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Man claims to have photographed living Tasmanian Tiger

JoeMorgue

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Peter Grove, a farmer in Southeast Victoria, Australia has claimed to have taken a picture of a Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus, also called the Thylacine or Tasmanian Wolf), a 40-70 lbs predatory marsupial that was last seen in the wild 1930 and declared extinct in 1936 when the last known specimen died in a zoo.

Alleged Picture:

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Reference photo of a living Tasmanian Tiger in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. in 1906.

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Article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-beast-prowling-bush-wasnt-scared-humans.html
 
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Looks like one to me. There have been many sightings of them over the years. I've never quite gotten to the bottom of what causes naturalists to effectively claim, "Right, all animals of species X are extinct and anybody who says they see one from now on is a liar unless they bring in the corpse!" Especially in a place the size of Australia. They even do it for species that live in regions barely a dozen Westerners annually set foot, then express astonishment when later evidence shows that species X isn't extinct after all, it had just been hiding under one of the 4.5 billion bushes nobody had looked under.
 
I hope this is true, but there have heaps of “sightings” in Victoria, none of which has proven to be the Tiger. I wonder whether the photographer searched for droppings around where the picture was taken\?
 
lionking said:
I hope this is true, but there have heaps of “sightings” in Victoria, none of which has proven to be the Tiger. I wonder whether the photographer searched for droppings around where the picture was taken\?
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Gippsland is a hotspot, from what I remember.
 
MikeG said:
Gippsland is a hotspot, from what I remember.
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Understandably. Plenty of “panthers” have also been sighted. As you would be aware, there are massive amounts of very thick and remote bush, so if any rare species is going to survive, it would be there.
 
I'll wait for the photo shop experts. How is the head and the tail in the light and the body not?

And the tail to the body doesn't quite align, looks like the body is a tad too fury.

And there was a recent photo of a similar animal that wasn't a tiger, IIRC.
 
I now see that the photo was not taken in Gippsland but near Port Arlington, so not really in remote bush. I’m now more dubious.
 
The tail looks photoshopped. It changes angle too - like they added straightness to a dog tail. The stripes should be bold and obvious but they aren't there. I don't think the face is like a thylacine either.

My guess is a photo of a dog that has been digitally altered.
 
Photoshopped or real, it's a beautiful creature. But yes, it is quite 'dog-looking'.
 
Body doesn't look long enough to me. Also, the face has white on the snout and above the eyes; the thylacines in the zoo picture have dark snouts & foreheads. Similar issue at the base of the tail. That said, the shape of the face looks a lot like the thylacine.

I don't know how much thylacine coloration varied, so the color differences may or may not be meaningful.

I share Mr. Parcher's concern that the stripes aren't visible. If the original picture is available, it would be interesting to try to color manipulations to see if we could bring out the stripes, but I think they're simply not present.
 
Pretty interesting.

Dingos (Canis lupus dingo) can be similarly slim towards the hindquarters.

My money is on that animal in the picture being a dingo.
 
Two dingo photos for comparison.
 

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William Parcher said:
The tail looks photoshopped. It changes angle too - like they added straightness to a dog tail. The stripes should be bold and obvious but they aren't there. I don't think the face is like a thylacine either.

My guess is a photo of a dog that has been digitally altered.
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dasmiller said:
Body doesn't look long enough to me. Also, the face has white on the snout and above the eyes; the thylacines in the zoo picture have dark snouts & foreheads. Similar issue at the base of the tail. That said, the shape of the face looks a lot like the thylacine.

I don't know how much thylacine coloration varied, so the color differences may or may not be meaningful.

I share Mr. Parcher's concern that the stripes aren't visible. If the original picture is available, it would be interesting to try to color manipulations to see if we could bring out the stripes, but I think they're simply not present.
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lionking said:
I think you are right. It would be a pretty deformed dingo if it was one.
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At first I did not see the tail stripes, enlarging the photo just on my mobile makes them evident.

The tail is anatomically accurate.

Looking at the two thylacines I do see variation in facial markings.

Unlike Bigfoot, thylacines were real animals so it's not unrealistic to assume this is a photo of one.
 
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Steve001 said:
Unlike Bigfoot, thylacines were real animals so it's not unrealistic to assume this is a photo of one.
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Except that thylacines are known to have been extinct since the 1930s and there has not been a single verifiable sighting of one since that time. Furthermore, there are no habitats where a sustainable breeding population might survive unseen by humans apart from a very few very inaccessible valleys deep in the Tasmanian temperate rainforest.

That this is a photo of a thylacine is an extraordinary claim. It will require extraordinary evidence to verify. Until then, the reasonable and most parsimonious explanation is that this is a case of mistaken identity.
 
I'm sure there's a relevant xkcd. Thylacines have been missing all through the period where everyone is carrying high quality digital cameras in their pockets.

Then right about the time that photographic fakery gets good enough to really question the evidentiary value of photographs... A thylacine photograph is produced.
 
arthwollipot said:
Except that thylacines are known to have been extinct since the 1930s and there has not been a single verifiable sighting of one since that time. Furthermore, there are no habitats where a sustainable breeding population might survive unseen by humans apart from a very few very inaccessible valleys deep in the Tasmanian temperate rainforest.

That this is a photo of a thylacine is an extraordinary claim. It will require extraordinary evidence to verify. Until then, the reasonable and most parsimonious explanation is that this is a case of mistaken identity.
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There is also the question of how a breeding pair got to the mainland. It’s almost beyond dispute that thylacines were extinct on the mainland before British settlement.
 
