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Man claims to have photographed living Tasmanian Tiger

Elagabalus said:
Apparently, it IS.


Also, if you haven't made up your mind by now you're setting the cause of Skepticism™ back a hundred years. Choose your tribe, man!
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No it is not. Nor has anyone on this thread claimed absolutely that the Tasmanian Tiger is extinct. I, like everyone would be delighted to see a find of a living population of these things.



But you are right about this particular photo because the location, the lack of corroborating evidence, the poor photo, and the historical context, all of which has already been documented in this thread, is quite conclusive.



I am already on the record suggesting that they may still exist in four places. The Tasmanian wilderness, East Gippsland, The Otways and the Great Divide. I cannot comment on other areas as I am less than familiar with the bush in other parts of Australia.


All we need is a skeleton or bones for analysis, some scat, a capture, maybe footprints, decent photographic evidence that withstands close scrutiny and everybody in Australia would be delighted and applaud the finding.



As has been said, we are not talking about bigfoot, which I am happy to say I don't believe in, we are talking about a living breathing animal that was alive and well less than 90 years ago. It would be close to the excitement of the scientific world when the first live coelacanth was found.


Norm
 
Australian animals previously thought extinct have been found alive and well. So the possibility exists, albeit a very very slim possibility, that the thylacine is still out there...somewhere.

 
baron said:
I wouldn't come to any conclusion based on one photo, what I'm saying is it wouldn't be a great surprise if it did show a Tasmanian Tiger, especially since there are other recent photos and videos that offer some form of evidence (most notably the 1973 Doyle video, which I find quite compelling).
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baron said:
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.
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You were saying?
 
Norman Alexander said:
I'm seeing a slightly different view to that photo.


Now consider the part of the "tiger" photo that I have identified. Could that simply be a fern that the animal is behind or beneath?
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One need not look too hard for a picture of the likely environment when the original image shows it.

Ferns could be an explanation, but I doubt it because the depth of field is too great, and for ferns to be an explanation, they would have to be nearly transparent from being out of focus.

The more I look at this, the more likely it seems to me that it's just artifacting, and in fact that what we see is so much a guess of the JPG algorithm that we can't really know anything.

Viewing this image is handicapped because most software that reads a JPG applies an algorithm to it which smooths the pixels.

For example, I open the original file in the freeware Faststone Image Viewer, and no matter how much I zoom into the image, it stays smooth. But if I go to "edit-clone and heal," which actually works on the file as it exists rather than as it is algorithmically read, the individual pixels appear.

As an experiment, I opened the file in another program which does not smooth pixels. Resaving the pixelated deep zoom to JPG smoothed it again. But when I did a screen grab, and saved it to BMP, it stayed pixelated, and when I resaved that BMP as a JPG it gave a true representation of the BMP. So here, as far as I can determine, is what a JPG reading program is seeing when it reads the original JPG file - whatever else you see is the program's ingenious guessing.

thyla pixels.jpg

As you can see, we're left without a whole lot we could bet on.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Put up a bounty, that'll take of it.
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No, it won't. People will then catch them and captive breed them. Aussies aren't that daft.

Besides, Australia is quite big, and the very few people that live there live almost exclusively in 6 major cities. The foxes have other arrangements.
 
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MikeG said:
No, it won't. People will then catch them and captive breed them. Aussies aren't that daft.

Besides, Australia is quite big, and the very few people that live there live almost exclusively in 6 major cities. The foxes have other arrangements.
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Of course I was joking, but did people try breeding thylacines for the bounty money?
 
MikeG said:
No, it won't. People will then catch them and captive breed them. Aussies aren't that daft.
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In one of the Discworld novels

a 20p bounty on rat tails was introduced to combat a serious rodent infestation, but threatened to drain the treasury dry without curtailing the rats' numbers. Vetinari's suggestion to "tax the rat farms" provided an early demonstration of his shrewd political insight.
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Note he didn't only immediately deduce the existence of rat farms, his solution was not to close them but to tax them. Smart guy. :)
 
arthwollipot said:
The photo looks to me like a normal smartphone camera - which these days are pretty great, by the way - that has been software-zoomed as far as it will go.
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I agree, and though smartphone cameras are pretty good now, they can't compete with a high zoom ratio fixed lens digital camera, let alone a DSLR for wildlife photography. The software zoom (basically just cropping) can't get anything like the resolution that a decent optical zoom can. I have a couple of fixed lens high zoom cameras that I've manage to take some pretty good bird and wildlife photos with, and I'm sure either of them would have taken a much better picture of that animal (whatever it is). Of course, if this is a hoax, the poor quality may be intentional, as a better picture might have left know doubt that it isn't what it's claimed to be.

OTOH, it's not unheard of for species that were presumed extinct, or at least extirpated from a particular region to turn up. One case that I am familiar with involved a grizzly bear that badly mauled and was killed by a bowhunting guide in Southern Colorado in the late '70's. The hunting guide claimed that the bear attacked him and he stabbed it with one of his hunting arrows in self defense. There was some suspicion that the guide might have shot the bear with the arrow and mauled before the bear died, but not enough evidence to file any charges against him. Whatever happened, the bear ended up dead from the arrow and the guide badly mauled. The bear was a very old female with bad teeth. Grizzlies were previously believed to have been extirpated from Colorado in the early '50's, though a population remained in the Yellowstone area.

