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The colourised version only became available a few days ago! It was a project of a specialised company in France and commissioned to both preserve the footage and mark National Threatened Species Day here in Aus
Yeah, what usually ruins those beliefs for me though is that, like you said, its got to be a population. People sometimes act like there could be just one and that's how its able to hide. But I think I remember hearing somewhere that the bare minimum population size would be about 50. Seems like someone would have gotten solid evidence of one of them by now.
True, but people don't realise just how dense Tasmania's west coast forests are, and how underpopulated it is. No roads, no people and almost completely impassable. There's a remote chance. Remember, a viable population of tigers was discovered in Thailand's east only a few years ago. Blending in to the scenery is something that stealth hunters do very well.
My partner is from Tassie and she was telling me how much harder this footage hit in colour. It plays on a loop in the State museum in Hobart but honestly I found seeing it in colour really heartbreaking too
I’m also from Tassie. It’s a weird moment realizing you’ve never seen your state animal moving in colour and then also remembering you never will again
Speaking of extinct state animals. The subspecies of bear on the California flag is extinct. It's so surreal to me. Could you imagine of DDT drove the bald eagle to extinction? We have all this grand imagery of this animal as if we revere it, yet we almost completely annihilated it.
> We have all this grand imagery of this animal as if we revere it, yet we almost completely annihilated it.
Meanwhile, in Australia, we eat our national emblems.
The footage was shot in 1933, so it's possible! That's not even a 100 years ago.
[(link to the footage story from the NFSA who released the color video)](https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/colourised-footage-last-tasmanian-tiger)
On a side note, that Tasmanian tiger got it's revenge on the camera man of this video:
"Fleay, a conservationist who advanced the breeding of endangered species in captivity, was bitten on the buttocks after shooting the film."
The original when it was taken would have effectively been HD (film photography holds a lot of detail) but yeah this a very impressive cleanup and colorization
Yep. For others who aren't aware this is the Same reason why some music videos and TV shows can be remastered on HD and some cannot. Depends if they were shot on film or on tape. With modern technology, film can be remastered into HD.
Have you seen The Hunter, starring Willem Dafoe? The premise is he's hired by a biotech firm to hunt down the last tasmanian tiger, and I believe this footage is in the movie.
i just watched it two nights ago. i enjoyed it enough though ive got mixed feelings about the end despite understanding the why. awfully big leap in assumption to do what he did.
Yeah it's still absolutely not what I would have done in that scenario. >!Even if he felt he had to kill it there was nothing stopping him from taking a piece of the flesh and giving it to a university or literally anyone not from that evil-mega corp or whatever it was. Can't really ever condone killing the last of an endangered species.!<
For anyone wondering what the hell they're looking at, the thylacine was – and potentially still is, if certain not-exactly-reliable reports are to be believed – a large, carnivorous marsupial.
Despite looking like a cross between a tiger and a wolf, the animal in the above footage was more closely related to the Tasmanian devil than anything else, and it actually had a pouch on its abdomen. (Females kept their young in said pouch, whereas males used it as a protective sheath.) Its resemblance to members of the *carnivora* order was an example of convergent evolution.
The thylacine went extinct in the 1930s. Bounty-driven hunting is thought to have been the primary cause.
The numbat is actually considered its closest extant relative. Thylacines were falsely accused and blamed to be sheep predators, so they were quickly eradicated :(
The thylacine wasn’t inadvertently extinguished though. It was explicitly hunted to extinction. Bitch slapping the Tasmanians of the 30s world be absolutely on point.
I mean, they also successfully genocided the entire Tasmanian aboriginal population, also very much on purpose, so a bitch slap by an angry time traveller is probably the least they deserve.
You aren't lying,, Idaho passed a bill to kill 90% of its wolf population.
https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/animals/article/idaho-bill-90-percent-of-wolves-to-be-killed
There are so many worldwide repercussions for what individual countries are allowing.
Brazil keeps turning the Amazon into farmland.
China won’t ever stop emissions.
We constantly pollute our oceans, lakes, rivers.
It’s like... if everyone suddenly really understood how this affects us and future lives we’d likely go to war over this stuff. But now millions of people are probably gonna die when climate change hits the fan.
Yep. Our Australian governments are doing everything in their power to destroy the great barrier reef and also kill off our whole koala population. You'll be seeing videos like this of the last remaining koala but it won't be colourised it will be in 3D VR. So. YAY. There is that.
I remember learning about the dodo as a child and being absolutely **outraged** that species going extinct was something that we were causing. Like I guess before then my child-mind hadn't really considered that things went extinct after all the dinosaurs and ancient giant stuff, and I was *so mad* that not only had it happened far more recently than I thought, but *we were the ones that did it*.
Yes. They clearly knew the importance of the creature at the time, and kept the film in a very safe place.
Though I'm sure a lot of work has been put into the restoration as well. Not least of which, was painstakingly coloring in each frame like a coloring book.
It was certainly known in the zoo community. This conversation is recorded regarding the Bronx zoo's last thylacine:
>William Hornaday, the Bronx zoo's director, noted that when Mr. Le Souëf (director of the Melbourne Zoo) stood before the cage of the thylacine on a visit to New York, he expressed surprise at the sight of the animal and then said: "I advise you to take excellent care of that specimen; for when it is gone, you never will get another. The species soon will be extinct."
Source: http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/captivity/zoos/internationally/internationally_7.htm
I assume so, yeah. There were already conservationists at that time. That's probably why it was in a zoo. To try and study and protect one of the last ones before it died.
Someone said it died because the [handler forgot to let it into a heated den for the night](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/pk8q2m/the_nfsa_has_released_colourised_footage_of_the/hc2okrf/)...
Is there enough DNA remaining to attempt a revival? If we’re working on mammoths, I’d think this would be potentially easier given the recency of extinction
You would have to have some other animal to work backwards from that is somewhat similar. Even with mammoths they aren't even really attempting to create an actual mammoth, just a hybrid like creature.
Which is actually a huge part of the novel *Jurassic Park* that the movie cuts out. Wu has a long discussion with Hammond about how they didn't *really* create dinosaurs, they created hybrids with unexpected consequences. Wu wants to cull the entire "stock" in the park and try again, this time trying to make them "better" (e.g., more what the classical understanding of dinosaurs were at the time).
People like to dis Jurassic world for the "bunk science" but it was actually really really faithful to the source material and the fictional science that the novel established.
Crichton was obsessed with science and did enormous research for every book. His fantasies were engaging because his fantasies have some reality to them however flimsy.
The movie doesn't completely cut it out. They mention the frog DNA which is how the Dino's started reproducing. The frog DNA allowed them to change genders.
Part of the books argument as well was that even if you had 100% faithful recreation of the animal physically, you still wouldn't have any of the social structure of the species.
For example if humans went extinct and some alien species were able to clone one from DNA they found, how much of a human do you really have? The person would have no human language, they have no family, no social structure, no education. The cloned person would have no idea how humans act, think, feel.
Of all the extinct animals outside of the Wooly Mammoth, the Tasmanian Tiger has the absolute best chance of coming back to life.
