It's to kill the rabbits instead. With any of these cryptids nobody ever seems to consider the obvious sign nobody finds. A dead specimen. Eventually these things die and surely someone would come across a dead one.
From last month, apparently a thylacine was seen in Melbourne. Because why not. Category: | Herald Sun A Melbourne man is convinced he has spotted a Tasmanian tiger roaming the area. Greg, who did not want his surname published, said he was driving with his family when they spotted the supposedly extinct creature at about 6.30pm. He initially thought it was a greyhound, but his children exclaimed “it’s got tiger stripes on the back”. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Greg told the Leader. “I had never in my life seen anything like this — it was strolling across the road. “It had a long, straight rod of a tail. “I thought ‘that’s strange’.”
Sleightholme, Stephen R. and Campbell, Cameron R. (In Press, 2017). The International Thylacine Specimen Database (6th Revision - Project Summary & Final Report). Australian Zoologist. An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie [Abstract]
In the latest issue of Zoo Grapevine & International Zoo News (Issue 44, Autumn 2017) there is a fascinating 5-page article titled 'The History of the Thylacine in Captivity' by Erik Block. Tidbits of information include such facts as: Bostock's Scottish Zoo in Glasgow, which was only around from 1897-1909, at one time had a Thylacine in its collection. Or that Adelaide Zoo had 22 Thylacines at one time or another over the years. Here is the link to the glossy, full-colour, quarterly zoo magazine: http://www.izes.co.uk/
I wonder if this will be from primary, or secondary sources. Seeing the reference to Bostock's I wonder if it isn't very influenced by Sleightholme and Campbell. How do you get hold of a copy?
Other than subscribing then I suspect that you might be out of luck. I know of several zoo directors and zoo employees that order copies for staff members, but the vast bulk of the subscribers are zoo enthusiasts.
They seem to sell individual issues for £8, that's probably the way to go for me, whether they're selling this one yet or not is another matter. Have you read it? As a matter of interest, does it mention City Park in Launceston?
I don't subscribe to IZES so don't get this mag. but the Bartlett Society, another Zoo specialist group, mentioned a talk on this same subject scheduled for one of their meetings recently. Of course I imagine the sources for both of these are the same as everybody else's.
The 5-page Thylacine article in the new magazine (pages 29-33) includes 8 photos and does indeed mention the City Park Zoo in Launceston, Tasmania. There is at least one paragraph about the zoo and this interesting sentence: "It is believed that this zoo had the last two Tasmanian Emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae diemenensis) ever exhibited." I would recommend to anyone interested in zoos to order a single copy of Zoo Grapevine & International Zoo News and then if they are impressed (and I'm sure that they will be!) to spend the money on a subscription.
Chapple, Peter. (2001). The Quest for the Thylacine, pp. 75-81. In: Cropper, Paul (ed.). Myths & Monsters 2001 Conference Papers. Unpublished. See also pp. 82-83, which seems to have been omitted from the Contents Page.
Thylacines and devils went extinct in the mid Holocene on the mainland, when dingos arrived from Asia. Wouldn't be Europeans introducing dogs to Tasmania did them in, would it? Without packs - something evolved to guard resources, not bring down prey - the thylacines were disadvantaged against canid kleptoparasites. The devils too, though they fare better by way of being able to process foods dogs cannot. All the same both went extinct on the mainland with the spread of dingos, and shifting hunting behaviours by aboriginals who began to prefer smaller prey items,
The thylacine's genome has been sequenced for the first time, using tissue from a one-month-old joey preserved in 1909. "Demographic analysis indicated a long-term decline in genetic diversity starting well before the arrival of humans in Australia. In spite of their extraordinary phenotypic convergence, comparative genomic analyses demonstrated that amino acid homoplasies between the thylacine and canids are largely consistent with neutral evolution." Paper: Genome of the Tasmanian tiger provides insights into the evolution and demography of an extinct marsupial carnivore | Nature Ecology & Evolution Article: Tasmanian tiger genome offers clues to its extinction
This news was actually broken on an episode of 'Destination Unknown' filmed over a year ago, but this the first time it's actually appeared anywhere serious. I was beginning to think I'd imagined it. Thanks for posting.
Tassie devils and the local Aboriginals used to share the same caves, which makes you wonder how dog domestication began. Usually the idea of dog ancestors as scavengers is rejected, because villages did not exist in the Pleistocene to provide a niche for new scavengers round rubbish dumps: but native Tasmanians coexisted with a carnivorous mammal at their living shelters, and presumably the devils were attracted to something like scraps left by man. Did the dingo usurp its cultural importance on the mainland from the devils, rather than the thylo as is usually supposed? Devil-tooth necklaces have been cited as reasons the devil died out on the mainland, although such artifacts were rare. I think its more important that such artifacts demonstrate a cultural importance to Australian people, prior to Australia's canicisation.
Trying to track down specifics: it seems to be Owen and Pemberton, who attribute it to a food taboo among native Tasmanians. Sounds like the devils were an incipient domesticate via a commensal pathway initiated by the animals, one that failed owing to their having an unsociable temperment, so this was probably tolerance of scavenging and nothing else, with their being no use to local people. As you know I take an interest in prehistoric domestications, and what was and wasn't, and who did and didn't. So, I'm trying to trace moar as Australia is neglected in studies of domestication (sources still repeat the aboriginals did not hunt with dogs, or that none of them had crops). And the four-way interactions between humans, dingos and the two marsupial carnivores, need to be understood to understand what was going on in the Holocene, and why the devils are not extinct after dogs were finally introduced to Tasmania.
