Recently, photos of an animal resembling the Tasmanian tiger (also known as the thylacine or marsupial wolf), which went extinct 88 years ago, surfaced online.
A man named Zak, along with his father, was vacationing on the island of Tasmania near Australia in April 2024. One evening, they encountered an unusual animal on the road.
At first, Zak thought it was just a strange-looking dog, but then the creature opened its mouth, revealing an unusually large jaw (“Just huge!”) and began screeching in a terrifying way unlike any dog.
According to Zak, the encounter with this “dog” lasted about 30 seconds, during which he managed to take several photos of the animal with his phone.
Zak didn’t rush to post the photos on social media. Instead, he first contacted Forrest Galante, an American wildlife expert. Galante had mixed feelings. He acknowledged that the animal in the photos looked exactly like an extinct Tasmanian tiger, but he struggled to believe the images were real.
“I really want to believe him (Zak), but this must be a hoax… My gut tells me it’s some kind of fake,” Galante said in his video.
After that, the pictures of the supposed Tasmanian tiger spread across the Internet, including on Reddit, sparking significant interest among users.
Many commented that the photos were “too good to be real,” while others believed that Tasmanian tigers might still survive in some hidden corners of Tasmania. Moreover, these are not the first recent photos of the Tasmanian tiger, just the clearest ones so far.
One of the last real photos of a Tasmanian tiger in a zoo.
“Only after I traveled around Tasmania did the possibility of a small population surviving not seem crazy to me. The wilderness of Tasmania is vast and difficult to access, and such places make up one-fifth of the entire territory,” wrote one commenter.
However, another user, identifying as a local resident, disagreed:
“I live in Tasmania, and if the thylacine still existed, someone would have hit it with a car by now, and we would have had an entire carcass.”