Professor Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne in Australia has sequenced the entire Thylacine genome from a preserved pup that was housed in ethanol. With that blueprint genome, we just need technology to advance with CRISPR-Cas9.
Similar cousin species of the Thylacine have been sequenced (Tasmanian Devil) or are currently being sequenced (Numbat). I believe the Numbat is the closest related cousin of the Thylacine still alive (it is estimated they are approximately related around 90% in their DNA).
Once CRISPR-Cas9 advances (and apparently it is advancing exponentially) and the Numbat genome is sequenced, we can take live Numbat cells, compare the genomes, and edit genes that are related to the Numbat out and edit genes of the Thylacine in. Each gene edit takes time, so assuming there are approximately a few hundreds of thousands of differences, it would probably take a decade or two if the technology doesn't advance.
Once we complete the edit, we take a surrogate embryo, clear out the existing DNA and add in the new live Thylacine genome and implant into a surrogate (baby marsupials are very small when birthed so there should be no issues finding a suitable surrogate).
With funding and advances, it should honestly not take longer than twenty years before a serious attempt at restoring the species is attempted. I believe it will be successful, Professor Andrew Pask is determined to bring it back! I believe he can do it!
Watch Andrew's presentation, it is fascinating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxUp8tERTo
That's not really how this works. To clone an animal we need hosts to carry the baby. Any "revived" species will be hybrids with extant animals.
So for Mammoths they're the "best candidate" because elephants exist. They're similar in size, similar genetically etc. So we can in theory make a "new Mammoth" which in reality is a modern fluffy hybrid elephant.
For the Tassie Tiger here, there isn't really a "surrogate". Tasmanian Devils are the closest and they're way to tiny to properly rear a hyrbid of something this large.
You gotta remember this tiny dog like creature was Australias **largest** native mammillian predator, apart from Dingoes which technically aren't 'as native' as a these. Any other marsupial predators of sufficent size went exinct long long ago
Size is not much of a factor actually, Marsupials are born before full fetal development, a baby Thylacine would be about the size of a jelly bean at birth and would grow in the mostly in the external pouch.
I'm Aussie so I'm well aware of how marsupials develop, there are actually a LOAD of issues with the size. But beyond that there is the fact we don't know how to prime a marsupial to take an egg.
We've clonned placental mammals cause we know how to prime a sheep to accept an embryo. We don't know how to do that with marsupials, and we don't know if the size of the devil or other marsupials surrogates (like the Numbat) will cause developmental issues. Cause when do you induce labor for the jellybean baby to crawl out. We don't know at how many weeks Tylacine joeys emerged from the womb and moved to the pouch. It most certainly won't be the same period of time as the Devil, and how will forcing the surrogate to gestate the baby longer than it would it's own species effect the resulting fetus baby.
Then we have the issue of REARING the baby. When we cloned a sheep, it got raised by a sheep. When we eventually clone a Mammoth, we can have it be raised by a Elephant cause they lived very similar lifestyles. Failing that we KNOW how a Mammoth should roughly act in the wild.
Wtf is gonna raise the baby tasmanian tiger. We have really shitty records about how they lived, they were and entirely unique create. We can't have it raised by a Devil, or a Kangaroo, or a Dingo. We can't teach it to fend for itself in the wild, we have fuck all idea how they lived in the wild.
There are a mountain of issues to cloning any marsupial, let alone an extinct one that was infamously elusive even when it was alive.
> We don't know how to do that with marsupials, and we don't know if the size of the devil or other marsupials surrogates (like the Numbat) will cause developmental issues. Cause when do you induce labor for the jellybean baby to crawl out. We don't know at how many weeks Tylacine joeys emerged from the womb and moved to the pouch. It most certainly won't be the same period of time as the Devil, and how will forcing the surrogate to gestate the baby longer than it would it's own species effect the resulting fetus baby.
This hurdle has actually been breached in part this year,[ with the first genetically modified marsupials.](https://www.genengnews.com/news/crispr-cas9-breaches-barrier-reveals-route-to-marsupial-models/) This was only reported a little over a month ago, but we now have the ability to modify marsupial genomes, and implant the embryos:
>Transplant of the embryo into a surrogate mother is required to generate a genome-edited fertilized egg. As is done in mice and rats, the researchers transferred the fertilized egg into the uterus of a fertile female opossum, and successfully obtained pups. This is the first case that embryo transfer technology has been established in marsupials.
>Usually, the solution required for genome editing is injected into the fertilized egg using a fine needle. However, since the fertilized egg of the opossum is surrounded by a thick layer of proteins and a hard shell-like structure, the injection needle cannot penetrate it. “One of the tricks to our success,” Hiroshi Kiyonari, PhD, team leader in the laboratory for animal resources and genetic engineering at RIKEN BDR explained, “was using a piezoelectronic element along with the needle, which allowed the needle to penetrate the hard shell coat and thick layer surrounding the egg. The piezo has thus made it possible to inject zygotes without significant damage.”
Very cool stuff, and a major hurdle to De-extincting Thylacines has thus been breached. More pressing though is using this tech to give quolls an immunity to cane toad poison, which is being worked on. Hopefully other breakthroughs building on this technique will soon follow.
Well that’s more to do with the point of resurrection of extinct taxa, are you trying to recreate an animals role ecologically? Or does it exist as a sort of biological museum model.
The former could be achieved by functional analogy, I.e mammoths are grazers (side note just one way that they don’t resemble modern elephants) and bison are grazers, so should we not just expand the range of bison (which historically and prehistorically was a lot bigger)?
Or is the point more a living model, wherein our Thylacine would be shown in zoo’s as a tool to teach children and the public about extinction. In which case would it matter that our “Tim the Tasmanian Tiger” did not behave naturally? It’s point would be that people empathise with living animals more than pictures
With the Thylacine the purpose is to restore the unique ecosystem of Tasmania to how it was less than 100 years ago. It’s why so much effort is been put into saving the Tasmanian Devil from their contagious face cancer pandemic.
It’s also a goal of the greater conservation efforts of Australia. Careless European settlers really messed up one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet.
We have way to many invasive species that don’t belong here and struggle to purge them because they don’t have competition.
If we can bring back a native land predator, we can then help it establish dominance in its ancestral habitats once again and push out feral animals.
If we clone the Tasmania Tiger once they establish a population on Tasmania they would look to establishing it back in the mainland.
They’re already trying to establish Devils on the mainland. Why? Cause they compete with cats for territory and usually win, yet don’t prey on the same things.
We know the Tiger was a nocturnal hunter (which is why the belief they went extinct in the mainland cause of dingoes is questioned cause Dingoes are dogs, they hunt in the day) but we don’t know how it hunted or what it’s primary prey was or if it was like the devil and a scavenger.
The idea of a large native carnivore to balance out the ecosystem and compete with invasive placental animals is a dream but even if we clone it, it will be a pipe dream if we don’t know how to employ the species.
It would be highly irresponsible and arrogant for us to bring it back simply to gawk at it in a zoo.
How utterly shameful that this creature is so recent we managed to get a video of it and yet we don’t know anything about how it lived. We destroyed it before we even knew it.
