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Posted: 09-03-2007 12:14 Post subject: Thylacine post 1936 sightings

(This thread is, for the moment, just a conglomeration of old ones. Once I've gathered all the stuff from the forum, I'll look to start splitting again and merging between the two thylacine threads. It will take a while, but in the meantime the vast majority of our thylacine stuff will be in one or other of them. Stu)

I was chatting to an elderly Greek man yesterday and, in passing, he mentioned that he had once seen a Tasmanian Tiger in the early 1950s in Greece. He said that a Bulgarian circus passed through his Greek village and one of the animals in the circus was a strange dog-like animal with stripes across its back. At the time he didn't know what it was but thirty years later he was in Australia and saw the famous old footage of a thylacine and immediately recognised it as the animal he saw years before.

I guess it's not outside the realms of possibility that a Bulgarian circus acquiring either a pup or a perhaps a breeding couple in the 1920s or early 1930s and having one thylacine survive through to the early 1950s. I don't suppose anyone else has heard of stories like this?

Z

Posted: 10-03-2007 12:09 Post subject:

Very interesting...

Posted: 26-06-2010 19:47 Post subject:

this one

Posted: 28-06-2010 00:58 Post subject:

Wow- A Bulgarian Circus? That's pretty far off for a Tassie Tiger.

And yet here I am WILLING them to have survived somewhere. Cool

Posted: 28-06-2010 07:42 Post subject:

Posted: 28-06-2010 10:03 Post subject:

I note various crossovers between the two threads on this sub-forum, "Possible post 1936 Thylacine sighting” ,and “Cryptids held in zoos or collections”. lordmongrove mentions in the latter, the suggestion that the “Girt Dog of Ennerdale”, which wrought massive sheep-slaughter in the Lake District in 1810, might have been an escaped thylacine. Per the “Wiki” article on the Girt Dog: “Travelling circuses and menageries of the time were known to contain what were described as “tiger wolves” – a description that fits the thylacine perfectly.”

I gather that one of the many theorised candidates for the identity of the Beast of Gevaudan, is the thylacine. This strikes me as exceedingly unlikely, if only because of the dates concerned: Beast-of-Gevaudan events were in the 1760s, when if I have things rightly, Tasmania had been discovered, but not yet explored or settled by Europeans.

Posted: 28-06-2010 10:37 Post subject:

Posted: 28-06-2010 13:55 Post subject:

Thylacines do appear to be a species which mightily engaged people's curiosity and affection, right from their discovery in Tasmania (very-late 18th century, if I have things correctly) -- with their seemingly immediately becoming valued as circus / menagerie / zoo specimens. It's a great pity that the species was, it seems, extremely reluctant to breed in captivity: had that not been so, the thylacine would very likely still be with us today, even if extinct in the wild.

I read on another Net site, "way back", about some alternative-history fiction work, in which thylacines become, in the 19th century, all the rage among the British upper crust; every nobleman worth his salt has a pet thylacine, or a whole pack of the beasts. If only...

Posted: 28-06-2010 14:54 Post subject:

Zilch5, they are allmost certainly still around in Tasmania,parts of Australia and parts of New Guinea.

Posted: 28-06-2010 18:21 Post subject:

I'd certainly like to hear the New Guinea evidence, I've heard a bit, dont they call it the Dobsina there? but haven't been able to find much.

Posted: 29-06-2010 00:26 Post subject:

Posted: 29-06-2010 06:56 Post subject:

Posted: 29-06-2010 10:14 Post subject:

Posted: 29-06-2010 10:56 Post subject:

I seem to remember,perhaps in an arthur c clark strange spookiness book,that a park ranger had taken a picture of tassie tiger,am i correct, or is it my dodgy old mind?

Posted: 29-06-2010 11:11 Post subject: