The search is on for the extinct Tasmanian tiger or thylacine after an extremely detailed sighting in Far North Queensland. The legendary thylacine was declared extinct in 1936 when the last of its species died at Hobart Zoo in Australia.
According to Live Science, the recently reported Tasmanian tiger sighting in North Queensland piqued the interest of scientists as it provided detailed descriptions of what the thylacine looked like. In an excerpt released by ABC, Brian Hobbs, a former tourism officer, relayed how he saw what could be a family of Tasmanian tigers during a camping trip back in 1983.
Hobbs recalled how his dog, a German sheperd, was startled by something in the middle of the night. He put his dog on a leash and, using a spotlight, searched the ravine area of the camp.
"All of a sudden I had these sets of red eyes looking at me and there was a male, a female and two pups -- I got within 20 metres of them," he said, noting that he has never seen such creature in his life.
"They were dog-shaped -- I had a shepherd with me so I certainly know what dogs are about -- and in the spotlight I could see they were tan in colour and they had stripes on their sides," Hobbs added.
You can listen to Hobbs' thylacine sighting here:
After the detailed account of Hobbs, a team of scientists from James Cook University decided to conduct a search to study the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
"We have cross-checked the descriptions we received of eye-shine color, body size and shape, animal behavior, and other attributes, and these are inconsistent with known attributes of other large-bodied species in North Queensland, such as dingoes, wild dogs or feral pigs," Professor Bill Laurance, lead author of the study, told Live Science
The team will disperse 50 camera traps in the Cape York Peninsula in northeast Australia. Laurance said that even if they do not confirm the existence of thylacines, the study will still provide helpful data regarding the status of wildlife populations in Cape York.
Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalis) is a strange-looking creature that has a striped, tiger-like body, a wolf-like head and a backward pouch -- imagine a dog with a stiff, pointy tail, big head and striped fur, the Australian Government described on their website.
Extinction of the Tasmanian tigers began when the Van Diemen's Land Company and the Tasmanian government offered a bounty for the creatures in 1830 and 1888 respectively. The bounty was due to the Tasmanian tiger preying on sheep in the area. Since then, thylacines were only seen in zoos until the last one died in 1936.
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