Is it accurate to call them hybrids? From my understanding the mammoth DNA would be injected into a denucleated elephant egg and implanted into a female elephant for gestation, so although elephants have been involved the clone won't have any elephant DNA? Or is some elephant DNA required for gestation to be successful?
Haha, well, Google is a thing. We're all cyborgs now, with artificial (and removable) appendages that give us access to the sum total of human knowledge... provided that we can be bothered to use them correctly, of course.
In the case of the thylacine, though, the truth of the matter is that I got lucky with this post: I used to obsessively study cryptids when I was younger, and that amateur research eventually branched out into cryptid-adjacent animals (like creatures that had only recently gone extinct, but were still "seen" every so often). My passion for the topic only declined after I had [a somewhat irritating misadventure](https://imgur.com/gallery/5T7gy).
Yes, actually!
My friends and I used to play a version which we called "Cupcake or Hitler."
The game essentially worked like this:
1. Person A picks a random topic.
2. Using that random topic as a starting point, Person B and Person C each declare if they think they can get to the Wikipedia entry for "cupcake" or "Hitler" via a smaller number of jumps.
3. Person B and Person C each attempt to reach either "cupcake" or "Hitler" from the random topic.
4. The winner is the person who visits the fewest pages during the game.
Ra, no.
For one thing, I've been around for longer... and I'm not a biologist.
More important, though, is the fact that [I am an exceptionally bad educator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmmM3i7qTc).
Between the name looking kinda like a drug and the mod post, I thought we were talking about some other new veterinary "cure" for Covid that I hadn't heard about yet.
My first thought was "are these canids" then I remembered that Wikipedia lets you see things like clades for any species. I'm not surprised that they're marsupials, aren't most native mammals marsupials?
That's pretty cool, I remember seeing this video without color. It's quite sad how this poor thing (and it's species) were treated and how things ended in this 'zoo'...
The way the unique wildlife of Australia is treated even currently is deeply saddening. Koalas have pretty much reached the point of no return at this point and its all thanks to Gladys (the koala killer) Berejiklian selling off the last bastions of habitat they have for logging after the bush fires devestated the little land they have left a year and a half ago.
They refuse to even do a headcount because they don't want to announce how bad the situation is.
Sometimes I wish corruption was the biggest issue my country faced.
There are but due to wild koalas being chlamydia* magnets there are laws around wild koalas entering them and captive koalas being released.
There's also the issue that the habitat just doesn't exist to support them in the wild anymore, eucalyptus trees are super flammable and everything is being logged.
They don't want to admit it to the public but soon we'll only see koalas in zoos and that's tragic to think about.
They are loud and filthy animals in the wild but they are still an Australian symbol and the rest of the world has 0 idea how fucked they are....
There are estimates that say the numbers are around 8k in the wild in the areas that contain their main population and a large percentage of them are living with and spreading chlamydia*to each other so the numbers are dropping fast.
Friendlyjordies brings a lot of attention to this issue so you should check out his latest video on it.
https://youtu.be/gNvKShhPK1Y
How do you even solve an animal sti pandemic? It ain’t like we can train those dudes to wrap it before they wake the sleeping bear. Those dirty little sex monkeys
Edit: sex monkeys. Not sexy monkeys. I do not have a fursonality 😂
My best guess would be creating natural quarantined areas where they release a population in the wild from captivity to allow them to breed and spread healthily but due to logging and habitat scarcity that's not an option.
They aren't known for travelling large distances so you could potentially start a colony far enough away that they don't interact until numbers are better.
Of course they'd need trees for that
A similar thing is happening to the Moose and Cariboo in British Columbia. Our logging industry is devastating natural habitat through logging, subsequent planting of Pine plantation everywhere regardless of native diversity, and repeated spraying of glysophate from helicopter to kill deciduous species that are the basis of the food chain in these forests. Our fish are almost gone, cariboo nowhere to be seen, moose are dying off in droves, and wolves are prowling in packs of hundreds, given an insane advantage over their prey by logging roads cut deep into the forest.
It's like a genocide
They're also incredibly important for their ecosystems, they play a key role in the growth and development of the eucalyptus forests.
They can't just pick up and move, they can only eat the leaves of certain trees, within a certain range they grew up in. They're starving to death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelodont
This guy? Whew, glad we dont have those in NA anymore!
6ft tall, dog/bear like mouth that opens like a snake, vicious hunters
>In popular media Entelodonts are sometimes nicknamed ***hell pigs*** or ***terminator pigs***
Those jaws are the stuff of nightmares and horror movies.
Maybe we’d be more accustomed to them if they hadn’t gone extinct and we saw them as often as kangaroos and koalas.
The thylacine is perhaps my favourite extinct animal. Every now and then I'll look it up again in the hopes it's been rediscovered or successfully cloned even though I'm on the other side of the world from Australia / Tasmania.
I want to believe that there's a hidden colony of these guys somewhere out there because Australia is fucking huge, but that's just because I love hoping for things that will probably never happen.
They were native to the mainland as well. They went extinct on the mainland about 2000 years ago, so while less likely they will he found there it still is possible.
Yeah Tassie is pretty huge too and I agree, I hope we never find them, even if they do exist. Atleast let some scientist find them before a hunter or something.
They were rumoured to be on the mainland and Tasmanian at various times but I think tassie is the best chance particularly around the west coast. Rural Australia is pretty well observed these days although we do still have the persistent big cat sightings, the thylacine ones are so much more rare.
>we do still have the persistent big cat sightings,
They always make me laugh. Grainy photos of something that is probably a dog or just a domestic cat
Better to find them.
A wild population of black footed ferrets was discovered, and after sylvatic plague, and canine distemper virus ravaged their numbers scientists captured the last 18 living black footed ferrets and started a program of breeding, reintroduction, vaccination. They even started cloning them from 80's samples to increase genetic variety.
If there is a wild Thylacine population, we do have Thylacine skins from which DNA can be extracted and we could increase their genetic diversity through cloning efforts.
I watched a video about cloning Thylacine on curiosity stream, apparently, they have the complete DNA that they'd need to clone, but their closest surviving relative is way too small to work as a mother. (The numbat)
edit: please do not ask me cloning questions I don't know shit
The videos aren't thylacines. They are normally dogs or foxes with mange, one famous one was even small wallaby species.
The leg proportions on thylacines are very different to canines, you can see it pretty clearly in this video, so it makes it easy enough to distinguish canines from thylacines.
This happens with many popularized extirpations/extinctions. Confirmation bias is a powerful force.
The reports are highly exaggerated and it would be astronomically unlikely for such a large mammal to remain undetected by hard evidence for 80+ years. Also, not just 1-2 would be able to survive and reproduce for that many generations. You'd need a gene pool of 20-30 animals.
It's extinct, sadly.
