The thylacine became extinct in the 1960s Or did it?

Tantalising sightings of this enigmatic Australian marsupial continue to inspire the belief that it could still be out there

-  JAMES FAIR

In March 1982, parked in a remote area of swamp forest in northwestern Tasmania, wildlife ranger Hans Naarding was asleep in his vehicle. When he woke up at 2am, it was dark and raining heavily. Out of habit, he switched on his torch and scanned the surrounding area.

“As I swept the beam around, it came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side-on some 6-7m distant,” he later wrote. “I decided to examine the animal carefully before risking movement. It was an adult male in excellent condition with 12 black stripes on a sandy coat. Eye reflection was pale yellow. It moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth.”

When Naarding reached for his camera bag after several minutes, the movement spooked the creature, and it slunk away into the undergrowth.

The encounter was kept secret while an intense search for thylacines was initiated in the surrounding area, but nothing was ever discovered. Naarding’s thylacine, it seemed, had vanished into the night.

There was just one problem with this remarkable sighting. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world authority on rare and threatened species, the thylacine – a dog-sized predatory marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger – was extinct in 1982. The last known individual died in 1936 in Hobart Zoo; the last reliable sighting of a wild one dates back to 1933. The species died out sometime after the mid-1960s.