Thylacines and More
Posted by: Loren Coleman on November 9th, 2007
Can we find any of these? Are some of the “extinct animals” merely today’s cryptids?
Is this footage of a Thylacine? Compare it with all the known footage of living thylacines.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
I can’t tell much from the first clip of the supposed thylacine. However, the thylacine tail is very distinctive. It sticks almost straight out from the body at all times. If anything the tail of the animal in the supposed footage seems to do the same thing. But the supposed footage is horrible, so I can’t really tell.
On the first video, ofcourse it is possible that some of the supposed extinct animals still exist. Remember the Ivory-billed Woodpecker?
Wow, that first video is an amazingly haunting montage. And to think that you could roll that clip all day long if we were to put every animal that has gone extinct in modern times. With animals like the dodo, which went extinct so fast after contact with humans, it is startling the damage we can do, be it intentional or unintentional. Just think, these creatures are gone FOREVER. Chilling to contemplate. I hold out hope for some of them though. There is most certainly a lag for some species, with scattered individuals still remaining after their species has been officially declared extinct. Sometimes there are reasonably well off populations of supposedly extinct animals and history has shown us on many occasions that we were perhaps too fast to write a species off. I hold out hope that there are still pockets of viable thylacine populations out there.
As to the video, it is of very poor quality but it sure does look like a thylacine to me. It’s movement, posture (from what I can surmise) and the apparent trademark Thylacine tail look very convincing. It is such a short and unclear clip that it is impossible to tell for sure, but I’d say it is promising.
I really thoroughly enjoyed the clips of the living thylacines shown here and thank Loren for posting them. They sure were (are?) magnificently beautiful animals.
I recently heard a Tasmanian official state that the Thylacine was more than likely not extinct as in none left but it is “genetically extinct” meaning that there are not enough of them to remain gentically viable and more than likely will be completely extinct shortly.
The first video is interesting, if you can get past the social messaging of its absurd soundtrack. The first clip in the second video is of such poor quality that discussing it is pointless.
Let’s all hope that there are animals out there like the thylacine, still holding out. The first video is a sad commentary , very sad….when are we gonna learn??
I have always wondered in a situation in which a small number of animals presumably extinct is found. What should we do if anything to help them bounce back from the verge of extinction? Should we capture them and try breeding in captivity. Since there is a chance said animal could not be bred in captivity. If we took them away from the small population of animals we would only be hurting their chance of survival. I have nothing but hope that the Thylacine will some day be seen as alive and well.
I guess my question is… how do you know these animals are all extinct, is it possible some may still be alive??
It’s more than possible, it’s probable! Most of them are small, or medium sized animals.
I feel it’s a matter of time before we see thylacines again. Not if, when. I also think there’s a lot of things that have stayed hidden. If the South China tiger can stay alive, maybe some of the others are around too.
Quagga is a form of Mountain Zebra, a group is trying to restore the breed in South Africa.
Thylacine may stll be living in PNG.
Hey,if the ?coleanth? can survive all those years, why not a thylacines?
So sad 🙁
I really hope there are still thylacines out there. I really believe there are. And hopefully some of those other beautiful animals are found again someday. Humans have destroyed so much.
Tasmania is a huge island, the 26th largest in the World and almost the size of Sri Lanka. It is very sparcely populated and is referred to as “One of the World’s last great wildernesses”. There are large areas that remain practically unexplored and densely forested. 37% of the island is contained within National Parks and World Heritage Sites. Something big could exist undetected in that kind of environment quite easily. Tasmania even has Bigfoot reports! 🙂
When a German tourist claimed to have photograph a living Thylacine in 2005, Nick Mooney of the Tasmanian Parks & Wildlife Service was reported as saying “It is possible the species could have remained undiscovered, living in small pockets in Tasmania’s most remote wilderness, as it was resilient to in-breeding.”
So who knows? It’s continued survival certainly cannot be ruled out! I don’t hold out much hope for the Dodo though.
Tbe dodo was killed off by rats, apparently, which ate the eggs. FWIW.
Has anyone heard of anything recent from that guy who was sure that thylacoleo was just hanging on in the southern tip of Australia?
Quite sad films, all those beautiful animals gone.
First film—Devastating.
Second film—My first thought was—it is a cat!!!
Then I looked at it closely two or three more times. Apparently the person who shot it is sure it is a thylacine. I’m not an expert on what a thylacine looks like but I want to believe-(yes, shoot me) and also I trust mystery_man. I will have to study pictures of the thylacine closer.
It is sad that these animals have become extinct, but I disagree that it’s all man’s fault as suggested by some.
Extinction has been happening for millions of years and will continue to happen in the future. Ever heard of natural selection?
Oddly enough megafauna survived in Africa but died out in the Americas and elsewhere. Elephants, rhinos, musk oxen, etc. learned to avoid men or retreated to the more wild areas of Africa. The same can be said of the oceans. Man didn’t attack the oceans systematically through whaling and fishing until the last 200 years. That is why so many “new” marine species are found. I agree that smaller animals like the southern Asian tiger and even the thylacine have and could survive in wild areas.
“Ever heard of natural selection?”
Yes we have, Skeptic, but the rate of extinction has accelerated dramatically, almost extraordinarily so, since the 1600’s. The current rate of species extinction is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times the rate of “background” or average extinction rates across the rest of Earth’s evolutionary time scale.
For more recently extinct animals, I very much recommend the book “A Gap In Nature” by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten, from which I think a few of the images in the first clip were taken. They even mention a few cases of post-extinction sightings, making at least a few of them Cryptids, by definition.
Boy, that Hartebeest in the first video looks like it was interesting animal, I’d never heard of it before.
Anybody know what song that was in the first clip? I detected elements of Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a haunting funeral dirge of a song, if ever there was one, and long one of my favourites.
I hope thylacines are still out there. They’re awfully cute. I can’t tell much from the first footage shown, it’s really messed up. This actually is the first real footage I’ve seen of the taz tiger. All I’ve seen are photos.