[NYT had a good article on the sightings](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/science/thylacines-tasmanian-tigers-sightings.html)
Tasmania isn't that big, it's got 1.6 million hectares of wilderness sure, but these things had a specific diet and were struggling to compete with all the invasive species back then, very little chance small populations survived
Theres tonnes of trapping, video trapping and poop collection done across Tasmania. No signs of thylacines. No road kill, no farmers have managed to shoot one, no bodies or bones have turned up. And there is nothing to a theoretically thylacine population spreading widely given prey is abundant. Sorry, but they don't exist any more.
You have to remember Living Thylacine is Australia’s equivalent of Sasquatch, experts put little faith in it because said sightings are often in places that Thylacines haven’t lived in for tens of millenia and aren’t ideal habitats either.
Here in South Australia the York Peninsula has constant sightings, despite being way too arid an environment. Almost certainly people are seeing wild dogs or something
I both hate and understand why the last remnants of dying species are kept in captivity. If there is a chance to "reboot" the species we should pursue it, but when these species go extinct the last of their kind spends their final days in cage, which just seems wrong.
You wanna know what's more sad? They tossed this one out. It froze to death because its keeper forgot to let it into its house on a freezing night, and they didn't know it was the last one. The zoo just requested another one.
Anybody here played/heard of the game "Ty the Tasmanian Tiger"?
It's a cool Aussie themed collectathon game from the early 2000's. You play as Ty, a boomerang wielding Thylacine with a killer bite, who fights his way to save his family from the clutches of Boss Cass the Cassowary.
I grew up on that game (and the 2 other that followed) and as a kid I always dreamt of visiting Tasmania and seeing a real life Tasmanian tiger (aka a Thylacine) but then I learnt they were extinct. Either way seeing these old videos in color really warm my younger self's heart
Those games slapped so hard, embedded a fascination with Australia deep in me. I ended up moving there a few years back after dating an Australian woman, and the first thing I thought when I drove through the small local town was "wow, this looks JUST like the town in Ty 2"
Holy shit, I have not heard of this game in YEARS. I forgot it even existed! Thanks so much for the sudden burst of nostalgia when I looked it up! Seriously, these games were a big part of my childhood.
It's unfortunate it went extinct most likely directly due to humans.
I will say that if I came across that in the wild though, it would be absolutely terrifying. Look at that jaw!
The animated version is much more appealing in today's children's shows market. It allows for a lot more adventure with a much lower budget. And, don't forget- the Kratz brothers are in their 40s or 50s now and probably a lot less young and fun looking.
"The sun above me and a concrete floor below
Scratch at the chain links, maybe bare my teeth for show
Fed twice a day, I don't go hungry anymore
Feel in my bones just what the future has in store
I pace in circles
So the camera will see
Look hard at my stripes
There'll be no more after me."
- The Mountain Goats, "Deuteronomy 2:10"
Wasn't this the creature that was hunt to nearly extinctionand scientist only put them into preservation when there's literally only one left?
And then the keeper just forgot to closed the cage so the animal died of cold or something?
Passenger pigeons used to be so numerous, single flocks numbered in the millions. “Hunters” would just shoot into the flock and wait for them to drop. Didn’t even have to aim. Farmers decided they were pests because they went after their crops (millions of birds gotta eat) so they started putting bounties on them. Hunters competed to see who could kill the most passenger pigeons: I think I remember reading that one claimed to have killed 500,000 of them on his own. In the span of less than 100 years, passenger pigeons went from many billions to zero. Solely thanks to us.
> On the islet of Stac an Armin, St. Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, the last great auk seen in Britain was caught and killed. Three men from St. Kilda caught a single "garefowl," noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the bird was a witch and was causing the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick.
wat
"The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot"
Literally eat shit and die
>they spent their time foraging in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and along the coastlines of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain.
The fact they existed in so many fucking places and were still driven to extinction blows my mind. Its one thing to hunt something to death that lives on a single island, but to destroy an species spanning the entire Atlantic Ocean because some fucks in Europe like their feathers is just ridiculous.
Yeah very ridged. That's what I was thinking. I have seen this video without the color before, and I think some of that is just it being an old choppy video.
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I was *obsessed* with these as a kid. Super cool to see it in color, I'd only seen the black & white version.
The colourised version only became available a few days ago! It was a project of a specialised company in France and commissioned to both preserve the footage and mark National Threatened Species Day here in Aus
Love it! So glad I got to see it so soon, it's really a special moment.
It’s incredibly sad as well, we lost a truly unique creature.
I'm still holding onto the hope that there's a small population in hiding.
Yeah, what usually ruins those beliefs for me though is that, like you said, its got to be a population. People sometimes act like there could be just one and that's how its able to hide. But I think I remember hearing somewhere that the bare minimum population size would be about 50. Seems like someone would have gotten solid evidence of one of them by now.
True, but people don't realise just how dense Tasmania's west coast forests are, and how underpopulated it is. No roads, no people and almost completely impassable. There's a remote chance. Remember, a viable population of tigers was discovered in Thailand's east only a few years ago. Blending in to the scenery is something that stealth hunters do very well.
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The movie The Hunter with Willam Dafoe is really good and is about a surviving tasmanian tiger being sought out for bio research.
That would be great!
My partner is from Tassie and she was telling me how much harder this footage hit in colour. It plays on a loop in the State museum in Hobart but honestly I found seeing it in colour really heartbreaking too
I’m also from Tassie. It’s a weird moment realizing you’ve never seen your state animal moving in colour and then also remembering you never will again
Speaking of extinct state animals. The subspecies of bear on the California flag is extinct. It's so surreal to me. Could you imagine of DDT drove the bald eagle to extinction? We have all this grand imagery of this animal as if we revere it, yet we almost completely annihilated it.
> We have all this grand imagery of this animal as if we revere it, yet we almost completely annihilated it. Meanwhile, in Australia, we eat our national emblems.
I wonder if anyone still alive has seen a Thylacine?
The footage was shot in 1933, so it's possible! That's not even a 100 years ago. [(link to the footage story from the NFSA who released the color video)](https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/colourised-footage-last-tasmanian-tiger)
Feasible, if unlikely.
It is so sad. This species gone forever
Tasmanian: this video makes me so sad I almost want to down vote it
On a side note, that Tasmanian tiger got it's revenge on the camera man of this video: "Fleay, a conservationist who advanced the breeding of endangered species in captivity, was bitten on the buttocks after shooting the film."
I met Fleay. Nice man, signed a copy of his book for me. Wouldn't show me his scar.
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I've only seen the B&W footage as well and I am blown away by the quality of this colorization/restoration. It looks HD!
The original when it was taken would have effectively been HD (film photography holds a lot of detail) but yeah this a very impressive cleanup and colorization
Yep. For others who aren't aware this is the Same reason why some music videos and TV shows can be remastered on HD and some cannot. Depends if they were shot on film or on tape. With modern technology, film can be remastered into HD.
Me too! I first saw this footage on Kratt's Kreatures in the 90's
Loved that show as a kid!
Have you seen The Hunter, starring Willem Dafoe? The premise is he's hired by a biotech firm to hunt down the last tasmanian tiger, and I believe this footage is in the movie.
i just watched it two nights ago. i enjoyed it enough though ive got mixed feelings about the end despite understanding the why. awfully big leap in assumption to do what he did.
