Thylacine?!?

[Chad]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/tasmanian-tiger-sighting-search-thylacine-queensland-australia

Did no one link to this yet? Possibly...possibly the find of the century? I won't get my hopes up, but, hey, they said the night parrot was extinct, too... Interesting that the sightings are in Queensland and not Tasmania. Anyway, hold on to your butts.

[Lanthanotus]

I want to believe..... but 2000 years of undetected co-existence with humans (from westerns science at least anyways) on the mainland vs 80 yrs on Tasmania ("small" somewhat, but sparsely populated aswell with lots of dense, protected and untouched forests), how high can hopes get?

While mammls are for sure the group that has the least number of species new to science and added to the list each year, there's still surprise out there (have a look at south east Asia where they found a new species of deer some years back and just discovered a second population of the Inochine Tiger in Thailand, a way bigger creature than the thylacine within a pressed environment in a densily inhabited country)... let's see where the story goes.

[ZoPteryx]

I'm not holding my breath, but if the observations described in the text really were that clear, then this may be our best chance yet.

As for the two videos, the first looks like a dog (be it dingo or domestic) based on the flexibility of its tail.  The second is odd, but based on the color and movement I'd guess it's an injured mangy Red Fox.

[Chad]

To be fair, the videos accompanying the article are not the sightings referenced in the article. The videos are from an amateur Thylacine Truther facebook group. The videos just look like dogs to me and don't get me revved up at all but I am cautiously excited by the eyewitness accounts in the article.

Here's the article that should be attached to the video: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/01/tasmanian-tiger-sightings-i-represent-3000-people-who-have-been-told-theyre-nuts

[BlueKrono]

Just like Nessie, there would have to be a sustainable breeding population in order to persist... for at least 2,000 years. Would be hard to miss.

[Lanthanotus]

To be fair, the Cape York Peninsula is a vast area of mostly unspoiled and unpopulated wilderness. The area stretches over more squarekilometres than Germany and just inhabits like 300k of people, almost all of them in Cairns and surroundings. There's even known endemic animals in that area that are only known from a handfull of sightings/documentations. So as far as calculatings chances goes, this would be an area where the chances that a population got overseen are greatest.

[Pachyrhinosaurus]

I don't know how realistic it is to think thylacines are still hiding somewhere but of all the video footage this one looks the most convincing to me:

https://youtu.be/0Dgq6d0Yf10

[CrypticPrism]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g0bbm2bKjIw

In all seriousness, it's possible that thylacines still survive.

Alright, everyone out the way, former cryptozoologist here.Well, I analyzed and looked at the situations and came up with some straight up weird hypothethetical explanations, but I'm not a real cryptozoologist, I guess.
Among my conspiracies were:

The chupacabra is a thylacine descendant that boarded boats from Australia to Puerto Rico, where they adapted to have rough spiny fur and black color. Apparently the bipedality of some chupacabra sightings meant that it was just rearing up(for some reason I don't know, perhaps smelling prey or trying to get a better vantage point) Nessie is a giant amphibian, jersey devil a giant hammerhead bat, Bigfoot a gigantopithecus descendant, and grey aliens being hyperevolved humans from another reality here to learn more about humans, and many others. And finally, my personal favorite, goatman is a species of goat evolved from those tree-climbing ones in Greece. They evolved bipedality to help reach plants better and somehow got to the us, where they then got hold of axes and ran around forests killing teens.

But then I turned 11 and realized that I had become a nutty conspiracy theorist, overanalyzing everything and coming up with ridiculous explanations for most likely fake animals.

Thylacines might be alive, who knows. Perhaps there's a breed of dingo with stripes that it uses to blend into brush that's causing all these sightings. Or maybe they're made up by people like me 3 years ago.

[Lanthanotus]

I don't know how realistic it is to think thylacines are still hiding somewhere but of all the video footage this one looks the most convincing to me:

https://youtu.be/0Dgq6d0Yf10

To be honest the contents of the linked video didn't convince me at all. Several things shown in the video suggest evidence (collecting hair and poo) but either must have proofed being leftovers from foxes or other animals or were not examined, as such pieces would allow for a definite proof if or if not they derive from a thylacine.

And a thylacine roaming the backyards of a suburb area? I at least could not make out any stripes in that video material and I've seen a number of dead and live foxes in Europe and Australia - for me, that was a fox.

The Adelaide hills are also an area where I would deem chances very, very slim for an "undiscovered" animal that size. The area is densily inhabited, a lot of agriculture there and a hell of a lot of traffic. I travelled more than 36.000 km by car in Australia and you can find any wide roaming creature on the road, killed, evidence would have shown up with an incredible high chance if there were any thylacines in that area. After all, those stripes are quite unique in the Australian fauna (there other animals with stripes similar, but they are way smaller and differnt in morphologie), so a body could easily be identified.

However, I really hope some hard evidence shows up, may it be in South Australia (which is way bigger and lesser inhabitated as the Cape York area, at least outside Adelaide and the South Coast area), Queensland or Tasmania (Puerto Rico would definetly be the find of the century )

[GasmaskMax]

I mean its possible, its a vast enough habitat, and its not like its impossible for a small population to survive. I wont say its likely, but its far from impossible.