The other thing that makes the whole thing dubious is, why didn’t the photographer seek out paw prints? Thylacine pawprints differ from dogs and native animals, and a fresh paw print to go along with the photo would be decent evidence.
 
Steve001 said:
At first I did not see the tail stripes, enlarging the photo just on my mobile makes them evident.
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The stripes are most apparent on the back. They would be very visible in the photo if it actually were a thylacine.

picture.php
 
It's really hard to tell with this picture, which is so small in resolution. I would guess that this is a very severe crop from a larger image, and the resulting image is so full of JPG and processing artifacts that it's hard to be sure what is the result of attempted fakery and what is from the processing and simply loss of resolution. As it now appears, one issue is that the stripes on the tail overlap the edges of the tail. As others have pointed out the tail looks oddly straight, long and unrealistic, but that could be a combination of image quality and chance. The resolution is so poor that the gray areas of the animal sometimes overlap into the gray areas surrounding it, so some of the tail anomaly might be from that. In addition the stripes go past the boundary of the tail, but compression and sharpening can cause odd effects. Again, though the face looks odd and it does appear that it gets more light than the rest of the animal, it could be a result of drastic oversharpening and blocking of color.

One big thing that would help the thylacine's case would be if the photographer made more than one image of the same critter. We'd have a much better idea of how the image was treated and whether it was faked if there were slightly varying multiples - even if only one of them was clear enough to show.

These days all but the most primitive digital cameras can shoot in bursts, and most in video as well, and for something like this it's critical. These days with digital cameras, there's little reason not to take a series of shots of anything important, and the reason for not doing so becomes suspicious.

Given that this might be a very deep crop from a distant image, the poor image quality is not a deal breaker, but of course it's also possible that one can do that on purpose because alterations to an image of such poor resolution are themselves hard to detect. Multiple images would help the case greatly, as would any look at the original image in its original size and format.

It's certainly interesting, and I hope greatly that it turns out to be a real thylacine, but I would not bet much on it.

edit to add: on the plus side, further browsing indicates that the photograph was made with a cell phone, which certainly would explain the poor resolution, as it's almost certainly a big crop from a wide image with a tiny sensor.

On the minus side Groves says the creature stood there for about five minutes, and although it's not disqualifying that he didn't think to take more than one picture it's kind of odd to say the least.
 
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I don't think it's completely implausible, and the photo certainly does look the part from what I can tell, but until better evidence is produced I remain very skeptical. I'd love it to be real though.
 
Damien Evans said:
I don't think it's completely implausible, and the photo certainly does look the part from what I can tell, but until better evidence is produced I remain very skeptical. I'd love it to be real though.
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If it is, then it'd be amazing. But I'm going to out on a limb and say that if it is not completely implausible, then it is very nearly completely implausible.
 
lionking said:
I hope this is true, but there have heaps of “sightings” in Victoria, none of which has proven to be the Tiger. I wonder whether the photographer searched for droppings around where the picture was taken\?
Click to expand...

lionking said:
The other thing that makes the whole thing dubious is, why didn’t the photographer seek out paw prints? Thylacine pawprints differ from dogs and native animals, and a fresh paw print to go along with the photo would be decent evidence.
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The quality of the image suggests it's a digitally-zoomed mobile phone camera. It's possible that the spot where the animal is standing in the photo, was not particularly accessible to the photographer.
 
Checkmite said:
The quality of the image suggests it's a digitally-zoomed mobile phone camera. It's possible that the spot where the animal is standing in the photo, was not particularly accessible to the photographer.
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It was a phone camera, according to reports I read. It explains the poor quality, but doesn't help answer the question of why he made only one still shot.
 
Leaving aside the veracity of the Photo, the whole Bellarine Peninsula including Clifton Springs, Drysdale, Portarlington, Indented Head, St Leonards and nearby Geelong area are all fairly well populated, and in summer become a tourist haven descended on by many thousands of people. For swimming, bush walking, camping and other activities. I doubt that there is anywhere on the entire Peninsula that has not been explored.

I spent many happy summers in this area.

A population of Thylacine would have either had to survive on the mainland unnoticed for the last 2,000 years, or somehow been smuggled into Victoria before around 1930 when it was known to be highly endangered. Given a life span of around 12 - 15 years, the survival of descendants and a viable population from a single pair becomes unlikely so far more than a single breeding pair would have been needed for these things still to be around today.



A fox with mange, as suggested in the article makes an awful lot of sense to me. Are there any left in Tasmania? This is a far better possibility than finding one roaming around in Victoria.



Norm
 
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fromdownunder said:
Leaving aside the veracity of the Photo, the whole Bellarine Peninsula including Clifton Springs, Drysdale, Portarlington, Indented Head, St Leonards and nearby Geelong area are all fairly well populated, and in summer become a tourist haven descended on by many thousands of people. For swimming, bush walking, camping and other activities. I doubt that there is anywhere on the entire Peninsula that has not been explored.

I spent many happy summers in this area.

A population of Thylacine would have either had to survive on the mainland unnoticed for the last 2,000 years, or somehow been smuggled into Victoria before around 1930 when it was known to be highly endangered. Given a life span of around 12 - 15 years, the survival of descendants and a viable population from a single pair becomes unlikely so far more than a single breeding pair would have been needed for these things still to be around today.



A fox with mange, as suggested in the article makes an awful lot of sense to me. Are there any left in Tasmania? This is a far better possibility than finding one roaming around in Victoria.



Norm
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Agreed. If it was in the Gippsland high country, it would be far more credible. The Ballerine Peninsula? Almost impossible.
 
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