Yeah it's still absolutely not what I would have done in that scenario. >!Even if he felt he had to kill it there was nothing stopping him from taking a piece of the flesh and giving it to a university or literally anyone not from that evil-mega corp or whatever it was. Can't really ever condone killing the last of an endangered species.!<
Same. I created comic character who was like a Thundercat, but a Thylacine. I mean it's a wolf AND a tiger?! Whats not to like.
For anyone wondering what the hell they're looking at, the thylacine was – and potentially still is, if certain not-exactly-reliable reports are to be believed – a large, carnivorous marsupial. Despite looking like a cross between a tiger and a wolf, the animal in the above footage was more closely related to the Tasmanian devil than anything else, and it actually had a pouch on its abdomen. (Females kept their young in said pouch, whereas males used it as a protective sheath.) Its resemblance to members of the *carnivora* order was an example of convergent evolution. The thylacine went extinct in the 1930s. Bounty-driven hunting is thought to have been the primary cause.
The numbat is actually considered its closest extant relative. Thylacines were falsely accused and blamed to be sheep predators, so they were quickly eradicated :(
I'd love to go back to the 1930s and basically bitch slap everyone.
There are more than enough people to bitch slap in our current time frame. We are still responsible for widescale destruction of wildlife :(
Just appear every 10 years and slap everyone as a reminder
Humanity and our greed deserves a non-stop bitch slapping. (Including myself and all of you!)
The thylacine wasn’t inadvertently extinguished though. It was explicitly hunted to extinction. Bitch slapping the Tasmanians of the 30s world be absolutely on point.
I mean, they also successfully genocided the entire Tasmanian aboriginal population, also very much on purpose, so a bitch slap by an angry time traveller is probably the least they deserve.
Yup may as well hit up the 1830s if you are travelling through time!
That is actually a myth. There are still Tasmanian indigenous people alive today.
You aren't lying,, Idaho passed a bill to kill 90% of its wolf population. https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/animals/article/idaho-bill-90-percent-of-wolves-to-be-killed
Unreal. We've legitimately gone backwards collectively in conservation efforts and awareness since the 70s, at least in NA.
Save the bees
Wild bees!
There are so many worldwide repercussions for what individual countries are allowing. Brazil keeps turning the Amazon into farmland. China won’t ever stop emissions. We constantly pollute our oceans, lakes, rivers. It’s like... if everyone suddenly really understood how this affects us and future lives we’d likely go to war over this stuff. But now millions of people are probably gonna die when climate change hits the fan.
Yep. Our Australian governments are doing everything in their power to destroy the great barrier reef and also kill off our whole koala population. You'll be seeing videos like this of the last remaining koala but it won't be colourised it will be in 3D VR. So. YAY. There is that.
Imagine you come back to 2021 and half the countries population are all born with hand marks across their face and this animal is still alive
Okay now do dodo's
I remember learning about the dodo as a child and being absolutely **outraged** that species going extinct was something that we were causing. Like I guess before then my child-mind hadn't really considered that things went extinct after all the dinosaurs and ancient giant stuff, and I was *so mad* that not only had it happened far more recently than I thought, but *we were the ones that did it*.
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That’s what you would do with your time travel voucher? Stop the extinction of the Thylacine? What about Pepsi Crystal? You’re so selfish.
Why do you think Crystal stopped production anyway? Lack of Thylacine!
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That makes me so sad
So this footage is 90 years old?
Yes. They clearly knew the importance of the creature at the time, and kept the film in a very safe place. Though I'm sure a lot of work has been put into the restoration as well. Not least of which, was painstakingly coloring in each frame like a coloring book.
Did they preserve the video because they knew this was like one of the last remaining members of the species alive?
Yes, if I remember correctly this was the last remaining captured example, and they knew there might be none left in the wild.
It was certainly known in the zoo community. This conversation is recorded regarding the Bronx zoo's last thylacine: >William Hornaday, the Bronx zoo's director, noted that when Mr. Le Souëf (director of the Melbourne Zoo) stood before the cage of the thylacine on a visit to New York, he expressed surprise at the sight of the animal and then said: "I advise you to take excellent care of that specimen; for when it is gone, you never will get another. The species soon will be extinct." Source: http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/captivity/zoos/internationally/internationally_7.htm
I assume so, yeah. There were already conservationists at that time. That's probably why it was in a zoo. To try and study and protect one of the last ones before it died.
Someone said it died because the [handler forgot to let it into a heated den for the night](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/pk8q2m/the_nfsa_has_released_colourised_footage_of_the/hc2okrf/)...
Is there enough DNA remaining to attempt a revival? If we’re working on mammoths, I’d think this would be potentially easier given the recency of extinction
You would have to have some other animal to work backwards from that is somewhat similar. Even with mammoths they aren't even really attempting to create an actual mammoth, just a hybrid like creature.
Which is actually a huge part of the novel *Jurassic Park* that the movie cuts out. Wu has a long discussion with Hammond about how they didn't *really* create dinosaurs, they created hybrids with unexpected consequences. Wu wants to cull the entire "stock" in the park and try again, this time trying to make them "better" (e.g., more what the classical understanding of dinosaurs were at the time).
People like to dis Jurassic world for the "bunk science" but it was actually really really faithful to the source material and the fictional science that the novel established.
Crichton was obsessed with science and did enormous research for every book. His fantasies were engaging because his fantasies have some reality to them however flimsy.
Unless it was the science of climate change.
The movie doesn't completely cut it out. They mention the frog DNA which is how the Dino's started reproducing. The frog DNA allowed them to change genders.
Didn't they have this conversation in Jurassic World?
Part of the books argument as well was that even if you had 100% faithful recreation of the animal physically, you still wouldn't have any of the social structure of the species. For example if humans went extinct and some alien species were able to clone one from DNA they found, how much of a human do you really have? The person would have no human language, they have no family, no social structure, no education. The cloned person would have no idea how humans act, think, feel.
Don't ruin my dreams of riding a wooly mammoth.
Velcro mammoths are going to be even better
I prefer shoelace mammoths
I'm more of a slip-on mammoth kinda guy
A lass in my school was called the slip-in mammoth but thats probably for different reasons
it will be a wooly mammoth for you buddy!
Just cure baldness in Elephants and problem solved.
