Thylacine

When I was a kid (about 16 in the 70's) I was hiking on the long plain in the Kosciusko National Park when early one morning I saw a strange striped "dog like" animal with a long stiff tail somewhat like a kangaroo belting off from the plain into the nearby thick bush. I later found pictures of the said animal (as above) which resembled the "extinct" Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger.

Two problems arose with this sighting. No. 1, the animal had been extinct on the mainland for 5,000 years and was restricted to the Australian island state of Tasmania, and, No. 2 the last Thylacine died in the Hobart zoo in the 1930's. The last "wild" animal was reported around 1918 having been hunted for government bounty's of 1 pound (a decent amount of money at the time) to extinction.

I thought I was mistaken and just "seeing" things. Maybe not as the following may explain...

No. 1. Research in later years claim that breeding pairs of the animal had been brought to the mainland in 1910 by the then "Thylacine Preservation Society" and released north of Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. North of this is the Baw Baw Ranges which link directly to the Great Dividing Range that leads to Kosciusko.

No. 2. In recent days news reports of scats collected in the 1960's and lodged in a museum are being identified by DNA as maybe being those of the Thylacine. Possibly proving the nocturnal and shy animal was still around 30 odd years after the last known animal had died.

So who knows, a further 10 years (1970's) is not that much a stretch of the imagination and the possibility that the animals released in Victoria had found sanctuary in the rugged ranges of bush of the national park.

Perhaps they still exist today... I hope so.