Yuku free message boards

Mainland sightings, excluding last 15 years or so.

The evidence is simply overwhelming but as they say it's all nothing without an actual body. A hunter admitted to killing one in the years after the official extinction date, and if true this would bring forward the accepted extinction date. The truth is no one knows the actual date they died out, and so I believe they could well exist. I believe they have always been present on the mainland, but due to their secretive nature, and relative rareness, they have avoided mainstream detection, yet every year reports come in, and these witnesses are clearly seeing something. Youtube has a nice selection of potential videos of the Thylacine, two of which I think could well be genuine.

Although the Thylacine is formally extinct, many people believe the animal still exists. Sightings are regularly claimed in Tasmania, other parts of Australia and even in the Irian Jaya area of Indonesia, near the Papua New Guinea border. The Australian Rare Fauna Research Association reports having 3,800 sightings on file from mainland Australia since the 1936 extinction date,[50] whilst the Mystery Animal Research Centre of Australia recorded 138 up to 1998, and the Department of Conservation and Land Management recorded 65 in Western Australia over the same period.[25] Independent Thylacine researchers Buck and Joan Emburg of Tasmania report 360 Tasmanian and 269 mainland post-extinction 20th century sightings, figures compiled from a number of sources.[51] On the mainland, sightings are most frequently reported in Southern Victoria.[52]


Sightings of the Red Fox (first introduced as early as 1864 and again in around 2000)[53][54] in Tasmania are taken very seriously, despite only minimal evidence of the presence of the species on the island.[55][56][h] While the Fox Free Tasmanian Taskforce receives government funding, there is no longer any funding for searches for the Thylacine. The difficulty of locating foxes in the Tasmanian wilderness points to some chance of the Thylacine's survival away from human contact.[53]

Despite many sightings being instantly dismissed, some have generated a large amount of publicity. In 1982 a researcher with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, Hans Narding, observed what he believed to be a Thylacine for three minutes during the night at a site near Arthur River in the north west of the state. The sighting led to an extensive year-long government-funded search.[57] In January 1995, a Parks and Wildlife officer reported observing a Thylacine in the Pyengana region of North Eastern Tasmania in the early hours of the morning. Later searches revealed no trace of the animal.[58] In 1997, it was reported that locals and missionaries near Mount Cartenz in Irian Jaya,[i] had sighted Thylacines. The locals had apparently known about them for many years but had not made an official report.[59] 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.[60] The photos were not published until 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.[61][62]

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1833

Why conserve marsupials?
1 February 2008by Christopher Dickman
Cosmos Online

Image: Rosemary Woodford Ganf


Vast amounts of money and resources are ploughed into conserving Australia's native mammals - is it all worth it?

As a biologist, I take the importance of the natural world for granted and see it as imperative that we protect biological diversity from the more destructive effects of human activity. But this is not a universal view and it is still, surprisingly, quite new.

Indeed, it could be argued that conservation was not part of the mainstream agenda in Australia until the 1970s when Jack Mundey led the 'green bans' against rampant development in Sydney, and Bob Brown galvanized the campaign to stop the damming of the wild Franklin River in Tasmania.

The conservation ethos competes with other ideals even now. So why is conservation important and why should we be concerned if we push a few more marsupials to extinction?

One argument is that marsupials have a right to exist independently, and should not depend on the capricious whims of humans for their future survival. This perspective is sometimes dismissed as being too simple-minded and philosophical when humans are so clearly the dominant species on the planet but it is nonetheless compelling from both ethical and moral points of view.

To me, it is arrogant in the extreme to deny life to another species simply because it does not serve us or cannot stay out of our way.

Aussie emblems

Another argument is that marsupials are aesthetically pleasing and should be conserved because of their intrinsic interest and the simple joy that they can bring to people. Children are awed by the sight of possums, gliders and kangaroos, whether the animals are up close in an animal park or glimpsed moving about in the wild. My own daughter, Alice, delighted as a child in extracting small mammals from traps that we had set in the field and in seeing how the pointy-nosed marsupials behaved compared to their placental counterparts.

I remain transfixed at the sight of an antechinus spiralling rapidly up a tree after being disturbed, at kangaroos stirring languidly in the long grass as the sun sets and at possums squabbling in the trees outside the house. These are sights to impress even hard-nosed sceptics.

It is a short step from admiration to inspiration. Marsupials feature prominently in Aboriginal art and culture, as we have seen. And, despite their generally low profile in the culture of new Australians, marsupials still appear in enchanting stories for children such as The magic pudding by Norman Lindsay and Possum magic by Mem Fox, and in poems such as Antechinus by AD Hope and Kangaroo by DH Lawrence.

They serve as faunal emblems for the Northern Territory and all mainland states except New South Wales (whose emblem is the platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, which is an egg-laying monotreme). The extinct thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) features on the Tasmanian state coat of arms, while the equivalent symbol for Australia features a red kangaroo (Macropus rufus) and emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) supporting the national shield.

Marsupials also serve as logos for high profile companies such as Qantas and Tasmania's Cascade Brewery, as well as for many small local businesses. If you wish to establish your Australian credentials, what more recognisable symbol could you choose than a marsupial?

Medical uses

Other arguments for conserving marsupials appeal to the most utilitarian among us because they highlight how we use the animals to improve our lives or make money. This approach, while selfish, places value on marsupials and turns them into resources that we are more likely to maintain.

We have seen already that marsupials perform a remarkably broad and important range of 'ecosystem services' such as dispersing seeds and maintaining soil quality. If they are taken out of the system, we risk not just the loss of productivity and landscape function that now characterises so much of Australia's semi-arid inland but a host of other far-reaching and irreversible effects that could preclude any attempts at restoration in the future.

And we have seen that they provide excellent opportunities for us to learn about ecology, behaviour, physiology, genetics, evolution and the development of the Australian environment. Because marsupials represent an alternative path in mammalian evolution, they also present unique insights for biomedical researchers.

Currently, we are using marsupials to understand the development of the immune, reproductive and nervous systems, the expression and determination of sex in the young, mechanisms for the repair of DNA and for the processing of cholesterol and other dietary fats, how to cope with stress, and much more.

We are extracting compounds from their milk to overcome bacteria that have become resistant to our standard antibiotics and sequencing the genetic code of selected species to probe the origins of genetic diseases. The potential use of marsupials in the biomedical field is enormous but greatly under-appreciated at present.

Cold, hard cash

Still sceptical? Then let us consider the bottom line. Marsupials make money for us and, for an entrepreneurial few, the profits are great.

The tourist industry, for example, relies in part on the attraction of marsupials to entice visitors Down Under. Surveys of foreign tourists leaving Brisbane and Sydney airports by Tor Hundloe and Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute found that nearly a quarter had been influenced to visit by Australia's unique wildlife and two-thirds said that nature-based activities were important for their Australian experience.

Most nominated the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) and kangaroos as their most popular creatures. Taking the 11 per cent of visitors who said they would not have come were it not for the continent's unique wildlife, Hundloe and Hamilton estimated that wildlife tourism contributes a very hefty A$1.8 billion a year to the Australian economy. About $1.1 billion (and some 9,000 jobs) can be attributed to the Koala alone.

Furthermore, this study was completed in 1997 - the current economic benefit of wildlife tourism is probably much higher. If we add the returns gained from the harvesting of kangaroos (over two million animals a year, yielding leather and over six million kilograms of export meat), sales of possum skins (up to 250,000 a year), souvenirs, novelty items and related products, marsupials clearly add thousands of millions of dollars to the national economy each year.

These are well-trodden arguments, but a final one has been articulated less often.

This says that we cannot always know the value of a species - or any other resource - in the future. Extinction now may mean that a future gene, drug, food, ecological process or other benefit will never be realised. We can call this a missed opportunity cost. It is difficult to value because it is hard to reliably predict where research and understanding will take us in future, and which species will prove to be of most value.

From a precautionary point of view we should therefore strive to maintain the species that currently persist. After all, extinction is forever.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/thylacine-replicas/

Matthew Bille, author of Shadows of Existence and other books, approached me with a question over the weekend, which I have seriously pondered often: Where are the Thylacine replicas?

Does no one produce affordable, hard-plastic, scale-model, museum-quality representations of the Thylacine (a.k.a. Tasmanian Tiger)? Does not Thylacinus cynocephalus, the wolf-headed pouched dog, one of the celebrities of extinct animals thought to be a living cryptid, deserve a replica?

Such replicas are helpful in lectures, exhibitions, and educational demonstrations about well-known and often-mentioned current or recent cryptid expeditions and research. Where are the Thylacine models?

Surely, it would be as popular for a seller as the little replicas they have of the Tasmanian devil (below).



I knew of one form of small replica of the Thylacine, which I owned. It is a pewter Thylacine, 8 cm long and 4 cm high (below). It is an attractive item, and I recall that it was the one figurine that Jeffery Vallance had in his Thylacine part of the Bates College cryptozoology exhibit, which I also had in my room devoted to artifacts, skulls, models, figurines, and footcasts from my museum there.



The pewter Thylacine is still available in Australia and Tasmania, apparently.

But my search was for a typical replica, in the tradition of Schleich, Papo, Safari, Bullyland, Noah's Pals, Britains, and other producers, and thus continued onward.

Stimulated by Matt's question, I sent out some emails to associates in Australia and elsewhere who might know if any Thylacine replicas existed.

Chris of Australia's Wherelightmeetsdark replied: "It seems the Thylacine figurines are even more non-existent than the animal itself."

Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology, who has probably the UK's most sizable collection of cryptid-related known animal replicas, was consulted too. I asked him if he knew of a Thylacine replica:

"No, it's shocking, but I'm not aware of any good replica Thylacines either. I was so bothered by this I once wrote to Britains Ltd and asked if they could make one, sending them instructions and everything. The person I corresponded with said in a letter that he recognised the need for new models and would indeed have one made. Alas, I don't think it happened."

I even wrote an animal replica company in Australia, and they said that while they "don't currently have a Thylacine replica, it is under consideration for 2009."

Always tomorrow. I emailed them back and encouraged them to go forward with their plans, as they would fill a void.

Finally, two people replied almost at the same time, and told me about an expensive resin model that does exist.

Michael Lemos, who designed and is selling the Maine Mutant tee-shirt as a full benefit for the International Cryptozoology Museum, wrote:

"Here's an excellent model maker (Mike Evans who started Lunar Models years back) for all things prehistoric, here, and a link to a Thylacine which I believe is a resin cast and not a bad price."

The image of the model shows a rather good replica, that is for sure.



The other person who told me of this resin model is the accomplished cryptid model maker himself, Jeff Johnson. "About the thylacine, it is rarely touched as a toy/model subject to be sure. Why I can't say. The best one around is the one sold by Alchemy Works. It is resin plastic (sculpted by Sean Cooper) and has to be painted. Here is the one I painted, I hope you like it."

Of course, I like it. Johnson's painted models he creates and paints are dynamic and remarkable. Seeing the paint job he did makes it a work of art. He sent along some photos of it for me:







Of course, the $58 plus shipping was one thing, but the painting was the other. While it is obvious some people are born to be great resin model painters, I have to say that while I can write a storm up about Thylacine cryptid sightings, I couldn't paint my way out of a paper bag. So, if I got this model, after I stumbled through assembling it, the poor thing would sit on a shelf unpainted.

That's why I look for the inexpensive Asian painted replicas first.

Then Eureka, the kind for which I was actually looking, an already painted replica, was found.

Paul Cropper, coauthor of The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot, discovered them, actually: "Tasmanian tourist shops have heaps of them - sample attached. Made in China so no company. They are quite good."

They are quite decent looking, as seen here on Paul's desk. Of course, it takes a flight over to Tasmania to pick one up, and that's not something someone does from Australia like you are going to the corner market. But, at least, we know where some are to be had.



Cropper's Thylacine replicas, via China, are to be found on Tasmania.

But now that I've seen those resin models too, they would appear to have their place in cryptozoology collections too. They do seem priceless, for a price. Anyone wish to donate a purchased and painted version of the Alchemy Works' Thylacine to the museum? I have one of the affordable Thylacines from Tasmania already on order for the next time Paul makes a trip to Tasmania, whenever that happens to be, but that Alchemy Works Thylacine is alluring.

P.S. A prediction: I will be selling plastic replicas of Thylacines from the International Cryptozoology Museum gift shop by the end of 2009!