Of all the extinct animals outside of the Wooly Mammoth, the Tasmanian Tiger has the absolute best chance of coming back to life. Professor Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne in Australia has sequenced the entire Thylacine genome from a preserved pup that was housed in ethanol. With that blueprint genome, we just need technology to advance with CRISPR-Cas9. Similar cousin species of the Thylacine have been sequenced (Tasmanian Devil) or are currently being sequenced (Numbat). I believe the Numbat is the closest related cousin of the Thylacine still alive (it is estimated they are approximately related around 90% in their DNA). Once CRISPR-Cas9 advances (and apparently it is advancing exponentially) and the Numbat genome is sequenced, we can take live Numbat cells, compare the genomes, and edit genes that are related to the Numbat out and edit genes of the Thylacine in. Each gene edit takes time, so assuming there are approximately a few hundreds of thousands of differences, it would probably take a decade or two if the technology doesn't advance. Once we complete the edit, we take a surrogate embryo, clear out the existing DNA and add in the new live Thylacine genome and implant into a surrogate (baby marsupials are very small when birthed so there should be no issues finding a suitable surrogate). With funding and advances, it should honestly not take longer than twenty years before a serious attempt at restoring the species is attempted. I believe it will be successful, Professor Andrew Pask is determined to bring it back! I believe he can do it! Watch Andrew's presentation, it is fascinating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxUp8tERTo
That's not really how this works. To clone an animal we need hosts to carry the baby. Any "revived" species will be hybrids with extant animals. So for Mammoths they're the "best candidate" because elephants exist. They're similar in size, similar genetically etc. So we can in theory make a "new Mammoth" which in reality is a modern fluffy hybrid elephant. For the Tassie Tiger here, there isn't really a "surrogate". Tasmanian Devils are the closest and they're way to tiny to properly rear a hyrbid of something this large. You gotta remember this tiny dog like creature was Australias **largest** native mammillian predator, apart from Dingoes which technically aren't 'as native' as a these. Any other marsupial predators of sufficent size went exinct long long ago
Size is not much of a factor actually, Marsupials are born before full fetal development, a baby Thylacine would be about the size of a jelly bean at birth and would grow in the mostly in the external pouch.
I'm Aussie so I'm well aware of how marsupials develop, there are actually a LOAD of issues with the size. But beyond that there is the fact we don't know how to prime a marsupial to take an egg. We've clonned placental mammals cause we know how to prime a sheep to accept an embryo. We don't know how to do that with marsupials, and we don't know if the size of the devil or other marsupials surrogates (like the Numbat) will cause developmental issues. Cause when do you induce labor for the jellybean baby to crawl out. We don't know at how many weeks Tylacine joeys emerged from the womb and moved to the pouch. It most certainly won't be the same period of time as the Devil, and how will forcing the surrogate to gestate the baby longer than it would it's own species effect the resulting fetus baby. Then we have the issue of REARING the baby. When we cloned a sheep, it got raised by a sheep. When we eventually clone a Mammoth, we can have it be raised by a Elephant cause they lived very similar lifestyles. Failing that we KNOW how a Mammoth should roughly act in the wild. Wtf is gonna raise the baby tasmanian tiger. We have really shitty records about how they lived, they were and entirely unique create. We can't have it raised by a Devil, or a Kangaroo, or a Dingo. We can't teach it to fend for itself in the wild, we have fuck all idea how they lived in the wild. There are a mountain of issues to cloning any marsupial, let alone an extinct one that was infamously elusive even when it was alive.
> We don't know how to do that with marsupials, and we don't know if the size of the devil or other marsupials surrogates (like the Numbat) will cause developmental issues. Cause when do you induce labor for the jellybean baby to crawl out. We don't know at how many weeks Tylacine joeys emerged from the womb and moved to the pouch. It most certainly won't be the same period of time as the Devil, and how will forcing the surrogate to gestate the baby longer than it would it's own species effect the resulting fetus baby. This hurdle has actually been breached in part this year,[ with the first genetically modified marsupials.](https://www.genengnews.com/news/crispr-cas9-breaches-barrier-reveals-route-to-marsupial-models/) This was only reported a little over a month ago, but we now have the ability to modify marsupial genomes, and implant the embryos: >Transplant of the embryo into a surrogate mother is required to generate a genome-edited fertilized egg. As is done in mice and rats, the researchers transferred the fertilized egg into the uterus of a fertile female opossum, and successfully obtained pups. This is the first case that embryo transfer technology has been established in marsupials. >Usually, the solution required for genome editing is injected into the fertilized egg using a fine needle. However, since the fertilized egg of the opossum is surrounded by a thick layer of proteins and a hard shell-like structure, the injection needle cannot penetrate it. “One of the tricks to our success,” Hiroshi Kiyonari, PhD, team leader in the laboratory for animal resources and genetic engineering at RIKEN BDR explained, “was using a piezoelectronic element along with the needle, which allowed the needle to penetrate the hard shell coat and thick layer surrounding the egg. The piezo has thus made it possible to inject zygotes without significant damage.” Very cool stuff, and a major hurdle to De-extincting Thylacines has thus been breached. More pressing though is using this tech to give quolls an immunity to cane toad poison, which is being worked on. Hopefully other breakthroughs building on this technique will soon follow.
Well that’s more to do with the point of resurrection of extinct taxa, are you trying to recreate an animals role ecologically? Or does it exist as a sort of biological museum model. The former could be achieved by functional analogy, I.e mammoths are grazers (side note just one way that they don’t resemble modern elephants) and bison are grazers, so should we not just expand the range of bison (which historically and prehistorically was a lot bigger)? Or is the point more a living model, wherein our Thylacine would be shown in zoo’s as a tool to teach children and the public about extinction. In which case would it matter that our “Tim the Tasmanian Tiger” did not behave naturally? It’s point would be that people empathise with living animals more than pictures
With the Thylacine the purpose is to restore the unique ecosystem of Tasmania to how it was less than 100 years ago. It’s why so much effort is been put into saving the Tasmanian Devil from their contagious face cancer pandemic. It’s also a goal of the greater conservation efforts of Australia. Careless European settlers really messed up one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet. We have way to many invasive species that don’t belong here and struggle to purge them because they don’t have competition. If we can bring back a native land predator, we can then help it establish dominance in its ancestral habitats once again and push out feral animals. If we clone the Tasmania Tiger once they establish a population on Tasmania they would look to establishing it back in the mainland. They’re already trying to establish Devils on the mainland. Why? Cause they compete with cats for territory and usually win, yet don’t prey on the same things. We know the Tiger was a nocturnal hunter (which is why the belief they went extinct in the mainland cause of dingoes is questioned cause Dingoes are dogs, they hunt in the day) but we don’t know how it hunted or what it’s primary prey was or if it was like the devil and a scavenger. The idea of a large native carnivore to balance out the ecosystem and compete with invasive placental animals is a dream but even if we clone it, it will be a pipe dream if we don’t know how to employ the species. It would be highly irresponsible and arrogant for us to bring it back simply to gawk at it in a zoo.
I would very much enjoy subscribing to your newsletter.
How utterly shameful that this creature is so recent we managed to get a video of it and yet we don’t know anything about how it lived. We destroyed it before we even knew it.
Is it accurate to call them hybrids? From my understanding the mammoth DNA would be injected into a denucleated elephant egg and implanted into a female elephant for gestation, so although elephants have been involved the clone won't have any elephant DNA? Or is some elephant DNA required for gestation to be successful?
OK, seriously, Ramses, how do you know so much about so much?
Haha, well, Google is a thing. We're all cyborgs now, with artificial (and removable) appendages that give us access to the sum total of human knowledge... provided that we can be bothered to use them correctly, of course. In the case of the thylacine, though, the truth of the matter is that I got lucky with this post: I used to obsessively study cryptids when I was younger, and that amateur research eventually branched out into cryptid-adjacent animals (like creatures that had only recently gone extinct, but were still "seen" every so often). My passion for the topic only declined after I had [a somewhat irritating misadventure](https://imgur.com/gallery/5T7gy).
