Watch the last Tasmanian tiger ever filmed... then it vanished forever

This is the last known footage ever recorded of the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, a now-extinct apex predator that was once widespread over continental Australia extending north to New Guinea and south to Tasmania. You might be thinking that it sort of just looks like a weird dog. Weighing between 30 and 60 pounds, or 13 and 27 kilograms, and standing at around 2 feet or 0.6 meters tall at the shoulders, the thylacine was a formidable dog-shaped hunter. But the reality is there's nothing else on earth like the thylacine. It was one of the largest carnivorous marsupials to ever live, far more closely related to a kangaroo than to a dog. Its gaping jaws could open to an unsettling degree, and its long snout helped it snatch and hold on to prey. Unlike wolves or big cats, the thylacine had a stiff, kangaroo-like gait and may have even been capable of short bipedal hops. In some of the film footage, you can see it standing upright on its hind legs, using its tail for balance — something almost unheard of in large carnivores. And yet, the similarities in their sharp teeth, powerful jaws, elongated snout, and general body form between thylacines and canines is impossible to deny. Scientists consider the convergent evolution between canids and thylacines one of the most striking examples on record. But despite its apex predator status, the thylacine was on a doomed path. On September 7, 1936, the last captive specimen died, and wild populations are assumed to have gone extinct shortly after. The thylacine thus disappeared from the world and is now preserved in a few museum specimens and a few old photographs and film reels. The thylacine has become a symbol of anthropogenic extinction, the few film clips of it a haunting reminder of just how recently we lost these unique animals. It would be easy to assume that the thylacine went extinct just because of people. But as I came to learn, it's a story that's much more complicated than that. And the thylacine's story may not be over. This clip from just four months ago may be the most convincing possible thylacine sighting circulating the internet. And there are many more than just this. There are tons of unconfirmed sightings from hordes of people that think a small population of thylacines could still be hiding in the vast wilderness of Tasmania and Australia, and maybe most convincingly, New Guinea. Could there be some merit to these claims? Why did it go extinct in the first place? what makes the thylacine one of the strangest predators to have ever existed. The thylacine was a formidable carnivorous marsupial, and today there are no equivalent existing species. Within the order of marsupials, the thylacine was in a unique family called thylacinidae, of which it was the largest and last surviving member. Its closest living relatives today are the other carnivorous marsupials, like the Tasmanian devil and the numbat. The more famous marsupials, like kangaroos and koalas, are farther away on the evolutionary tree. Interestingly, the thylacine and the numbat share a stripe pattern on their back. These stripes in both the thylacine and the numbat provide excellent camouflage in the woodlands where they live. The numbat almost looks like a mini thylacine. But the thylacine was notably much larger. To learn more about the modern thylacine and to learn about where it fits into Australia's evolutionary history, I talked to Timothy Churchill, researcher at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who studies the fossil record of thylacinidae. The modern thylacine, it's part of a genus of thylacines that were sort of the survivor lineage from a much earlier time where thylacines were a lot smaller and a lot more diverse. So the Tasmanian tiger, it was one of the largest thylacines that ever lived. There was a few species larger, but most of them were quite a lot smaller. But of all these diverse thylacines, the modern thylacines lineage was the only one to make it to modern times. What happened to the rest? Part of it's due to Australia's climate changing. The Australia was a lot more wet and warm, so most of the habitats were closed forest or sort of rainforest environments, and then around what is called the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, the climate changed and Australia cooled and dried out. We lost a lot of our rainforest and closed forest habitats and it became much more dry woodlands and more arid sort of grassland, and that caused extinctions of all sorts of marsupial groups, including the thylacines. And what we see is that the diversity of thylacines that we have from that time massively decrease, and the only lineage that seems to have survived is the ancestor of the genus Thylacinus. They then went on to get much larger and much more specialized to be more carnivorous. In fact, the thylacine was among the biggest modern marsupials. And the stature and anatomy of a thylacine looks so much like a dog, it's almost hard to believe it's not a canid. Unless you were a trained anatomist, you probably wouldn't be able to guess which of these skulls is a wolf, and which is a thylacine. They both have a long snout and forward-facing eyes for better depth perception. They both have sharp teeth for gripping and slicing meat, and their jaw muscles are well-developed for biting and holding onto prey. Canines and thylacines also share a digitigrade stance, meaning they walk on their toes rather than flat-footed. This differs from plantigrades like squirrels or us, or unguligrades like deer who walk on modified tiptoes. The thylacine's claws are also non-retractable just like a dog's, and at first glance their tails look similar too. But upon looking closer, this is where the thylacine