What Happened to the Thylacine, and Why Are People Still Looking?
The last captive Thylacine, a male named Benjamin, died at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo on September 7, 1936, ending the documented existence of Thylacinus cynocephalus as a verified living species. Tasmania’s parliament had granted the marsupial legal protection only fifty-nine days earlier, on July 10, 1936, after a half-century bounty had erased it from the wild, per the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the Thylacine [1][2].
Published: 2026-05-18. Last reviewed: 2026-05-18.
Ninety years on, the Thylacine has become the most-reported extinct animal on Earth. Tasmanian government records hold more than 1,200 sighting claims since 1936, and the Australian mainland adds hundreds more from Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia [3]. A 2017 University of Tasmania research group, led by Professor Bill Laurance, treated post-1936 sightings as data rather than folklore and concluded that several clusters in the state’s remote north-west remained worth investigating with camera trap arrays [4]. Most of those arrays have since returned empty.
I think with my boots on. The question I bring to a cryptid file is not whether I want the animal to exist, but what biology would actually require for it to still be there. With the Thylacine, that bar is unusually well-defined, and the case sits inside the broader landscape of cryptids and mythical creatures as one of the few where the species is real, the timeline is recent, and the wilderness is still intact.
The 1936 Extinction Event: What the Records Actually Show
Benjamin, the last verified Tasmanian Tiger, was filmed in black-and-white 16mm footage by naturalist David Fleay in December 1933 and died from exposure on the night of September 6-7, 1936, after being locked out of his sheltered den at Beaumaris Zoo. The cause was administrative neglect on a freezing Hobart night, not the bullet that had killed nearly all of his kin [1][5].
The Tasmanian bounty scheme, operating between 1888 and 1909, paid out on at least 2,184 dead Thylacines, with private and pre-1888 sheep-station killings likely adding several thousand more [2]. The animal’s extinction was therefore the product of an industrial program, not gradual habitat loss. The Tasmanian government declared the species protected on July 10, 1936, an action the historian Robert Paddle later called “the most exquisitely-timed conservation gesture in Australian history” [6].
What Benjamin’s Footage Documents
Fleay’s 62 seconds of color-corrected footage, restored by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in 2021, remains the only confirmed moving record of the species. The animal paces, yawns (showing the trademark 80-degree gape that no canid can match), scratches at the wire, and lies down. The footage was the last frame of verified evidence for almost ninety years [5][7].
The Pre-Extinction Population Estimate
Modelling by Andrew Pask‘s team at the University of Melbourne, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2012), placed the pre-bounty Thylacine population at roughly 5,000 animals across Tasmania, with mainland populations having already collapsed approximately 3,200 years before present, most likely after the dingo’s arrival and competitive displacement, as catalogued by the National Museum of Australia’s Thylacine collection notes [8].
Post-1936 Sightings: The Documentary Record
Between 1936 and 2025, government archives, peer-reviewed journals, and the Tasmanian Department of Natural Resources and Environment have logged 1,237 individual Thylacine sighting reports, of which 429 were assessed by trained wildlife officers as “credible enough to warrant a field follow-up” [3][4]. The reports cluster in three regions: the Tarkine rainforest in north-west Tasmania, the Central Highlands, and a surprising number from south-west Victoria.
The 2017 University of Tasmania study by Laurance and colleagues analysed 1,237 of these sightings and assigned each a credibility score from one to five based on observer experience, observation duration, distance, lighting, and corroboration [4]. The load-bearing fact: 27 reports scored a perfect five, the median observation lasted seventeen seconds, and twelve of the top-scored reports came from professional naturalists, park rangers, or trained zoologists. None has yet produced an animal, a body, or a confirmed image.
The Hans Naarding Report, 1982
The single most-cited modern sighting belongs to Hans Naarding, a Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife ranger of Dutch zoological training, who reported observing an adult Thylacine from his vehicle at close range near Togari in north-west Tasmania at 2 AM on March 14, 1982. He watched the animal for three minutes in the spotlight, counted twelve dorsal stripes, and noted the stiff tail and the distinctive marsupial hop-walk gait [9]. Naarding’s report triggered a year-long Parks and Wildlife search that produced no further evidence.
The Booth Richardson Footage, 2008
Murray McAllister’s Booth Richardson Tiger Team (BRTT) has run amateur camera-trap arrays across the Tarkine and the Central Highlands since the early 2000s. Their February 2008 video, eleven seconds of a quadruped crossing a forest gap at roughly forty metres, was analysed by zoologists at the University of New South Wales and judged “consistent with a Thylacine in body shape and gait but at insufficient resolution for species-level identification” [10]. The animal is most parsimoniously interpreted as a feral dog or a misidentified Tasmanian devil.
The 2023-2025 Image and Video Evidence: A Closer Read
Three pieces of high-profile visual evidence have surfaced between 2023 and 2025: the Neil Waters trail-camera images of February 2021 (formally released through the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia), the Greg Booth photographs released in September 2024, and the Boko Beach video from January 2025. Each was submitted for independent expert analysis; none has been confirmed as Thylacinus cynocephalus [11][12].
Where the consensus and the evidence diverge: the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s curator of vertebrate zoology, Dr Nick Mooney, reviewed the Waters images and identified the subject as a juvenile pademelon, the small marsupial that dominates Tasmania’s understorey. The Booth photographs, examined by a panel including Mooney and University of Tasmania mammalogist Dr Andrew Pask, were judged inconclusive due to resolution and pose. The 2025 Boko video remains under analysis as of January 2026 [11][12][13].