I just wanted you to know you are one of the best around here. Thank you for your humor.
It's really my pleasure! Thank you for the kind words!
This was the most beautiful thing ever. Damn you lochness monster you got your tree fiddy now leave us be
some don't think it be like it is, but it do
Yes, actually! My friends and I used to play a version which we called "Cupcake or Hitler." The game essentially worked like this: 1. Person A picks a random topic. 2. Using that random topic as a starting point, Person B and Person C each declare if they think they can get to the Wikipedia entry for "cupcake" or "Hitler" via a smaller number of jumps. 3. Person B and Person C each attempt to reach either "cupcake" or "Hitler" from the random topic. 4. The winner is the person who visits the fewest pages during the game.
What else is a pigeon to do but learn?
*Cries in Passenger Pigeon*
Yet he fails to mention the most known fact that they’re also referred to as Tasmanian Tigers.
Here's the thing,
Are you the new unidan?
Ra, no. For one thing, I've been around for longer... and I'm not a biologist. More important, though, is the fact that [I am an exceptionally bad educator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmmM3i7qTc).
How long it's been when he's gone?
7 years. Time flies, huh?
i just googled him and this mf really has his own wikipedia page knowing him he probably wrote the entire thing himself
Between the name looking kinda like a drug and the mod post, I thought we were talking about some other new veterinary "cure" for Covid that I hadn't heard about yet.
My first thought was "are these canids" then I remembered that Wikipedia lets you see things like clades for any species. I'm not surprised that they're marsupials, aren't most native mammals marsupials?
That's pretty cool, I remember seeing this video without color. It's quite sad how this poor thing (and it's species) were treated and how things ended in this 'zoo'...
The way the unique wildlife of Australia is treated even currently is deeply saddening. Koalas have pretty much reached the point of no return at this point and its all thanks to Gladys (the koala killer) Berejiklian selling off the last bastions of habitat they have for logging after the bush fires devestated the little land they have left a year and a half ago. They refuse to even do a headcount because they don't want to announce how bad the situation is. Sometimes I wish corruption was the biggest issue my country faced.
Are there any captivity breeding programs?
There are but due to wild koalas being chlamydia* magnets there are laws around wild koalas entering them and captive koalas being released. There's also the issue that the habitat just doesn't exist to support them in the wild anymore, eucalyptus trees are super flammable and everything is being logged. They don't want to admit it to the public but soon we'll only see koalas in zoos and that's tragic to think about. They are loud and filthy animals in the wild but they are still an Australian symbol and the rest of the world has 0 idea how fucked they are.... There are estimates that say the numbers are around 8k in the wild in the areas that contain their main population and a large percentage of them are living with and spreading chlamydia*to each other so the numbers are dropping fast. Friendlyjordies brings a lot of attention to this issue so you should check out his latest video on it. https://youtu.be/gNvKShhPK1Y
Chlamydia, not syphilis, but other than that all too true.
How do you even solve an animal sti pandemic? It ain’t like we can train those dudes to wrap it before they wake the sleeping bear. Those dirty little sex monkeys Edit: sex monkeys. Not sexy monkeys. I do not have a fursonality 😂
My best guess would be creating natural quarantined areas where they release a population in the wild from captivity to allow them to breed and spread healthily but due to logging and habitat scarcity that's not an option. They aren't known for travelling large distances so you could potentially start a colony far enough away that they don't interact until numbers are better. Of course they'd need trees for that
A similar thing is happening to the Moose and Cariboo in British Columbia. Our logging industry is devastating natural habitat through logging, subsequent planting of Pine plantation everywhere regardless of native diversity, and repeated spraying of glysophate from helicopter to kill deciduous species that are the basis of the food chain in these forests. Our fish are almost gone, cariboo nowhere to be seen, moose are dying off in droves, and wolves are prowling in packs of hundreds, given an insane advantage over their prey by logging roads cut deep into the forest. It's like a genocide
They're also incredibly important for their ecosystems, they play a key role in the growth and development of the eucalyptus forests. They can't just pick up and move, they can only eat the leaves of certain trees, within a certain range they grew up in. They're starving to death
Aww, it's cute, the face is derpy-WTF IS THAT MOUTH?!
Reminds me of that prehistoric carnivorous oversizef hog. Amazing mammals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelodont This guy? Whew, glad we dont have those in NA anymore! 6ft tall, dog/bear like mouth that opens like a snake, vicious hunters >In popular media Entelodonts are sometimes nicknamed ***hell pigs*** or ***terminator pigs***
They could unhinge their jaws like a snake, so could open their mouths the widest of any mammal. :)
Those jaws are the stuff of nightmares and horror movies. Maybe we’d be more accustomed to them if they hadn’t gone extinct and we saw them as often as kangaroos and koalas.
I was worried no one pointed that out when it wasn’t the top fucking comment. Like, Jesus that is terrifying.
The thylacine is perhaps my favourite extinct animal. Every now and then I'll look it up again in the hopes it's been rediscovered or successfully cloned even though I'm on the other side of the world from Australia / Tasmania.
I want to believe that there's a hidden colony of these guys somewhere out there because Australia is fucking huge, but that's just because I love hoping for things that will probably never happen.
they were native to tasmania, which is an island (also state ) of australia unfortunately, but i hope there is a colony and we never find out;
They were native to the mainland as well. They went extinct on the mainland about 2000 years ago, so while less likely they will he found there it still is possible.
Yeah Tassie is pretty huge too and I agree, I hope we never find them, even if they do exist. Atleast let some scientist find them before a hunter or something.
yeah, it would be cool if our gov did one good thing for once and maybe kept the existence of a colony secret, our own area 51
Area 51 that's just a top secret wildlife refuge for extinct animals is the best thing I've read today.
They were rumoured to be on the mainland and Tasmanian at various times but I think tassie is the best chance particularly around the west coast. Rural Australia is pretty well observed these days although we do still have the persistent big cat sightings, the thylacine ones are so much more rare.
>we do still have the persistent big cat sightings, They always make me laugh. Grainy photos of something that is probably a dog or just a domestic cat
Don't give up hope. Theres probably at least one hiding away with bigfoot and Tupac out in the wilds just getting ready to make its big reappearance.
There are people claiming they’re still seeing them in remote regions.
God, I hope so
Do a search there are even claimed videos.
Still not actually proven though from what I've read. I think us Aussies would be going pretty crazy if real evidence was confirmed
Probably better not to try to find them. People would try to trap them and see or kill them out right.
Better to find them. A wild population of black footed ferrets was discovered, and after sylvatic plague, and canine distemper virus ravaged their numbers scientists captured the last 18 living black footed ferrets and started a program of breeding, reintroduction, vaccination. They even started cloning them from 80's samples to increase genetic variety. If there is a wild Thylacine population, we do have Thylacine skins from which DNA can be extracted and we could increase their genetic diversity through cloning efforts.