starts to look unusual. The thylacine tail is not distinctly separated from their body like it is in canines. Instead, it tapers gradually, more like a kangaroo's tail. This, combined with the fact that its hind legs are slightly longer than its front legs, gives it a hunched-over appearance. This body configuration allowed the thylacine to occasionally stand on its hind legs, where its rigid tail would stabilize the animal's center of gravity. And while their teeth look similar at first glance, there are some big differences. When it comes to the teeth, you get definitely a lot of convergence in the sort of overall morphology in the sense that when an animal becomes more carnivorous, its longitudinal blades will lengthen and it'll lose the transverse area of the teeth. It doesn't need that for grinding anymore. And so the more carnivorous an animal gets and the less grinding it does, the longer its teeth become and the narrower they become. So in that sense, there's a lot of convergence between canids and thylacines. However, there are some key differences between marsupials and placentals, especially in the carnivores. So placental carnivores, or mammal carnivores, or mammalian carnivores, will have a tooth that we call a carnassial tooth and that's like the meat tooth and when you watch a dog chew a bone, it'll position that bone onto part of its jaw where that large sort of meat tooth is focused and that's the tooth that really gets through the majority of the abrasive material. Marsupials, they have a different number of molars, they don't really enlarge one molar versus another or at least in thylacines they don't, so all four of the thylacine molars are relatively the same size. And in the rest of its jaws, there's another striking difference here between thylacines and canines. The thylacine was able to open its jaws to an unusual extent, up to 80 degrees. So that super wide gate is something that we see across pretty much all of our zoophiles. So we see it in the thylacine, we see it in the Tasmanian devil, we see it in the rest of the dasyurids. This is Dr. Douglas Rovinsky, a paleobiologist who works at the Australian Museum. This is something that's called a threat yawn, and you'll see it in all of these animals, quolls, devils, and the thylacine. When they get stressed, they do this threat yawn, and they open their mouth really, really wide. They show off their big teeth. They show off how big their mouth is. Sometimes they hiss at the same time. They're saying, hey, I'm really nervous. I don't like you being here. I want you to go away right now. Look at how tough and scary I am. You should move on. If this sounds familiar to the American audience, the Virginia opossum, another marsupial half the world away, does the same thing. Other features of the thylacine are distinct from canines, too. The coat of a thylacine is coarse, short, and dense, with no wooly hairs at all. They typically had between 13 and 22 dark stripes from their shoulder blades to the base of their tail. These stripes varied greatly between individuals, and could be used to identify them. However, to identify an individual, you would have to see it from above, because the stripes are not symmetrical, and therefore not the same on each side of the animal. And then of course there's the pouch. Like all marsupials, the thylacine gave birth to underdeveloped young, which then continued growing in a pouch called a marsupium. Scientists aren't certain, but thylacines likely gestated between 21 and 35 days. Then a jellybean, fetus-like Joey, was born. It would have been blind, and measured only 2 cm long, weighing just 1 gram. But shockingly, it would have been strong enough to crawl into the pouch and latch onto one of four teats. And here the joey would grow bigger for about 3 months, before finally emerging. The thylacine pouch faced backwards, which helped keep dirt and debris out while the animal moved through dense vegetation. And this marsupial-ness of such a large predator probably feels weird to us dog-centric, placental, mammals. Because despite any similarities between a thylacine and placental mammals like a canine, they last shared a common ancestor around 120 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. For reference, humans and canines last shared a common ancestor around 80 million years ago. So why does the thylacine look so much like a dog if it's so distantly related? It's a classic case of convergent evolution, where two unrelated organisms evolve to look and act similarly because they fill a similar ecological niche. They're so similar that some people call the thylacine the marsupial wolf, though some scientists equate them more closely to African jackals and South American foxes. Convergent evolution is where two distinct lineages convergently evolve on the same solution to the same problems. Now in the case of the thylacine and just like the wolf or the dog and the rest of the canids, they both end up looking relatively similar. And that's due to the fact that they are both kind of sort of doing a similar thing in their environments. And because all of evolution, all of biology, it's all controlled at the end of the day by physics, there's only so many ways that you can solve a certain problem. So you've got relatively mid-sized animals. They both have relatively long limbs that are evolved towards a bit more efficient locomotion. So as opposed to something like a cat or a bear, where like with bears, we're looking at power generation. With cats, we're looking at springiness, like jumping around and ambushing things and prop. With thylacines and canids, we're looking kind of more towards the, I would like to move efficiently, whether or not that's moving fast for a long period of time, or just moving at like a normal speed for a long