New Thylacine Footage: Just Released
Posted by: Loren Coleman on November 15th, 2010
Do you think this is a Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger)? The footage from 2009 was released in Australia today.
Compare to previous footage:
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.
Wow. The new footage is excellent. The length of the tail is clear. It’s hard to see if there are stripes, but it does look like there is more coloration going on than the straight yellow of a dingo. Most, importantly to my mind, is the awkward way the tail comes off the back, almost more like a kangaroo than a dog. This is amazing footage.
Holy cow, it sure does move like one. The previous footage looks to me to just be a dog/dingo — the way it runs is canid, not marsupial — but this new piece has the requisite “bounce” of a thylacine, not to mention the tail.
We think it’s interesting footage too – we posted some of the back story from the news bulletin here.
Sorry guys it looks like just a common red fox.
Here is a vid I found, check it out.
First off, I’ve been praying for a true thylacine sighting since Hans Naarding’s account captured my imagination as a young boy. That said, I’m more than a little dubious from this clip. The website promises 8 more minutes to come (pending a broadcast deal)… I’ll be the first to say mea culpa if what’s to come is more definitive.
The pros are:
– Head shape – suggestive of a thylacine (or a fox). The ears are inconclusive.
– Tail shape and movement – very promising. The shape, length and stiffness suggest thylacine.
– Gait – Very exciting. The footage strongly suggests the kangaroo-like longer hind legs of a thylacine. And the stiff trot followed by hopping run meshes with eyewitness accounts from the 19th century Tasmania.
The cons are: (some or all could be cleared up upon release, some have nothing to do with the video itself, but the overall presentation of the video)’
– Too blurry to get any definitive proof we’re looking at a thylacine. I think you’d need a clear, color view with markings for a video that would truly proclaim the thylacine’s existence. And all the more so given the suggestion that we’re looking at SE Victoria — not Tasmania — for this sighting.
– Lack of scale, landmark — really anything to give us a size.
– Lack of info. I don’t necessarily begrudge the author trying to get some money for broadcasting the footage. That’s the game now. But I’m sorry – I find it hard to believe anyone as involved in thylacine “hunting” as his website suggests, with all the work he says he’s done, wouldn’t have put together a release plan long ago.
– Backup Evidence. I would hope immediately after this footage was shot, they returned to the location to look for tracks, fur, scat — all the evidence that has eluded searchers on the island and the mainland since the 1930s. This is a wide open field we see… plenty of room for some kind of backup. And given that thylacines were likely territorial animals, there should be scat or markings from frequent visits.
– Scientific Experts. I would hope that any release of footage also include testimony from scientific experts verifying any video or collected data. These people would have to have no financial interest in the footage.
– Time. I don’t understand why this was shot 19 months ago, and we’re just seeing these 8 seconds now? Maybe there’s a logical reason, but you’d think that would be offered.
Sadly, none of us really know what a running thylacine *should* look like. No film exists of a healthy, happy, wild thylacine doing its thylacine thing. The film we do have show an animal that rarely survived long in captivity, maybe sick with either a species-wide epidemic, or just poorly cared for. We know now that animals look and behave differently in zoos, and that a depressed animal will carry itself differently than a wild one. And the stuffed thylacines in museums around the world are decades — if not a century — old and fading, their posture and gait interpreted at a time when such science was inexact at best.
If through this and other videos, we finally do know the answer, I will be as giddy as the 9 year old boy I was when I first learned about this animal and its questionable demise. If not, I’ll just keep hoping for the next video to come along…
aguilar5_9 wins the Gold Occam. And the sunlight could definitely make a fluffy tail look short-haired and gaunt.
believe me i would like so much for thylacines to be found extant.
but i have to put on my skeptic hat when anything even slightly unclear surfaces that promises to be the proof.
and this is unclear.
my gut instinct is a fox.
the deal breaker for me is the tail… it appears to be too shaggy to be a thylacine tail.
i say fox, and wish to be pleasantly surprised.
can someone get Attenborough’s people in there with high-def cameras please? 🙂
the head and tail gives it away.
can’t see a fox at all. nice vids!
This is one of the cryptids I really want to be real. I’m also interested in efforts to reconstruct the genome. We’ve been planning an episode of MonsterTalk to discuss that project if we can ever get the scientists booked…
coincidentally enough i was in the midst of researching the thylacine for my environmental sciences class when i found this. good thing i check cryptomundo daily. interesting stuff Mr. Coleman,
Thanks
I am still impressed by all these blurry videos that keep popping up. I have tried to make blurry videos myself and today’s cell phones and cameras make it very difficult to do. So when I see a blurry video I assume it was done this way purposely. Therefore I seriously doubt this is a tiger.
It’s hard to tell, but it could easily be a red fox. The 73′ footage is much more convincing and (in my opinion) probably is a Thylacine.
I’m not an expert but after looking at the “fox ” video and then the supposed new footage of a thylacine I don’t see the resemblance. I mean the gait is the same but the fox holds his head high while the other animal holds its head much lower whether it is walking or beginning to run. This is my opinion I would say the video is not of a fox.
