Good news! There have been sightings and paw prints found. She’s out there!
There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.
The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.
In colonial india, the british put a bounty on cobras. Indian villagers who would have usually just killed the cobras and went on with their day now tried to catch them alive so they could then farm them for multiple bounties. This ballooned the snake populations to ridiculous levels, and then the british found out about the scheme. They then cancelled the bounty program, and the snake rearers released their animals on places they thought were far from people.
Net result: More snakes than ever before.
Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?
Sister you might want to sit down for this surprising info: Bigfoot isn’t real. The thylacine is. And extinct animals are rediscovered regularly. Like the Galapagos tortoise that was officially extinct for 113 years and the Voeltzkows Chameleon was extinct for 107. The University of Queensland considers it “highly probable” that the thylacine was still alive at least until the 90s based on video and photograph evidence, which again- Bigfoot isn’t real. The thylacine is. So it’s apples and oranges to try and make that comparison between them. Even the ivory billed woodpecker has just last year been likely photographed again. Like am I crazy here? Thylacine isn’t a cryptid. It just hasn’t been seen in a long time. Have you heard of the coelacanth? We only knew about it from fossil evidence until a fisherman found one living!
Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.
Well I have hope. It might be unlikely but that doesn’t make it impossible. And if it ever happens that one is officially captured or whatever I want you to remember me.
IIRC there was also a manipulated photo of a thylacine with a chicken that contributed to the perceprion that they were killing all the livestock, leading the government to put a bounty on them.
The story of their extinction is so sad. They were beautiful animals.
