page_title: Thylacine
section_title: Unconfirmed sightings
hierarchical_section_title: Thylacine / Relationship with humans / Unconfirmed sightings
caption_attribution_description: English: Alleged thylacine sightings in the south west of Western Australia. Deutsch: Angebliche Beutelwolf-Sichtungen im Südwesten Westaustraliens.
context_page_description: The thylacine, now extinct, is one of the largest known carnivorous marsupials, evolving about 4 million years ago. The last known live animal was captured in 1933 in Tasmania. It is commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger because of its striped lower back, or the Tasmanian wolf because of its canid-like characteristics. It was native to Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Australian mainland.
  The thylacine was relatively shy and nocturnal, with the general appearance of a medium-to-large-size dog, except for its stiff tail and abdominal pouch similar to a kangaroo's, and dark transverse stripes that radiated from the top of its back, reminiscent of a tiger. The thylacine was a formidable apex predator, though exactly how large its prey animals were is disputed. Because of convergent evolution it displayed a form and adaptations similar to the tiger and wolf of the Northern Hemisphere, despite being unrelated. Its closest living relative is either the Tasmanian devil or the numbat. The thylacine was one of only two marsupials to have a pouch in both sexes: the other is the water opossum.
context_section_description: The Department of Conservation and Land Management recorded 203 reports of sightings of the Thylacine in Western Australia from 1936 to 1998. On the mainland, sightings are most frequently reported in Southern Victoria.
  In 1982, a researcher with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, Hans Naarding, observed what he believed to be a thylacine for three minutes during the night at a site near Arthur River in northwestern Tasmania. The sighting led to an extensive year-long government-funded search. In 1985, Aboriginal tracker Kevin Cameron produced five photographs which appear to show a digging thylacine, which he stated he took in Western Australia.
  In January 1995, a Parks and Wildlife officer reported observing a thylacine in the Pyengana region of northeastern Tasmania in the early hours of the morning. Later searches revealed no trace of the animal. In 1997, it was reported that locals and missionaries near Mount Carstensz in Western New Guinea had sighted thylacines. The locals had apparently known about them for many years but had not made an official report. In February 2005 Klaus Emmerichs, a German tourist, claimed to have taken digital photographs of a thylacine he saw near the Lake St Clair National Park, but the authenticity of the photographs has not been established. The photos were published in April 2006, fourteen months after the sighting. The photographs, which showed only the back of the animal, were said by those who studied them to be inconclusive as evidence of the thylacine's continued existence.
  In light of two detailed sightings around 1983 from the remote Cape York Peninsula of mainland Australia, scientists led by Bill Laurance announced plans in 2017 to survey the area for thylacines using camera traps.
  In 2017, 580 camera traps were deployed in North Queensland by James Cook University after two people - an experienced outdoorsman and a former Park Ranger - reported having seen a thylacine there in the 1980s but being too embarrassed to tell anyone at the time.
  According to the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, there have been eight unconfirmed thylacine sighting reports between 2016 and 2019, with the latest unconfirmed visual sighting on 25 February 2018.
  Since the disappearance and effective extinction of the thylacine, speculation, and searches for a living specimen has become a topic of interest to some members of the cryptozoology subculture. The search for the animal has been the subject of books and articles, with many reported sightings that are largely regarded as dubious. According to writer Errol Fuller,  the most likely record of the species persistence was proposed by Athol Douglas in the journal Cryptozoology, where Douglas challenges the carbon dating of the specimen found at Mundrabilla in South Australia as 4,500 years old; Douglas proposed instead that the well-preserved thylacine carcass was several months old when discovered. The dating of the specimen has not been reassessed.
caption: Map of reported sightings in the south west of Western Australia
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