period of time. It's an efficient locomotor setup. Additionally, their heads are extremely similar. I've got, for example, a thylacine skull here and a dog skull here. They look really, really similar, right? A large part of that is due to the fact that, for all intents and purposes, they're kind of doing the same thing with their head. And what they're doing with that head, with that long snout, with a lot of teeth, is kind of like snapping on things pretty quickly. These two animals show us how evolution, across vast stretches of time and space, independently sculpts creatures to solve similar challenges in similar ways. It's the reason why the sleek bodies of dolphins slice through the oceans like fish, and why the wings of bats and birds fly through the sky, born from entirely different ancestral paths. The thylacine is simply an uncanny parallel to the canine predators that evolved half a world away. Because it turns out, a four-legged, 30-60 pound predator with a long snout, forward-facing eyes and sharp teeth is an excellent configuration to hunt and consume many different types of of small to medium-sized prey animals. It's a nearly perfect build. And yet, the thylacine didn't last. What about its specific configuration doomed it to extinction, while canines the world over are thriving? There is much debate about the factors that led to the ultimate demise of the thylacine. In Tasmania, we know that their extinction was ultimately caused by people. Overhunting was the biggest reason, especially after European settlers arrived. The Tasmanian government placed a bounty on thylacines, paying for each animal killed due to claims they preyed on livestock. Even though feral dogs were more likely the culprits. And as settlers cleared land for agriculture and grazing, the thylacines' natural habitat shrank, reducing their access to prey and forcing them into more vulnerable areas. It's all very recent history, and it's all very clear. And if you want to feel extra depressed, Benjamin, the last thylacine in captivity, the one at the start of this video, died from exposure after a particularly cold night when zookeepers didn't bring him inside. And this was only two months after the Australian government granted the species protection. Too little, too late. But that's just the story of the Tasmanian thylacines. In Australia, it's less clear why they disappeared. But there are some pretty major clues if we look at the timeline of its life and mainland extinction. For thousands of years, we know that the thylacine was the largest predator in mainland Australia, and it sat at the top of the food chain, filling a role similar to wolves or big cats in other ecosystems. And then, 4,000 years ago, something major happened in Australia. Dingoes arrived for the first time. And we know that a few hundred years after that, thylacines disappeared from the Australian So this makes many scientists ask the question, was it the dingo that led to the extinction of the thylacine? The dingo is Australia's wild dog. It's a type of domestic dog that descended from wolves like all other domestic dogs, and was likely brought to Australia from the old world by Asian seafarers. And while the dingo did not evolve in mainland Australia, it certainly thrived there. And some scientists think that this was likely a major problem for the thylacine in the form of brand new competition. Some scientists think that because the thylacine and the dingo were so similar morphologically that they would have occupied nearly identical ecological niches. Meaning, perhaps the thylacine's similarity to the dingo became its downfall. And based on the shared aspects of their morphology, many guessed that thylacines and dingoes did eat the same stuff — things like wallabies, kangaroos, and smaller animals like bandicoots, rodents, birds, and small reptiles. Some say that they even would have hunted in similar ways. Dingoes hunt in packs, and thylacines were observed to hunt in family units. There are several reports from farmers in the 1850s in Tasmania that say small groups of thylacines assumed to be a mother and her pups, would pursue game together. Some reports even note thylacines would catch their prey by using their sense of smell to find them and then run them down for a long time, winning out because of their endurance. And if dingo and thylacine prey was, indeed, similar, the dingoes may have had the thylacines beat on a few small details. One, dingoes were possibly slightly bigger than mainland thylacines, especially the female thylacines, who are notably smaller than their male counterparts. And two, dingoes were probably hungrier. Placental mammals tend to have higher metabolic rates than marsupials. This means it's likely that they would have needed to hunt more of the available prey. The higher metabolism in placental mammals is also linked with larger brains, which usually correlates to higher intelligence. And that brings us to detail three. Dingoes were probably smarter. Dingoes used teamwork incredibly effectively, hunting in packs to exhaust and surround prey, giving them perhaps a big advantage over the thylacine. Even if thylacines hunted in small groups, it was probably nothing compared to the coordinated pack hunting of dingoes. even possible thylacines were driven to extinction in mainland Australia from direct killing by the dingoes. But the problem is, we don't really know for sure what thylacines would have eaten. And we don't really know for sure what dingoes would have eaten back then either. We just don't know for sure all of the ways their niches overlapped or didn't. Do you think they could have eaten, like, a full-size kangaroo? Probably not. I mean, I really struggle to think that a thylacine would have been capable of taking a full-size gray or red kangaroo. Those