Gone to the dogs by Nigel Roth

If you lived in Kiwirrkurra, and you suddenly realized you needed a latte from the next town over, you’d need to drive one-hundred kilometers across the Gibson Desert and the Northern Territory state line to sate your growing thirst.

On that drive, depending on the time of day and if you were able to glance about you safely, you might espy any number of local residents, including numbats, dunnarts, wambengers, and quolls. But you wouldn’t meet their closest relative, the thylacine, because the last one, after being captured in the rainforested Florentine Valley, amid the myrtle, celery-top pine, sassafras, and leatherwood, was left to die of neglect in 1936, in a Hobart zoo.

As the thylacine was already showing signs of distress, the Tasmanian authorities, who’d previously cared little for the marsupial, quickly did things that looked like action, and awarded the species official protection. Two months later the animal was dead.

And that was that. Not another thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, as it was colloquially known, has ever been found.

Not that that stops the speculation that thylacines still live and breathe among us. There are frequent sightings, reports, photographs, and videos, but none that are definitive in conclusion, and most are probably mangy dogs.

That can also be said about other extinct animals, of course, like the Siberian mammoth, with their large white curved tusks and dark chestnut fur, which have been seen roaming the tundra, and are the subject of Jurassic Parkesque DNA cloning rumors, or the passenger pigeon, the last of which was said to have died in Cincinnati, in 1914, but continued to be spotted well afterwards.

There’s the Yangtze dolphin, extinct in 2006, seen again in 2007, but only once, or the ivory-billed woodpecker, declared extinct in the 1920s and possibly recorded as late as 2005 by a team from Cornell University. Or, the Mexican grizzly bear, gone by 1964, but still said to exist in the wilds of Mexico to this very day, and the actively-sensible government, which we all live in hope of seeing again soon.