Threatened Species Day. All that remains of Benjamin, whose pelt and bones were tossed into a rubbish tip, is a mute 62-second clip of black-and-white film taken by a man who was bitten on the buttock while operating the camera. Watched by a man in a hat, Benjamin yawns, squats, tears flesh off a bone, looks round with an air of hopelessness and leaps every so often at the cage wire. To add insult to injury, the footage shows Benjamin to have been female.
Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a month passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the bush. Since 1936, there have been more than 4000 sightings. Indeed, it has been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus.
Take Buck and Joan Emberg, retired university teachers who live near Lilydale, a village in the northeast of the island. One night they were driving home when, according to Buck, “there in the lights stood a mother thylacine and baby thylacine next to the road.” He says, “I braked and as I pulled in I said to Joan, ‘Are you sure of what we just saw?’ She paused for 15 seconds. ‘I just saw two tigers,’ she said. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I replied. We turned round, hoping. But they had moved off.”
Or take Laurelle Shakespeare, a housewife who saw a tiger near a shack in the Great Lakes in central Tasmania. She was with her mother and the owner of the shack when the animal appeared on a big ridge in the middle of the day. “It just stood there,” she recalls, “and then it flipped round, disappearing into the bush. I can remember feeling scared, a kid seeing something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I said to mum. ‘That’s a Tasmanian tiger.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we’re not telling anyone.’ Can you imagine? There’d be people all over the place.”
Such sightings are compromised by the fact that not much is known about how the animal behaved in the wild. By general consent, the thylacine seems to have been shy, elusive and ungainly. Unable to pounce, it had to wear down its prey. It preferred wallabies and possums and had a particular liking for merino sheep, which it would bring to the ground with its jaws and kill by suffocation. A less messy killer than dogs, it had a taste for vascular tissue: lungs, hearts, livers. “It would tear out the jugular vein, suck the blood, then rip a piece of flesh from the shoulder, discarding the rest,” says Jackson Cotton, who as a boy took part in a tiger hunt near ., on Tasmania’s east coast.
“They used to roar out at the back of Cranbrook during the night,” 79-year-old farmer Ted Castle recalls in the kitchen of his old shack. Ted himself never saw a tiger in the wild, but his father did – plenty. “My dad was a tiger hunter. He had one as a pet, had it tied up. It had got into the killing shed.”
When the British first colonised Tasmania in 1803, there were 2000 to 4000 thylacines on the island. In a bid to protect its sheep flocks, in 1830 the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which owned large tracts of Tasmania, offered a bounty of five shillings (38 cents at current rates) for a male and seven shillings for a female, and appointed a “tiger man” as a full-time tracker. In 1888, the government increased the bounty to £1 for every adult carcass presented and ten shillings for every pup’s. In its 21-year operation, the Tasmanian government bounty scheme accounted for 2184 skins.
Many were rumoured to have been fashioned into gentlemen’s waistcoats, but David Owen, author of Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Allen & Unwin), disputes this: “No such waistcoat is known to exist.” A more popular use was rugs. A rug quilted from the pelts of thylacines and bought for £3 in 1900 sold in September 2002 for £135,000.
In 1909, this bounty scheme was stopped. A distemper epidemic had drastically reduced the tiger population and sightings grew less frequent, although in 1912 a new hotel in the north-west still felt able to advertise “Tiger Shooting” as one of its attractions. Live specimens were sold abroad for up to £150, one of the exporters being film actor Errol Flynn’s father, Professor Theodore Flynn.
The Tasmanian tiger bounded from fact into myth before everyone’s eyes. From the label on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of Launceston city council and Tasmania’s local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Like unicorns on the royal arms, a pair of heraldic thylacines stands rampant in the state’s coat of arms. The creature has even lent its name to the island’s cricket team, the Tasmanian Tigers. “It is – or was – a cunning and aggressive carnivore; a killer,” says the former test cricketer David Boon. “If it still exists, it’s surrounded by mystery and extremely hard to track down. It certainly projects an appropriate image for our cricket team.”
Yet all the sightings since 1936 have not produced any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin magazine offered a reward worth AUD1.25 million for a photograph showing a live, uninjured thylacine (“No fuzzy photographs, please”).
Soon afterwards, a German tourist claimed to have captured just such a specimen on his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. The photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding’s sighting and who probably knows more about the thylacine than anyone alive.
The images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney’s conclusion: “The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct.” (Indeed, on September 7, 1986, four-and-a-half years after Naarding’s sighting, the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct.)
Then, last may, incredible news – an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th-century Tasmanian tiger pup (preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. According to the man who led the research, Dr Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, “This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to in-duce a functional response in another living organism.”
In Tasmania, the achievement has renewed fears of “a Jurassic Park-type scenario.” In that film, dinosaurs were resurrected out of prehistoric DNA retrieved from fossilised amber, a notion that has turned out to be not so far-fetched – Dolly the Sheep was created in 1996 from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.
The fact that a thylacine gene has now successfully activated cartilage in a live creature and that the tiger’s surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive response in experts such as Nick Mooney. He has no truck with scientists who seek to clone the thylacine.
“‘Clown it,’ we call it. I think it’s irresponsible. It’s teaching people ‘extinct’ is not forever. Technology should be applied to preventing extinction.”
Indeed, for even now the tiger’s closest relative is under threat. The Tasmanian devil, a pug-sized scavenger that takes its name from a howl that freezes the blood, has replaced the thylacine as the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. But since 2001 a fatal and mysterious cancer has decimated the devil. Bruce Englefield runs a nature park on Tasmania’s east coast that is largely devoted to saving the Tasmanian devil, whose population has plummeted in seven years from an estimated 100,000 to 15,000.
He is scathing of the tiger/mouse experiment. “The DNA won’t contain the innate behaviour of the thylacine and there’s nothing around for it to learn its behaviour from. More likely, it will have the innate behaviour of its host creature. You could have a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger, but behaves like a mouse.”
For most people, there’s a prospect that’s a lot more exciting than creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice: the prospect of finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat, as Hans Naarding did. For years Naarding hoped his sighting would result in the discovery of a few isolated pockets of thylacines in the southwest that might have survived on small kangaroos or carrion. He hoped to hear of other credible sightings. “But the majority are a flash across the road after Friday pub closing. I’ve never met anyone who’s convinced me they’ve seen one.”
So does he believe there are any Tasmanian tigers left? He hesitates, then says in a quiet, sad voice, “Frankly, I don’t think there are.” Still, he has tried to come across another tiger himself, in the same spot south of Smithton. “I’ve often gone bush-walking and spent weeks up there, but I’ve never seen the slightest sign.” Yet.
- See more at: http://www.rdasia.com/the_quest_for_the_tasmanian_tiger#sthash.khbfyMJX.dpuf