are big animals, they're strong. They just don't have the hardware required to really tackle something like that. They would have been easily capable of taking juveniles. They would have easily been able to take like a lot of the mid-size wallabies, smaller wallabies, all of the piles of little, hoppy, scurrying things. Catermillans, rock wallabies, bandicoots, bilbies, that kind of stuff would have been, I imagine, the mainstay of the thylacine's diet. And the reason it probably would have only eaten smaller things comes down to some specific anatomy in its skull. If you look at the Thylacine skull, and we look at it from either the front or especially, like, the top-down view, you can see how very kind of thin and narrow that face is. Now, if we look at a wolf skull, there's an enormous difference, right? And these are, okay, not even close to the same size, but even if we take this dog skull, we can see that this thylacine skull is much bigger, but that's even narrower across the mid-face, which means that it's gonna be weaker in that area than the skull of the dog, which is a smaller dog than that thylacine gruene. and that weak face, especially because it's so narrow, would have struggled in being able to take multi-directional forces. And that's really important. If you're grabbing onto something with your face and it doesn't want to be grabbed, and it's going to run and jerk and pop and twist and pull, and your face is gonna have to be able to withstand that. If that face is thin and narrow, That means that maybe, like, if Thylacine's face was like that shape, which it kind of is, if you look at it from the front, it's kind of like an A shape, right? Like an A-frame? It's probably going to be pretty good at withstanding forces kind of coming down or up. So if it was doing things like snapping at something that's small, right? Probably pretty good at doing that. And withstanding the force of that downward snap, that shape would not be very good at withstanding forces coming from the sides or kind of like torsional forces. So if the dingo could eat bigger things than the thylacine, doesn't that negate the niche overlap hypothesis? Some scientists think that thylacines would have hunted in a very different way from dingoes altogether. And therefore, competition isn't the most likely theory their demise in mainland Australia. A 2011 paper suggests that the proof of this is in the elbow. To understand their idea, we first need to understand the different hunting methods that exist within top mammalian predators. For big mammals, two types of hunting are the most prevalent. The first is stalk and ambush, like large cats do. They initially stalk the prey, which is followed by a fast but relatively short dash at maximum speed. When the prey is captured, it's often subdued using the forepaws. And the other type of hunting strategy is sustained pursuit, like canines do, like the gray wolf or the dingo. This requires a lot of endurance, and the forelimbs are not particularly used in grappling the prey. Previous studies have found that pursuit carnivores have a restricted range of motion at the elbow, while ambush predators retain the ability to extend and rotate the forearm. And these differing ranges of motion can be seen in the bone structure of the elbow. Grapplers, like cats, have a relatively wide elbow joint. A wide elbow joint provides a larger space for the radius bone to rotate around the ulna, which is the key movement that enables the forearm to rotate. Conversely, pursuers have elbows that are narrow and box-like, with pronounced stabilizing features. So if we look at thylacine bones, which type of elbow does it have? The 2011 paper found that the thylacine joints are much more similar to the ambush grapplers like big cats. In this graph, the black dots are the pursuers, the grey dots are the pounce pursuers, and the white dots are the ambushers. The thylacine joints fell mostly in line with the ambushers, the pantherine cats. Therefore, the researchers suggest that the thylacine was more of an ambush predator than the grey wolf or dingo, which is often considered to be its ecological counterpart. They then say that if there's not as great an ecomorphological convergence between the thylacine and the dingo, as has been previously assumed, the niche overlap hypothesis as the cause for extinction of the thylacine is not so evident. Researchers like this suggest it was climate change or just people all along who altered the ecosystem or overhunted the thylacine to its extinction in Australia. But I wouldn't say this elbow thing is the smoking gun. Thylacines don't have retractable claws like cats do, so grappling prey in the same way seems unlikely. Maybe they did a sort of hybrid pursuit-grapple situation. One report of thylacines hunting in Tasmania says this. The natural food supply of the tiger is the kangaroo and wallaby. Two or three will get together, one will crouch down beside a track, and the others will hunt the wallaby. And when one comes along, the waiting tiger will pounce on it. Another says this it does not lurk and spring on its prey as a tiger does but rather picks up a trail and follows it with dogged perseverance. Its staying power is phenomenal and in persistence it has no equal in the animal kingdom. may startle a wallaby which will dart away and easily out distance it but once on the track it holds it until the exhausted wallaby stopping for a rest sees its enemy approaching and is off again. Right through the night it will trot until the wallaby has not a hop left in it, when the thylacine can rush up to it with open jaws and take it. None of these reports seem to suggest the thylacine grappling with their prey like a true tiger, but perhaps its final pounce does require more flexibility in its elbows. Or