EIGHTY years ago, almost to the day, a Hobart zookeeper locked up for the night, his mind most likely on getting home in time for dinner.

Benjamin – the last known thylacine on earth – was locked out of his shelter, and not for the first time. As the mist rolled down from Mt Wellington and settled over the city on the bitterly cold evening, nobody heard Benjamin’s whimpers as he shivered on the concrete floor of his cage. By morning the creature, malnourished and long-neglected, was dead. The Tasmanian tiger was no more.

At least, that’s the accepted story. Neil Waters thinks it might be more complicated than that.

The 48-year-old Adelaide horticulturalist is convinced that the thylacine may still be living on the Australian mainland – perhaps as close as the Adelaide Hills – and he’s on a mission to prove to his point.

Mr Waters’ tiger story began in the wooded northeast of Tasmania one day in 2010. He’d moved to the island state to rebuild his life after tragically losing his daughter in a car accident.

Out one afternoon walking his dog, Mr Waters became aware of footsteps in the bushes to the side of the trail.

“I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it – it was only 20m away at the most,” he says.

“Every time I stopped it stopped. I came up the hill and came out in a clearing where the bush wasn’t as thick. I was standing there calling out to the dog and this thing came out. I could see it sitting up behind a clump of rushes, sitting up like a dog. It was looking at me. It definitely wasn’t a dog; you could see the long stiff pointy tail.”

media_camera A LONELY LIFE: Benjamin, the last-known thylacine, died in a Tasmanian zoo in 1936.

Convinced he’d seen a thylacine, Mr Waters told others in the region, half-expecting to be scoffed at. Instead he was regaled with other tales of sightings and encounters, and was even shown pictures of the creature one man claimed to have captured with remote trail cameras.

“They were clear as a bell. A collection of thylacine pics from the last 20 years,” he says.

“He’s sat on that information to protect the animals. I call it passive-aggressive conservation and I’m not a big fan of it, but anyway. He’s sitting on golden photos, but because it’s Tassie and everything is so wound up in logging and forestry I think he’s a bit fearful to release them.”

Now thoroughly convinced the animal was still alive, Mr Waters began researching sightings on the mainland where it was supposed to have become extinct around 2000 years ago.

The results astounded him – hundreds, perhaps thousands of sightings from every state in Australia.

Many of them were in broad daylight, often involving farmers who were very familiar with foxes and dingoes, and had absolutely nothing to gain from making up stories.

Mr Waters formed a Facebook group – The Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, which now has more than one and half thousand members – and set about collating evidence of the creature’s presence on the mainland.

The group has now published two videos of possible tiger sightings, both of which have attracted significant media attention and put the creature’s fate back in the spotlight.

The first video was shot in the Adelaide Hills in February this year (Mr Waters prefers not to say exactly where the animal was seen, but says it was within the Mitcham Council boundary). Released on September 7 – National Threatened Species Day – it shows a brindle creature with a long tail, thick at the base, like a kangaroo’s.

At one point it appears to turn and look straight at the camera. It’s grainy footage, but it is at the very least intriguing.

The second video, shot in Victoria, has caused an even bigger stir. The handy-cam footage shows an animal with the same long, distinctive straight tail trotting through a paddock.

It has a large head, which the woman who took the footage describes as “prehistoric-looking”. The footage has been viewed online hundreds of thousands of times.

media_camera ON A MISSION: Thylacine hunter Neil Waters.

So how could it be true? How could an animal thought to have been extinct on the mainland for millennia have survived almost undetected?



Mr Waters believes that scientists either know the thylacine exists and are keeping the fact hidden in an effort to protect them, or that they’re simply too embarrassed to admit that they were wrong.

“There’s this stubborn belief throughout mainland Australian that thylacines are extinct, end of story, and that anything that leaves a print that looks remotely like a thylacine must be a feral dog or a fox and must be baited,” he said.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment, and a lot of pride involved. Nobody wants to be proved wrong. Case closed.

“But there is anecdotal evidence that has been popping up all over the joint for nearly 200 years that runs contrary to that, but we just keep ignoring it.

