The Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) was a beautiful carnivorous marsupial that went extinct in the 1930s in part due to human hunting and encroachment on the animal's natural habitats. (To this day though, people report occasional sightings in the region.) There are a handful of film clips of the Thylacine shot at the Beaumaris zoo and the London zoo and now researchers from the Tasmanian Tiger Archives Facebook Group collaborating with the State Library and Archive uncovered this additional footage seen above.
More about the Thylacine at the Australian Museum.
Also, enjoy this terrific New Yorker feature from 2018 by Brooke Jarvis: "The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger."
(via The Anomalist) Read the rest
I've never seen anything like this before and neither had Matt Dunbabin, the owner of the Bangor Vineyard Shed in Dunalley, Tasmania, who shot this now-viral video of a Tasmanian tiger snake slithering along the top of a wire fence.
Dunbabin said there are plenty of snakes in southern Tasmania, but he had never witnessed one climbing a fence, he told The Mercury.
“Certainly not along a strand of wire on the fence, it seemed really bizarre..."
“They’re a part of the landscape that is great to see, and it’s fascinating to see behaviour that you just don’t normally see, it’s quite amazing.”
(Geekologie, Mashable) Read the rest
Baby Tasmanian devils are called imps. There's a big push underway to breed the ornery marsupials in captivity due to a facial tumor epidemic ravaging wild populations. Upside: lots of baby pictures. Read the rest