perhaps that flexibility in the elbows is actually just more of a marsupial trait needed for when they're still small joeys climbing into their mother's pouch. This is all to say, the dingo competition extinction theory of mainland thylacines has not been ruled out. And it's not only like just like if it was just a normal normal canid that would be bad enough but it's not a normal canid it's one of the wolf adjacent canids right so these are very smart they're very plastic in their behavior so they can do a lot of different things and they can kind of kick in shoes which one of those things are doing to suit the environment so So they can hunt by themselves and do things like, okay, well, I'm kind of alone and there's not a lot of food around, so I'm just going to eat lizards and mice. Or they can get together in larger groups and they can be like, you know what? We can eat whatever we want. And that type of behavioral plasticity means that their niche is enormous. So while we can pick apart the exact ways which the thylacine and dingo may have had slight differences in their predatory ecology or morphology, at the end of the day, whatever the thylacine was doing, the dingo was probably doing that and more. The graph may look something more like this. And there's still this strong circumstantial evidence. Dingoes never arrived in Tasmania, and in Tasmania, thylacines persisted for 3,000 years after they disappeared in mainland Australia. So So even though I love dingoes and think that they're cool and a descendant of one sleeps in my bed, my money is still on them for playing a large part of extincting the thylacine. And whatever the reasons for its long decline, the last captive specimen died just 89 years ago. But some scientists think wild populations persisted until even more recently than that. One study even ran computer models and concluded extinction might have been as recent as the late 1980s to early 2000s. But some people take this a step further and believe there could be wild populations of thylacines still hiding in Australia or deep in the wilderness of Tasmania. And there are a lot of clips on YouTube of possible sightings. This is a clip of thermal imaging and it's pretty compelling. You see a mob of kangaroos in a grassland and then they start to scatter. The video poster claims that the kangaroos scatter because a juvenile thylacine has approached. Here it is. Okay, not gonna lie, it does sort of look like a thylacine, with its stiff and awkward gait. However, when the video zooms in, you can see it's an animal who's favoring one of its back legs, limping. To me, it's pretty clear that that's the reason why it's walking funny. The video poster then goes on to point out its stiff, fairly hairless tail. Okay, but one has to ask, is this only convincing because it's thermal imaging? Thermal imaging of a squirrel wouldn't really show its fluffy tail, for example. The fluff doesn't hold much heat, so wouldn't be very visible on a thermal camera. The same would be true for a fox with a fluffy tail. And there's another thing that would make a fox look even more like a thylacine. Mange. Foxes with mange lose a lot of their hair, and their tail starts to look even more like the long pointed tails of the thylacine. I hope I'm wrong, but pretty much every video on the internet that claims to be a thylacine is probably a fox. Or maybe a tiger, quoll, or Tasmanian devil. And what is definitely true is that every video that claims to show a thylacine is super low resolution, blurry, thermal, or like three seconds long. And that thermal imaging scene? That was supposedly filmed just 50 kilometers from Melbourne's central business district. I just don't believe that there's a large predator outside of a major city that no one has happened to see in three or four thousand years and is somehow evading every high-quality camera on the continent of Australia. The stakes are just too high and there's so many people trying and failing to get a single image of one. The reason that they're failing is because it's not there. What do you think of the people on the internet who really believe that they could still be out there? More power to them? I mean, I would I would fall over myself if if we shot that. I would say that would be the best thing. I would be first person on the plane to go and take a look at it. I don't think there are any out there. We have zero evidence. We have zero real evidence. There's no physical evidence whatsoever. There is no photographic evidence, no bones, no hair, no teeth, no scat, no poop, nothing. There's nothing. However, there is one place in the Thylacine's historic range where there aren't millions of people with iPhones and Ring cameras. A place where the geography makes the forests nearly impenetrable. A place where we really We don't know much about what lives there, and that place is the island of New Guinea. New Guinea is an interesting place in this regards. It's very remote, it's very difficult to get in and explore, very difficult to kind of know what's really on the ground there. If you put a gun to my head and said that I had to put money on a place to go and look for them or a place to find them or a place that we would see them, New Guinea is probably the place. It might seem like wishful thinking, and maybe it is, but the thing is, it wouldn't be the first time scientists found a species there that we thought was extinct. So I sort of went down a rabbit hole learning about all the other extinct species that have been found in New Guinea, and learning about what these discoveries can tell us about our chances of finding the thylacine. Before I started on this project, I would have assumed that trying to find the thylacine is the same as trying to find Bigfoot. But now I'm not so sure what to think. Month.