“There are thousands and thousands of sightings. I’ve got sightings from every single habitat you can think of in Australia – from the Snowys to the desert to the coast. It’s always the same – ‘bring us the proof and we’ll talk about it’, to which I say ‘no, you get off your arse and help us find it and then we’ll talk about it’.

“There is a huge resistance from the scientific field to look at this subject and investigate it because they just want it to go away.”



The lack of physical evidence, Mr Waters said, can be explained by the fact that a thylacine’s skeleton looks very similar to that of a dog or fox.

media_camera HUNTED TO EXTINCTION: Regarded as a threat to farm animals, thylacines had a bounty placed on their heads.

“There’s every chance that hundreds of thylacine remains have been walked past with people thinking they’re dog or fox bones,” he said.

“Also, they live in dens. Who’s to say they don’t go back into their dens to die? We just don’t know because not enough studies were done while they were around in numbers.”

The other problem for tiger hunters is the same one faced by the hunters of Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster and UFOs – nobody seems to be able to nail just one clear, unambiguous picture.

Mr Waters maintains that there’s actually a very simple explanation for this.

“You startle an animal and you might have three seconds – at the most – to get your phone out of your pocket, turn the camera on, and try to get some kind of shot,” he said.

“It’s not an easy thing to do.”

An intriguing piece of the mainland thylacine puzzle revolves around a small Tasmanian tiger carcass found in a cave on the Nullarbor in 1966.

The Mundrabilla Thylacine, now housed in the Western Australian Museum, is remarkably preserved. Its hide is completely intact and even its tongue and left eyeball were preserved. According to the scientists, the carcass was mummified thanks to the cave’s cool, dry atmosphere. Carbon dating tests show the body is about 4000 years old.

Many of those hoping to find a living thylacine, however, are unconvinced and say that the carbon dating could have been contaminated by water in the cave.

“It’s that fresh-looking that it had an eyeball and maggot casings next to it,” Mr Waters said. “And these sightings on the Nullarbor persist – they’re still seeing them out there. For an animal carcass to survive in a cave with an eyeball in it for 4000 years … well, that’s a big ask, I think. If they’re so confident about its age, let’s retest it. But nobody wants to do that.”

South Australia Museum senior research scientist and mammal expert Dr Cath Kemper said she thought the chances of finding a living thylacine were “almost zero”.



“But it would be very arrogant of me as a scientist to say that there’s absolutely no chance of ever finding one,” Dr Kemper said.



“I will say that I think there would be a much greater chance of finding a thylacine in Tasmania than there is on the mainland.”

Dr Kemper used the mountain pygmy-possum – a marsupial known only from fossils until one was found in 1966 – as an example of a creature that could hide in plain sight.

“The problem, of course, is that the thylacine is a much bigger animal than a pygmy-possum,” she said. As for the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, Mr Waters said there was plenty more to come.

“We’ve got a few cards up our sleeve,” Mr Waters said with a grin.

“By the end of October we’ll have another video out. Since we released that first video I’ve picked up about 20 more sightings from around Adelaide.

“I’d like to see South Australia declare the species extant, rather than extinct.

“That’s what I’d like to see. If there’s something we can do to raise awareness and possibly prove that it’s there, then let’s do it.”

Lazarus species: The creatures that came back from the dead

Coelacanth

This ancient-looking fish was known only from the fossil records and was thought to have died out 65 million years ago – until a fisherman caught one off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

Wollemi pine

Known only from fossils, living Wollemi pines were discovered in the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales in 1994. Fewer than 100 trees are known to be growing in the wild, but many now grow in gardens.

Bermuda petrel

Not seen since the 1620s, 18 nesting pairs were rediscovered in Bermuda in 1951. The population is recovering, but the bird is still listed as endangered.

Night parrot

There were no known sightings of this mysterious Australian bird (pictured) between 1912 and 1979, leading to speculation that it was extinct. A living specimen was captured in 2015 and the population is thought to be less than 250.