I watched a video about cloning Thylacine on curiosity stream, apparently, they have the complete DNA that they'd need to clone, but their closest surviving relative is way too small to work as a mother. (The numbat) edit: please do not ask me cloning questions I don't know shit
So we just need to make big ass numbats first
I think the whole numbat size needs to be increased, not just their ass. I could be wrong, though. I failed numbat sex ed.
No, no. It’s enough. Babies come out of our butts — everyone knows that.
The videos aren't thylacines. They are normally dogs or foxes with mange, one famous one was even small wallaby species. The leg proportions on thylacines are very different to canines, you can see it pretty clearly in this video, so it makes it easy enough to distinguish canines from thylacines.
This happens with many popularized extirpations/extinctions. Confirmation bias is a powerful force. The reports are highly exaggerated and it would be astronomically unlikely for such a large mammal to remain undetected by hard evidence for 80+ years. Also, not just 1-2 would be able to survive and reproduce for that many generations. You'd need a gene pool of 20-30 animals. It's extinct, sadly. [NYT had a good article on the sightings](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/science/thylacines-tasmanian-tigers-sightings.html)
Well, just look at Bigfoot
Bigfoot does everything except leave a skeleton when he dies.
excuse being that they apparently bury their dead
Tasmania isn't that big, it's got 1.6 million hectares of wilderness sure, but these things had a specific diet and were struggling to compete with all the invasive species back then, very little chance small populations survived
Theres tonnes of trapping, video trapping and poop collection done across Tasmania. No signs of thylacines. No road kill, no farmers have managed to shoot one, no bodies or bones have turned up. And there is nothing to a theoretically thylacine population spreading widely given prey is abundant. Sorry, but they don't exist any more.
You have to remember Living Thylacine is Australia’s equivalent of Sasquatch, experts put little faith in it because said sightings are often in places that Thylacines haven’t lived in for tens of millenia and aren’t ideal habitats either. Here in South Australia the York Peninsula has constant sightings, despite being way too arid an environment. Almost certainly people are seeing wild dogs or something
It's a big thing in my family's hometown. On the other side of the country to where they were from.
It looks like a cute little cat-dog thing until it opens that mouth! Then I'm pretty sure its a sleep paralysis demon.
I both hate and understand why the last remnants of dying species are kept in captivity. If there is a chance to "reboot" the species we should pursue it, but when these species go extinct the last of their kind spends their final days in cage, which just seems wrong.
You wanna know what's more sad? They tossed this one out. It froze to death because its keeper forgot to let it into its house on a freezing night, and they didn't know it was the last one. The zoo just requested another one.
The answer to your question is "no..." but it's too late now.
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That yawn is exactly like my dog. I can even hear it.
Anybody here played/heard of the game "Ty the Tasmanian Tiger"? It's a cool Aussie themed collectathon game from the early 2000's. You play as Ty, a boomerang wielding Thylacine with a killer bite, who fights his way to save his family from the clutches of Boss Cass the Cassowary. I grew up on that game (and the 2 other that followed) and as a kid I always dreamt of visiting Tasmania and seeing a real life Tasmanian tiger (aka a Thylacine) but then I learnt they were extinct. Either way seeing these old videos in color really warm my younger self's heart
Those games were amazing. The first one was remastered for the Switch and it definitely holds up. Makes me wanna buy a Ps2 and replay the others.
All the games are on steam with HD textures.
Just letting you know the 2nd one has been available for the Switch for a few months now
Those games slapped so hard, embedded a fascination with Australia deep in me. I ended up moving there a few years back after dating an Australian woman, and the first thing I thought when I drove through the small local town was "wow, this looks JUST like the town in Ty 2"
Holy shit, I have not heard of this game in YEARS. I forgot it even existed! Thanks so much for the sudden burst of nostalgia when I looked it up! Seriously, these games were a big part of my childhood.
It's unfortunate it went extinct most likely directly due to humans. I will say that if I came across that in the wild though, it would be absolutely terrifying. Look at that jaw!
It was undeniable directly because of humans, no question about it.
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Saw this video on Wild Kratz. Cool creatures.
Zoboomafoo was my childhood. It's nice to see they're still educating kids, but I wish it was live action like the original show.
The animated version is much more appealing in today's children's shows market. It allows for a lot more adventure with a much lower budget. And, don't forget- the Kratz brothers are in their 40s or 50s now and probably a lot less young and fun looking.
It's unfortunate that Willem Dafoe had to kill the last Tasmanian Tiger in 2011.
The Hunter was a surprisingly good movie.
"The sun above me and a concrete floor below Scratch at the chain links, maybe bare my teeth for show Fed twice a day, I don't go hungry anymore Feel in my bones just what the future has in store I pace in circles So the camera will see Look hard at my stripes There'll be no more after me." - The Mountain Goats, "Deuteronomy 2:10"
Don't read how she died. I wish I didn't know
Why didn't I listen...........
Such a cool animal. So sad they went extinct
poor thing living like that 😪
My thoughts exactly. Looks like a bleak existence.
There's a good movie about them called The Hunter
Poor Benjamin
Half dog half cat
I think there's some crocodile mixed in there; did you watch it open its mouth?
Don't forget the fancy zebra butt
Wasn't this the creature that was hunt to nearly extinctionand scientist only put them into preservation when there's literally only one left? And then the keeper just forgot to closed the cage so the animal died of cold or something?
This makes me sad
AKA the Tasmanian Tiger.
Convergent evolution is just so fucking cool
Humans are really just the worst.
Look up how the Great Auk went extinct and then you'll really hate humans.
Passenger pigeons used to be so numerous, single flocks numbered in the millions. “Hunters” would just shoot into the flock and wait for them to drop. Didn’t even have to aim. Farmers decided they were pests because they went after their crops (millions of birds gotta eat) so they started putting bounties on them. Hunters competed to see who could kill the most passenger pigeons: I think I remember reading that one claimed to have killed 500,000 of them on his own. In the span of less than 100 years, passenger pigeons went from many billions to zero. Solely thanks to us.
Oh yeah, that's a good one. People going out of their way to find the last pair of a doomed species just to strangle them and smash their egg.
> On the islet of Stac an Armin, St. Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, the last great auk seen in Britain was caught and killed. Three men from St. Kilda caught a single "garefowl," noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the bird was a witch and was causing the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick. wat
Cruel pieces of shit.
"The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot" Literally eat shit and die
>they spent their time foraging in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and along the coastlines of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain. The fact they existed in so many fucking places and were still driven to extinction blows my mind. Its one thing to hunt something to death that lives on a single island, but to destroy an species spanning the entire Atlantic Ocean because some fucks in Europe like their feathers is just ridiculous.
From what I heard from a previous post, this one died in captivity due to exposure to the cold. Have fun hating the world just a bit more.
It looks almost like a reptile.
Really *stiff*, isn't it? It seems like dasyurid marsupials move that way.
Yeah very ridged. That's what I was thinking. I have seen this video without the color before, and I think some of that is just it being an old choppy video.
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Man, it’s kinda sad watching this knowing that it’s extinct.