Yep, probably a red fox. But since this guy has such a blurry piece of junk camera, we will NEVER know. He must have bought his camera in 1973, the year the more convincing footage of a Tas Tiger was captured!
I just watched these videos several times. The 2009 & 1973 films make me think ‘thylacine’. In the 2009 video, the back legs are too long for a fox, just doesn’t look ‘fox’ to me. And you can see the size and shape of the head – not much like a fox. A fox has a narrow snipy muzzle, could not see that here.
In the 1973 video, the animal doesn’t move a lot like a fox, the tail is too long and thin and you can see the heavier head again.
I don’t KNOW that these are films of thylacines, but I would like to think so. To the person who commented that because it is SE Victoria means it couldn’t be thylacines, I say so what? There have been many sightings in SE Victoria over the years and the thylacines original territory was in Victoria as well as Tasmania.
I would love the Tasmanian Tiger to be found alive and well and living in the remote areas of Tasmania and Victoria. There have been sightings in Tasmania and Gippsland in SE Victoria – maybe one day we will see clear video of one and that will quieten the skeptics. 🙂
Oh, and I can take video on my digital camera and my phone and neither gives a picture that ISN’T blurry. 🙂
The 2009 sighting looks like a fox to me. However the first part of the 1996 video and the 1973 video probably shown a Thylacine, but not like the Tasmanian one. I think the mainland Thylacine is a bit different in robustness. This trait is also shown on the Ozenkadnook tiger photo.
The 1973’s Thylacine seems to have a white stripe instead of a black one and a shorter snout, whereas the 1996’s thylacine seems to be a “standard” one.
Looks like a thylacine to me. The head doesn’t resemble a red fox. Although I can’t rule out the fox myself. Were in the 21st century so maybe the thylacines mated with other animals of the same kind (at least we didn’t know they were the same kind). Just saying because when it runs, it kind of reminds me of a fox. Everything seen on these videos remind me of a thylacine. I may be wrong about the mating thing.
I don’t know if a red fox can mate with a thylacine. Again, it can be a hybrid of another unknown type of thylacine or animal. Thylacoleo? This reminds me of Hollywood where you see a celeb from a distance and people are surrounding them (ex: red carpet at a movie premiere).
You have a camera but your across the street and you can’t really make out which celebrity that is. So you take pictures anyway and you get glimpse or a blurry pic of a celeb claiming that’s who you saw or who you think you saw.
I said to my cousins on Sunday when we went to Hollywood (at the El Capitan theater there was a movie premiere of Tangled), Mandy Moore showed up. I was across the street. I could barley make her out. Someone pointed out that was her. So I tried taking pictures and tried squinting to see better and it reminded me of Bigfoot. No good pics and you have to squint to see better when your far from the animal/person.
I also could of sworn I saw Zac Efron but it wasn’t him. Just like when you think you saw Bigfoot/Thylacines at a distance and it turns out it wasn’t them. Also, I had a good view of Zachary Levi. So I took pictures but the picture didn’t show up the way I thought it would and he didn’t come out in the picture. That also reminded me of thylacines, Bigfoot..etc. You actually see these cryptids but the pictures are bad.
Hmm… red fox is a possibility. After watching a couple of times, it does remind me of a red fox when it’s in summer coat where the body is lanky and thin rather than the fluffy foxes we are used to seeing in most photos during their more attractive fall & winter coats.
It’s aggravating that when someone takes supposed footage of a cryptid, no further testing is done in the AREA it was filmed.
All that is done (well as far as it seems) is the poor quality video is always over-inspected, despite not showing much… they need to go back to this area and look for evidence! In fact, if I was the person who filmed that, I would personally have gone over to the area myself and looked for fur, pawprints, etc. before other animals, weather, and time erased any of it.
Tacos: The thylacine is/was a marsupial carnivore — if alive it’s the largest, and the last of it’s family. It has other cousins in the Dasyuromorphia Order, such as quolls and Tasmanian devils, but those relations are awfully distant, and wouldn’t produce a hybrid.
(Although if a thylacine were to be cloned, the plan was to have the zygote implanted in a Devil…)
A thylacine/fox pairing could happen I suppose, but it would produce nothing except a kinky diary entry for the thylacine.
(Speaking of Dasyuromorphs… anyone here feel a little guilty sometimes pining for the thylacine while the Tasmanian Devil lurches noisily towards extinction? I know some in the Thylo-hunting communities think the focus on the Tiger overshadows real necessary work that could save the Devil. It’s an interesting discussion in a world that will have many other “are they really extinct” mysteries as more and more animals get the thylacine treatment…)
How many people have been out (in the real world) and watch a red fox skipping about, it ain’t like that I know (many years tracking and stalking and had foxes withing 10 feet of me on many occasions)
The head, tail and locomotion is all wrong.
That said can’t be sure it’s anything specific but does hint of thylacine.
