Tasmanian Tiger May Have Still Been Alive in the Late 1980s or Even in the 21st Century, Study Suggests

The captive thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) in the tiny Hobart zoo became the last Tasmanian tiger ever witnessed after it took it last breath on September 7, 1936.

Well at least, not officially. Claims of marsupial wolf sightings in the rough island wilderness persisted far beyond the 1930s, eventually fading to murmurs as the world came to assume the famous native Australian creature was truly extinct.

Over 1,000 Sighting Reports of Tasmanian Tiger

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) closed the chapter on Tasmanian tigers in 1986 due to a suspicious absence of reliable sightings, including prints and remnants.

But a new analysis published in a study, titled "Resolving when (and where) the Thylacine went extinct," in Science of the Total Environment discusses a plausible timetable for the thylacine's last days has been released, revealing the animal was most likely extinct before then.

Science Alert reported that a team of researchers led by experts from the University of Tasmania amassed an extensive collection of 1,237 sighting records and devised a novel method for predicting the distribution of post-bounty thylacine holdouts, discovering that the final individuals were gone by the 1970s.

That is based on reports that have the best likelihood of being reliable. But there is a lot of difference between a trapper's words penned in the 1960s and someone else's claim of sighting the extinct creature.

The ability to categorize the reports on a scale of trustworthiness allows a little more room in findings, allowing for the potential of tiny communities to continue long into the 1990s, years after officials proclaimed them extinct.

If the credibility of the source is stretched, there is a slim and extremely unlikely chance that thylacines might be lurking in the southwest part of Australia today.

The team behind this latest attempt to definitively pin down a date for the animal's extinction combed through government archives, newspaper articles, museum collections, and anything that mentioned the existence of wild Tasmanian tigers from 1910 onward.

Curating the collection based on dates, places, kind, and quality, the team used different statistical approaches to provide a range of feasible possibilities indicating when the last real observation was likely to have occurred. All this considered, the team said that the last thylacine died five years after the death of its captured cousin.

But if high-quality, uncertain glimpses or few sightings of the marsupial were indeed true, it might be possible that the would have still been alive when Bill Clinton became president. Nonetheless, if there is still hope for these animals, then perhaps they can be saved from extinction.

De-Extinction of Tasmanian Tigers

Even though the last known Tasmanian tiger died almost 100 years ago, Interesting Engineering reports that some scientists have already started to work on the "de-extinction" of the species. If these efforts are successful they could have a significant impact on the burrowing flea based on cutting-edge gene-editing technology.

Mackenzie Kwak, a parasitologist at Hokkaido University in Japan, said that if Thylacines were revived through de-extinction, conservationists could advocate for it to rewild in Tasmania so it could once again perform its ecological role.

Every time a new "sighting" makes the rounds in the press, Thylacine captures the public's fascination. While it is improbable that any are still living today, this new research shows that thylacine may have been present throughout the lifetimes of many people alive now.

Check out more news and information on Tasmanian Tiger in Science Times.