Thylacine sightings

The last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, died at Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo on 7 September 1936. People have reported sightings ever since, none of them confirmed.

The National Museum of Australia says the last thylacine known to be alive died of exposure on 7 September 1936 at Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo, just two months after it gained protected status. Wikipedia says intensive hunting in Tasmania is usually blamed for the extinction, with disease, competition from introduced dingoes, climate change and people moving into its habitat also playing a part.

Wikipedia adds that there have been many searches and reported sightings since, none confirmed. Brooke Jarvis wrote in The New Yorker in 2018 that hundreds of sightings were officially recorded over several decades, and many more that stayed unofficial. Witnesses said the animals ran across roads with a hopping gait or followed walkers through the bush while yipping. A housekeeper at a hotel told Jarvis that when she was a girl in the 1960s she and her grandfather spent a day on the Arm River, where they watched a den of striped animals, and learned only later at school that they were thought to be extinct.

ABC News reported in 2023 that researchers had reviewed over 1,200 reported sightings to judge how plausible each was. They concluded that the species could have persisted in remote Tasmania until the 1980s.

The last thylacine is sometimes given the name Benjamin. ABC News reported in 2022 that Dr Paddle, a Tasmanian tiger researcher, traces the name to Frank Darby, whose story using it was printed in Melbourne papers in 1968 and reached Tasmania only in the 1980s. Dr Paddle asks people to stop using it.