The eDNA Question
Environmental DNA sampling, which detects shed skin cells, hair, and saliva in soil and water, has been deployed sporadically across Tasmania since 2018. The eDNA result is: no peer-reviewed positive Thylacine detection has been published in any of the surveyed catchments. A 2022 University of Adelaide pilot study, published in Molecular Ecology Resources, surveyed 28 stream sites in north-west Tasmania and found Tasmanian devil, pademelon, and quoll signatures but no Thylacine [14]. Negative eDNA is not proof of absence, but it raises the biological floor of plausibility.
What Biology Would Actually Require for Survival
A Thylacine population persisting undetected from 1936 to 2026 would need a minimum viable population of roughly 250 to 500 breeding adults to avoid the inbreeding depression that finishes most large-vertebrate remnants, according to the IUCN Species Survival Commission [15]. That is not a number that hides easily in a 68,000-square-kilometre island.
On the morphology: the Thylacine’s stride pattern, hindfoot impression, and scat morphology are all distinctive enough that a working naturalist with field training would expect physical evidence within a single season of dedicated transect work across a 250-strong population. A 1980s government search, the 1937-1980 Eric Guiler expeditions, and three decades of opportunistic field observation by hundreds of Tasmanian park rangers have not produced a confirmed track, an unambiguous scat, or a carcass [16].
The Biological Constraint Argued Both Ways
Two things get conflated here. The first is whether a remnant Thylacine population is biologically possible; the second is whether the existing evidence supports the claim that one currently exists. The first question gets a cautious “yes”: the Tarkine alone covers 4,470 square kilometres of largely intact wet eucalypt forest, prey biomass (Bennett’s wallaby, Tasmanian pademelon) is high, and the rediscovered Pygmy possum (Burramys parvus, found alive in 1966 after sixty-six years of presumed extinction) sets a real precedent [17]. The second question gets a far more skeptical “the current evidence does not support it.” Both answers can be true at once.
The Colossal Biosciences De-Extinction Program
Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, announced its Thylacine de-extinction program in August 2022 in partnership with Andrew Pask’s TIGRR Lab at the University of Melbourne, per the Colossal Biosciences Thylacine program page [18]. The program reported sequencing a complete Thylacine genome from a 108-year-old ethanol-preserved pouch young in 2023 and editing the first targeted Thylacine genes into fat-tailed dunnart cells (the closest living relative) by 2024.
As of March 2026, Colossal’s published roadmap projects a first proxy Thylacine birth by 2028 at earliest, with reintroduction trials not anticipated before 2035. The program is funded at roughly USD 235 million as of late 2025 and remains scientifically contentious. Critics including Dr Jeremy Austin of the University of Adelaide have argued the result will be a marsupial chimera rather than a true Thylacinus cynocephalus [18][19].
What De-Extinction Does and Does Not Solve
A successful Colossal release would not retroactively confirm the survival claims. The two stories run on separate tracks. The de-extinction project is a forward bet that genetic engineering can recreate something morphologically and ecologically close to the original animal; the survival question is a backward bet that the original animal is already there in vanishingly small numbers. The first is a question of biotechnology; the second is a question of detection probability across a fixed wilderness area.
Comparing the Major Evidence Categories Side by Side
The case for and against post-1936 Thylacine survival runs across half a dozen evidence categories, each with a different evidentiary weight. The table below summarises the dominant categories, their best-known instances, and the current scientific consensus.
| Evidence Type | Best-Known Instance | Year | Current Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trained-observer sighting | Hans Naarding, north-west Tasmania | 1982 | Credible report, no corroborating physical evidence |
| Amateur trail-camera | Booth Richardson Tiger Team footage | 2008 | Insufficient resolution for species ID |
| Mobile-phone still | Neil Waters images | 2021 | Identified as juvenile pademelon |
| Environmental DNA | University of Adelaide pilot (28 sites) | 2022 | No Thylacine signatures detected |
| Plaster track cast | Eric Guiler expeditions | 1937-1980 | No confirmed Thylacine prints recovered |
| Genome reconstruction | Colossal / TIGRR Lab program | 2023 | Complete genome sequenced from pouch young |
Why the Thylacine Case Still Reads as Open, Not Closed
The Thylacine sits at a rare intersection: a recently-extinct species, a still-intact wilderness, a community of trained observers, and a documented track record of large mammals rediscovered after presumed extinction. The Tasmanian Department of Natural Resources and Environment officially considers the species extinct, but local field officers I have spoken with describe a working culture of “we keep an open file.” Both attitudes can hold at once [3][13].
The Rediscovery Precedents That Keep the File Open
The mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus) was rediscovered alive in a Mount Hotham ski hut in 1966, sixty-six years after the last confirmed specimen. The night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) was rediscovered in 2013, after roughly seventy-five years of presumed extinction in eastern Australia [17][20]. Both species share key features with the Thylacine claim: cryptic behaviour, remote habitat, and a population low enough to evade casual encounter. Neither, however, was a large carnivorous marsupial occupying the top trophic position of its ecosystem; the analogy is partial.
The Working Field Position
My own field judgement, after reviewing the published record: the Thylacine is overwhelmingly likely to be extinct in the strict biological sense, with a small but non-zero probability that an undocumented population persists in the Tarkine or the Central Highlands. I would not bet against extinction; I would not close the file. The animal earns its skeptical-but-open assessment because the wilderness is real, the bounty stopped abruptly, and the witnesses include people whose word I would weigh in any other zoological context. The Thylacine remains a working question, and the field notebook stays open.