As for blurry cameras, not everyone in the world has an up to date camera phone, heck my dad doesn’t even own a camera.
JMHO
The animal seems to resemble a primate on four legs. It has long limbs, it’s hindquarters are raised, and it run like one. I think it could have been a baboon or something that escaped a zoo, it’s owners home, or a black market trade.
The only thing that would disprove this is it’s joints. It’s legs (and/or arms) don’t seem to have flexible joints as a primate would.
We have red and silver fox all over the countryside here in Oregon, this does NOT move like a fox. Also while the head and body of the animal in the video could be almost any canid, the tail is certainly NOT that of any fox I have witnessed. If not the elusive Thylacine, I would guess some sort of coyote or coy-dog.
My inner cryptozoologist really hopes this is the ‘genuine article’.
The 2009 footage looks like a large Spotted-tail Quoll, Dasyurus maculatus, to me. I have seen a few of these animals in the wild and this is exactly how they move. The movements appear to be too rapid to be a larger animal. The 1973 footage looks like a Thylacine, not so much on a frame by frame basis but by the appearance of the whole animal- the small rounded ears, the position of the long tail, the large head and the gait discount a dog or fox. The Wilk Worowaty footage also appears to be more like Thylacine, although I would be less likely to bet the farm on it. It is important to bear in mind that Thylacines were distributed right across Australia before the arrival of the dingo. I have done a lot of work as a public-contact ranger and have had about 15 Thylacine sightings reported to me over the years- most have been from the mainland, from Victoria, through the Australian Alps and up to the NSW/Qld border. Some of the descriptions were very detailed and left me in no doubt that the people describing the animals were either very good liars who were familiar with the features of a thylacine, or had actually seen one. However, people who spoke to me did so in confidance for fear of public ridicule.
I’m usually a lurker not so much a commenter on this site as the majority of my work is with domestic animals not wild ones, but thylacines are possibly my all-time favorite cryptid and one I dearly hope is still out there somewhere.
However, having said that and having looked at this footage, I’m afraid I’m with the skeptics on this one. When I first watched the footage I so badly wanted to believe – especially since so many “thylacine sightings” come from the mainland – I was extremely excited. But the more I watched it the more I saw… a dog. A dingo or dingo hybrid more probably.
Granted there isn’t much to grant scale and also granted red foxes are most certainly present here in Aus, but think of the difference in size: thylacines averaged 100 – 130cm long, 60 cm a the shoulder and weighed an average of 20-30kg – the size of your average sheep or cattle dog (sorry guys, Australian, not sure what that equates to in pounds, feet & inches.) A fox is only about 70 -90 cm long and weighs an average of 5-10 kg.
Dingoes are closer to thylacines in size (117 – 124cm long, 52-60 cm high at the shoulder and about 13 – 27kg depending on the weather and what part of Australia you’re in!)
While I agree this animal does have short, sharp movements as seen in smaller animals like the quoll, the fox and so forth, I’ve seen plenty of dingoes move like that. Depending on the sub-species and their interaction with man (and their general health); dingoes have also been known to run with their head and tail down like that. Those with close associations with human communities behave more like dogs but those that does are not unlike wolves in the way they move: head and tail low most of the time, especially when suspicious of something as this animal appears to be.
Also, dingoes have a colour mutation that is quite golden in the forequarters and darkens to a sable in the hind, which would explain this animal apparently darker hindquarters. Not stripes, just darker coat.
I really, really, really hope I’m wrong and I’m the first to admit I’m no expert – but take a look at this footage of a dingo chasing a car and see what you think. I’m just throwing another suspect into the mix!
But does a Dingo, or any dog breed, have a tail that long? The tail reaches the ground in that 1st video… I’ve never seen a dog with a tail that touched the floor as it walked/ran.
The mind boggles- there’s nothing in the ‘new footage’ to suggest other than a young fox, and then ‘convincing’ 1973 footage? It’s the first I’ve seen of it here. Again, a blurry canine character trots across the shot followed by a low-resolution still claiming to see a single, solitary stripe on the thinly striped rump of an animal in an image so pixelated it looks like a 4-bit space invader… and then a spliced in shot at different resolution, lighting, location and body position of a random wallaby. Oooh, look at its long tail- no way that’s a dog/fox/dingo. Well, you’re right. Well done!
I can’t believe this obvious ruse is posted here as possible footage when it looks more like a child’s cack-handed joke- and then the credence lent to it!
Wilk Workowaty’s footage reminds me now more of a Thylacoleo than a Thylacine, even though it’s a quite blurry video.
A new study revealed here suggests Thylacoleonid had a more dog-like skull than a cat-like one. Moreover, the animal shown here seems more compact than a Thylacine.
Fox: no way. At least I’d bet no way, and I am no betting man. Here is one of the few bets on which I’d put money.
I’ve seen a lot of foxes, most of them very recently. Most fox sightings will look as much like a cat as like a dog.
Don’t know what this is. But I echo everyone else who says: foxes just don’t move like that.