Could favourite tiger be nature’s comeback king?
I WANT this animal to be alive, the Lazarus of the Cryptozoology world, the comeback king of the beasts.
Forget Nessie, Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Tasmanian Tiger has always been my favourite, ever since I attended the International Cryptozoology Conference in Edinburgh way back in 1988.
At the conference there was a chap from Germany who was convinced that the creature last recorded live in Hobart Zoo in 1936 was still alive and he had spent a fortune camped out over a number of years trying to get an evidential photograph in the Tasmanian outback; having said that, he also believed that the Clifden merman in Connemara, west of Galway was real. Yes, he was absolutely bonkers, as were half the delegates, but there’s nothing wrong with a passion and he was very sincere and enthusiastic.
Like any good family gathering, there were heated exchanges, especially concerning the existence of Mokelembembe, a sauropod dinosaur.
In the heart of Africa, in the Congo River Basin, it is said there lives a ferocious creature known to the local people as Mokelembembe.
Some say it is a huge beast, as big as an elephant and even though it is a herbivore it will violently attack any man or animal that comes near.
Others claim it has a long neck. It is semi-aquatic, and dwells in Lake Tele and the largely unexplored swamp jungles that surround the lake.
Many accounts of Mokele-mbembe describe it as something like a large, aquatic rhinoceros. And this is where the family fun really kicked in.
An American millionaire was setting up an expedition to find the creature, but he claimed it was only nine inches long and was most likely to be found under damp rocks like frogs and toads.
Seriously, it was so heated, they nearly came to blows over a non-existent dinosaur.
Cards on the table here, as I don’t believe in most of the improbable beasts and the branch of the ‘science’ I am really interested in, is the continued existence of actual known species.
For example, one of the world’s largest woodpeckers, the ivory-bill is one of six North American bird species suspected or known to have gone extinct since 1880.
The last conclusive sighting of the woodpecker was in Louisiana in 1944.
Since then this charismatic species has become the Elvis of the bird world, with whisperings over the years that it might still be alive in some secret hideaway.
Experts remained highly sceptical. That is, until now.
Eight independent sightings have been reported since early 2004 in the Big Woods region of eastern Arkansas, a 550,000-acre (220,000-hectare) corridor of swamps and floodplain forests.
The reports all came within two miles (three kilometres) of one another.
Some of the most famous extinct animals of recent times have been birds, but for every passenger pigeon or dodo, there’s a much bigger and much lesser-known casualty like the elephant bird or the eastern moa.
A largely unknown bird, which boosted the diet of European settlers in the 18th and 19th Century, the Eskimo curlew or Prairie Pigeon was a small, inoffensive bird that had the misfortune to migrate in a single, gigantic flock from Alaska and western Canada down to Argentina, via the western United States and back again.
The Eskimo curlew got it during the migration north, when American hunters could pick off dozens of birds with a single shotgun blast, while Canadians pounced on the fattenedup birds before they embarked on their return trip south.
The last confirmed sighting of the Eskimo curlew was about 40 years ago.
Cryptozoology is a rich seam and in the coming weeks I will introduce readers to a staggering variety starting next week with the wonderful Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine.