May. June 83He believes that about
200 Tasmanian tigers
exist in three separate
groups on the island.
anonymity. He describes himself as a greenie, an egotist
and a dreamer.
As the book’s title proclaims, it is an undisguised attempt
to prove that the thylacine survives. It’s based on research
the author says he carried out over six years.
In the absence of absolute proof that the thylacine exists
today, Tigerman harnesses ‘sub-proof’ – such as footprints,
tail drag marks, cave lairs, scats and prey carcasses – to
make his case. He believes about 200 Tasmanian tigers
exist in three separate groups on the island, 100 in the
south-west, 70 in the north-west and 30 in the north-east.
“It is almost extinct, but not quite. I know that because
I have seen two,” he writes. But, he adds, “society will
not protect an animal it thinks is extinct. If the Tasmanian
tiger is to survive, someone must prove it exists...”
In the Blue Mountains of NSW I visit the book-
crammed home of Mike Williams, a fast-talking bundle
of infectious exuberance. Though a mainlander, he’s been
searching for thylacines in Tasmania since the early 2000s.
His interest was originally an offshoot of his fascination
with so-called cryptids, creatures that cryptozoologists
believe exist but that have not been proved to do so. It’s
a fascination he shares with his partner, journalist Rebecca
Lang, with whom he produced and published a book in
2010 about mysterious big cats reportedly roaming the
Australian bush.
“While we were investigating big cats we started to
get reports about thylacines,” Mike says. “We went to
Tasmania and I spoke with Col Bailey initially, then with
others, and heard of some interesting and even bizarre
sightings by really good witnesses. Not all of them are
deluded or demented. That started me on my hunt for
the tiger.”
Mike began following up sightings. He has made
numerous trips to Tasmania, four of them for major expe-
ditions. He has a fifth expedition planned for 2017. “I will
chase up more witness reports and set up three to five
cameras at different sites and come back and check them
later,” he says.
Although he doubts the thylacine survives on the main-
land, he’s sure it does in Tasmania and believes that sooner
or later a dash cam on a local’s car or a camera trap in the
bush will confirm this. “I am convinced it’s out there,
otherwise I wouldn’t waste my time,” he says.
In 2014 Mike and Rebecca published a book of essays
by different authors entitled The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct
or Extant?
T
HE WORDS in the thylacine’s scientific
name, Thylacinus cynocephalus, mean
“pouched” and “dog-headed”. Its
closest living relatives are numbats, quolls and
Tasmanian devils. As with quolls and devils,
the female thylacine carried her developing
young in a backward-opening pouch. This
orientation prevented the pouch from
snagging on branches or twigs as the animal
moved through dense bush.
Pouch young, up to four at a time, emerged
half-grown after four to five months, by which
time the pouch was hanging almost to the
ground. The male thylacine had a back-
ward-opening pouch, too, though it was more a
partial or pseudo pouch. The male was able to
draw his testes up into it either to protect them
or possibly to regulate their temperature.
The male pouch was central to a dispute
about the gender of the last thylacine to die in
captivity – popularly known as Benjamin (see
“Last of his kind”). Australian naturalist David
Fleay took the last still photographs and a
movie clip of the animal (getting bitten on the
backside in the process) and a cursory viewing
of the images and film reveals no male
genitals. In his book The Last Tasmanian Tiger,
published in 2000, author Robert Paddle
claimed Benjamin was in fact female.
However, in 2010, Dr Stephen Sleightholme
of the International Thylacine Specimen
Database project examined Fleay’s movie
frame by frame and in one sequence found
that the pouch contained proof of Benjamin’s
masculinity. His finding was published in
Australian Zoologist in 2011.Him or her
A Tassie tiger’s pouch may
not only have been a place for
carrying babies.This display of a female thylacine and four
pouch young at the Tasmanian Museum and
Art Gallery was destroyed in about 1935. The
animals were killed in 1884.