The DOW conducted a petty thorough effort to find more grizzlies in the area and came up empty. No further unequivocal grizzlies have turned up in 40 years, though there have been eye witness reports. However, the area has a large population of black bears, so they could have easily been misidentification.

It really looks like the grizzly may have been a sole survivor.
 
Nay_Sayer said:
I'm surprised no one spotted the obvious bigfoot in the bushes. ;)

This would be incredibly fascinating if true
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It would raise many questions. Like "how the hell could a breeding population have remained unseen for so many years?"

'Cause at the moment, the answer to that question is far from clear.
 
arthwollipot said:
It would raise many questions. Like "how the hell could a breeding population have remained unseen for so many years?"

'Cause at the moment, the answer to that question is far from clear.
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Going with a hypothetical answer, No one thought to look where the population(assuredly small) is.
 
Nay_Sayer said:
Going with a hypothetical answer, No one thought to look where the population(assuredly small) is.
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Oh believe me. People have been looking. Every conceivable habitat has been thoroughly examined. Folks have been searching for them for decades. The only habitats that are left to search are, as I said, tiny inaccessible valleys deep in the temperate rainforest in Tasmania, or habitats where they didn't live even when they were known to be alive.
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh believe me. People have been looking. Every conceivable habitat has been thoroughly examined. Folks have been searching for them for decades. The only habitats that are left to search are, as I said, tiny inaccessible valleys deep in the temperate rainforest in Tasmania, or habitats where they didn't live even when they were known to be alive.
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Parliament House?
 
A place I lived and worked at had a series of big cat sightings. The way they were checked was to go to the place of the sighting to try and find other evidence such as paw prints, and droppings. Needless to say, no other evidence was found.

Anyone who takes a photo should mark the site for further examination.
 
Cool photo. Through my pareidolia glasses it looks tassy to me, but you take them off and honestly can't tell if what you think you see is really there. So . . . tie a sheep to a stake Jurassic Park Tyrannosaur Paddock-style, and ring the thing with game cams. I'll wait.
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh believe me. People have been looking. Every conceivable habitat has been thoroughly examined. Folks have been searching for them for decades. The only habitats that are left to search are, as I said, tiny inaccessible valleys deep in the temperate rainforest in Tasmania, or habitats where they didn't live even when they were known to be alive.
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You're very likely correct.

I was reminded of this little guy;https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/rare-wondiwoi-tree-kangaroo-discovered-mammals-animals/

So the idea isn't entirely an impossible one.
 
Nay_Sayer said:
You're very likely correct.

I was reminded of this little guy;https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/rare-wondiwoi-tree-kangaroo-discovered-mammals-animals/

So the idea isn't entirely an impossible one.
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arthwollipot said:
Not impossible, no. But very, very, very unlikely.
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To expand on the above post, please note the words remote and near-impenetrable in the link. Is it reasonable to use these words where the Tasmanian Tiger was sighted? This question has the same answer as should the sighting be taken seriously?
 
rjh01 said:
To expand on the above post, please note the words remote and near-impenetrable in the link. Is it reasonable to use these words where the Tasmanian Tiger was sighted? This question has the same answer as should the sighting be taken seriously?
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No.


Norm
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh believe me. People have been looking. Every conceivable habitat has been thoroughly examined.......
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Every conceivable habitat was searched, too, for the night parrot. How did that work out? Have they found Peter Falconio's body yet? They know it's not far from the road. How long did it take to find Azaria Chamberlain's jacket? That was just a few hundred yards from where she was last seen alive. Maybe more aptly, how is the search for Lasseter's Reef going?
 
rjh01 said:
To expand on the above post, please note the words remote and near-impenetrable in the link. Is it reasonable to use these words where the Tasmanian Tiger was sighted? This question has the same answer as should the sighting be taken seriously?
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Why? Large mammals can cover ground quickly, and many don't stick to their home territory, especially if they are short of food. Here's a wolf that walked 1200 miles from where it was born and raised, in the centre of Europe. If it had been photographed anywhere along its route (it was only seen once, and never photographed, on the entire trip) the response would have been "what's it doing here just a few hundred yards from (say) Verona (Italy)?". No, animals wander into all sorts of inappropriate places, but it doesn't mean for a second that that is where they live.
 
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MikeG said:
Why? Large mammals can cover ground quickly, and many don't stick to their home territory, especially if they are short of food. Here's a wolf that walked 1200 miles from where it was born and raised, in the centre of Europe. If it had been photographed anywhere along its route (it was only seen once, and never photographed, on the entire trip) the response would have been "what's it doing here just a few hundred yards from (say) Verona (Italy)?". No, animals wander into all sorts of inappropriate places, but it doesn't mean for a second that that is where they live.
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Yes, especially animals never sighted in this area before that are thought to be extinct anyway and probably have been extinct on the mainland for thousands of years. Just to be clear, here is the Bellarine Peninsula where the picture was taken and showing the Drysdale/Clifton Springs area. The total area is in the order of 1,500 sq. miles.Not exactly a remote and near-impenetrable place for a population of Tasmanian Tigers to have survived.



Dah0Cqd.gif




Norm
 
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Norm, why do you do that? It's almost like you've not bothered reading what I wrote, or what I was responding to. What if I were to counter your map with a photo of a wild animal in the middle of a town?

s0m1uyG.jpg



fromdownunder said:
..Not exactly a remote and near-impenetrable place for a population of Tasmanian Tigers to have survived........
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MikeG said:
........ animals wander into all sorts of inappropriate places, but it doesn't mean for a second that that is where they live.
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