Catching a photo of one doesnt necessarily seem like a stretch. var oldonload = window.onload; But on Feb. 23, Neil Waters, president of the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, promised conclusive photographic proof of a surviving thylacine. The last 10 days, Ive probably been acting a bit weird to everybody in the group and online, Waters said. an amateur not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the elusive creature, eight claimed sightings of the thylacine between 2016 and 2019. Her research on breeding populations of exotic wallabies in Britain, for instance, relied partially on images shared over social media. Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. An earlier paper led by ecologist Colin Carlson from the University of California, Berkeley, suggested the thylacines extinction date was sometime between 1936 and 1943. "Nobody can adequately look at a video and say that's definitely a thylacine, without some DNA evidence," Pask told CNET last week. Both possibilities were in the news this week with an interesting eyewitness report from Adelaide and a comment from the doctor working with thylacine DNA. Pask, whose work on thylacine genetics sees him flooded with identification requests each year, says this is "one of the least convincing" images he's seen. Zoologist says the animals seen in the Thylacine Awareness Groups video are most likely pademelons. Take a moment to feast your eyes on the magnificence of these (verified) photos and videos of pademelons. "However," he claimed, "the baby is not ambiguous". As they have inhabited the region for a long time, they have evolved many different body types to occupy various niches. w[ l ].push( { [CDATA[ */ In 2021 Mr Mooney debunked video footage of three animals in Tasmania . change_link = false; j.src = This new thylacine sighting claim has made a lot of people online very tentatively excited, but also super wary that this all might be a load of shit and nobodys too sure whether they can deal with that kind of heartbreak in 2021. i am gonna need fucking therapy if this thylacine isn't real. 2021.11.4. var ignore = 'https://imgix.pedestrian.tv'; Mr Waters said he had already shown the footage of the three animals to experts, including a vet and canine and feline "judges". We've done it.". Waters said the picture of the supposed mother and father are ambiguous, but that the baby was definitely a thylacine. Our biweekly podcast delivering news & inspiration from natures frontline. Technologies like IVF and cloning could then allow for the production of an embryo. "We now have the nuclear genome sequence and the mitochondrial genome sequence of the thylacine. Jackson Ryan is CNET's award-winning science editor. Much is made of the apparent banding -- or stripes -- on this creature, but Mooney believes these are "a combination of narrow shadows(from sticks and cutting grass) and natural parts in the fur.". These became extinct over the course of a few thousand years, either due to climate change, human impact, or a combination of the two. All of this does actually contribute and I really one day the tech becomes cheap enough and available enough to de-extinct the thylacine. It emphasizes that if you can gather and encourage best use of citizen science data, then thats helpful for a species on the brink of extinction, Brook said. The Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, an amateur not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the elusive creature, claimed it had photographic evidence of three thylacines living happily in north-east Tasmania. Research has shown that unclear sensory data such as a blurry picture causes the brain to rely more heavily on preconceived patterns to make sense of it. He was unable to take a photograph, but reported watching it for three minutes. In the males, the pouch was used to keep the genitalia protected. All rights reserved. Neil Waters released a video last week teasing fans about the photos which he claimed were proof the extinct animals were still alive. However, some researchers claim that climate change and an increasing human population at the time may be to blame. Her interests include natural history, wildlife, the outdoors, health and fitness. There are the familiar kangaroos, koalas and Tasmanian devils, but also less well-known bandicoots, quolls and numbats (look them up, theyre SUPER cute). The embryo would either be grown in an artificial womb, or a fat-tailed dunnart mother could act as a surrogate. It is, of course, the thylacine. Five vets all agree it looks like a four-legged animal and not a macropod that hops, Mr Waters says. Weighing approximately 25kg, the Thylacine was around 60cm tall at the shoulder, with a body roughly 115cm long and a 50-65cm long tail. //