By many accounts, the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that the world ever saw died of neglect. It had been a hot day in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, followed by a freezing cold night, but the animal's caretakers forgot to provide the animal with access to its sheltered sleeping quarters. With its demise, the thylacine joined the ranks of the passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, and other extinctions of the 20th century...
... or did it?
Yes. It almost certainly did. But unlike the species itself, the legend of the thylacine dies hard.
This week, a news article announced that there have been several sightings of the world's largest modern carnivorous marsupial. Many of the younger zookeepers I work with, or associate with online, have been gaga with the news. Some of them have had to be restrained from starting to map out new exhibit space. For those of us who have been around for a while, the news hardly warranted a raising of the eyebrows. We'd heard this one too many times before.
Ever since its official extinction in 1936, there have been sporadic sightings of the Tasmanian tiger. The only other recently-extinct animal I can think of which has generated nearly as much controversy as to whether it exists or not is the ivory-billed woodpecker in the US. There have at least been some reasonable sightings and arguments for the woodpecker. What there has never been for the thylacine is anything other than wishful thinking - as in, hard evidence. A freshly killed specimen, shot by a suspicious sheep farmer, or laid out on the side of the road, a victim of traffic. A even remotely usable photograph or video clip. A fecal sample or hair scraping from which DNA could be gleaned. Anything at all...
When I was about 6 years old, shortly after I learned what a thylacine was, I became convinced that I saw one. It was a greyhound - an orangish greyhound with black stripes. That was my youthful experiment in wishful thinking.
Yes, it can be impossible to say with 100% certainty that a species is extinct - you can't prove a negative. And yes, every once in a while, extinction has proven to us that she is bluffing, and a thought-to-be extinct animal shows up out of the blue.
I'm not 100% convinced that the last thylacine diet in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. Maybe there were a tiny number of stragglers in the wild, isolated from one another, too wary of hunters to venture out and find each other, until they all winked out like lights, one after the other. It's been over 80 years since anyone has had a verifiable sighting of the animal, though. This isn't a question of a single, elusive animal evading cameras and traps - it would be an entire population, of whatever size would be needed to keep the species going for eighty plus years. Hundreds of animals, perhaps - and not one of them every leaving hard evidence behind. In this day and age, when every single person keeps a camera in their pocket, where we have the most accurate methods of census habitats for rare, unseen animals ever, and a large mammal in a reasonably occupied, developed corner of a first-world country, yeah, I'm skeptical.
If evidence of the thylacine's continued existence ever does pop up, I promise that I'll share it here, and I guarantee, you'll never see anyone as happy to eat crow as I would be. I'd love to be proven wrong. But I don't think I will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment