Thylacine (6 page)

What size were they? Museum specimens give a fair indication, and one can speculate that some of the older written accounts are exaggerated. A report that may be presumed credible, from a newspaper in 1885, concerns a shepherd and his dog near Launceston investigating a sheep kill, one of five over an unknown period of time. The dog got into ‘a severe fight [with] a very large tiger'. The shepherd shot the tiger, ‘which measured 5ft. 4in. from the nose to the tip of the tail'.
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If one assumed a mean adult body weight of about 25 kilograms, that animal would equate to the size of an average adult striped hyaena, African wild dog, snow leopard or Dalmatian.

The illustrations on page 36 provide useful mammal size comparisons, although it is important to remember that existing photographs and moving images of thylacines show considerable size variations between adult males and females, males being considerably larger.

Although the thylacine's head has a distinct canine profile and alertness, that resemblance falls away at the bulging jawline. The famously wide gape of the jaws is the clearest possible indicator of its predatory nature. A vice-like grip, preferably at the head, neck or upper body region, brings the prey to a halt and kills it by suffocation and/or internal crushing. Wallabies are the preferred prey.

Captive thylacines were seen to consume some bone as well as the flesh of carcasses given to them. However, their wide jaw gape does not equate to a bone-crunching ability; the size and distribution of their teeth do not support that notion. Their populous relatives, Tasmanian devils, on the other hand, have immensely strong jaws and will readily consume bone.

Studies of the thylacine's musculature and skeleton also engender debate. It possibly lacked the ability to stiffen the wrists and digits, which is a requirement for quadrupeds to run at speed. This would lend weight to accounts of its being a ponderous or awkward-looking runner. A presumably authoritative 1983 account states: ‘It had a rather stiff gait and could not run very fast'.
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Paddle cites evidence to the contrary, and also refers to their ‘rapid pursuit' hunting technique.
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This presumed technique in turn must contend with contradictory evidence. Well-known Tasmanian bushman-trapper Mont Turner in the 1960s spoke of them ‘prowling along patiently after their prey'.
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As a child he had helped his father trap the two thylacines which are in Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Raymond Hoser agrees: ‘The Thylacine is not particularly agile. The hindquarters slope downwards and this, together with the stiffly held tail, which is rigidly united to the spine, forces the animal to run with a peculiar stiff, loping movement'.
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Ongoing skeletal anatomy studies at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, however, now suggest that the thylacine is capable of genuine speed and an ability to turn swiftly and precisely, due to its narrow chest. (Fleeing wallabies exhibit a good turn of pace!)

It is arguable that generations of scientists have peddled and recycled misleading thylacine information, of which a prime example is the gait/speed. Why, for example, would nature spend millennia endowing a predator with such a hindrance of a tail that it ‘forces' the animal into an awkward form of locomotion?

Earlier skeletal studies had been used to argue in favour of the animal having a bipedal tendency, that is, an ability to hop like its distant relatives the herbivorous marsupials. Certainly, the rear leg can be flattened at the ankle, but to thereby infer kangaroo-like locomotion requires a metaphorical leap of faith

A unique animal. As an ‘extension' of the body, the tail is powerful and possibly
rudder-like; the hind legs appear to be shorter than the forelegs but this is because the
versatile marsupial ankle flattens, creating a ‘foot' which might have a residual
hopping function; the thick neck supports an extraordinary jaw.
(Michael Sharland) and imagination. The thylacine's far closer marsupial relatives, the Tasmanian devil and the tiger cat, are strictly quadrupedal. The belief in a bipedal form of movement may have arisen in response to a number of early written accounts that refer to it briefly bounding and/or hopping, particularly when chasing or being chased.
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Cat-like abilities were also ascribed to it, in being able to jump fairly high and also to leap with agility from one raised point to another. Exaggerated or not, all of these features would require a sound balancing mechanism. The thylacine had a long, powerful tail; surely a prominent asset, though far from having a truly pentapedal (fifth-limb) function. The tail could be used as a rudder, to improve the animal's balance and thus its ability to run and turn swiftly. The tail also has a clear social function: swishing/wagging to indicate anger; held out straight when disturbed or threatened; and held vertically when sexually aroused, for both visual and olfactory communication. A crest of hair at the end of the tail can be raised, like hackles (this is also a feature of the Tasmanian devil).

The following account, if accurate, vividly describes the tail—and is a rare instance of a person being attacked:

Adventure with a Native Tiger.—It is by no means generally believed that there are native animals that will face a man. Nevertheless, it is so. On Monday, as Mr. B. Stevenson, a sheep farmer on the North Esk, was going round his run, a large native tiger rushed close up to him. He hit it with his walking stick, which broke with the blow. The tiger, uninjured, turned and ran away about ten paces, then faced round, growling very fiercely, and came up a step at a time to within 6ft. or 8ft. Then he stood growling, and with his tail wagging backward and forward after the fashion of a cat on the point of catching a bird. Mr. Stevenson's only means of defence was his pocket-knife. He could not even get hold of a stone. However, after due consideration the animal evidently deemed discretion the better part of valour, and made off for an adjacent dogwood scrub. Formerly tigers were very troublesome to the sheep farmers on the North Esk River.
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Finding evidence of the thylacine's contact with the ground in the form of spoor (paw-prints), finding scats, or a lair, have long been held out as the most likely proof of its continuing existence. Its prints are not dissimilar to a dog's and, as previously noted, might also be mistaken for a wombat's. A dog-like quality also applies to its droppings, which again might bring such evidence into question. A typical lair is known to be a shallow rock cave with nesting material covering the floor. Hollow logs, dense shrubs, overhangs and rocky outcrops are also used. A captive thylacine at Washington's Smithsonian Institute zoo was observed to carry hay in its mouth for nest-building. It is also possible that, like devils, thylacine families use more than one lair. (Hyaenas frequently move their cubs between lairs.) Whatever the case, discovery of a lair in current use in the extensive Tasmanian wilderness would cause great excitement, and would be surpassed only by an unambiguous sighting.

Any number of colourful and imaginative descriptions have been applied to the noises the thylacine makes. Writing down a sound is difficult at the best of times, which partly explains the uncertainty over this particular attribute. Needless to say there are no recordings of its vocalisations. Confusion with other animal noises has also played its part, most notably with the shrieks and screams of the Tasmanian devil at night, noises which are most unsettling to the uninitiated. A ‘coughing bark' would appear to describe the thylacine's more usual vocalisation. An expert who would have heard it many times, Alison Reid, Hobart Zoo's last curator, wrote the sound as ‘ah-ah-ah-ah'. This indicates a muted level. In describing his thylacine capture, Mont Turner recollected that the animal ‘couldn't get free and he coughed with rage. It was the same cough I'd heard many a night as I lay in my bunk in the camp'.
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But this was just one part of the vocal range. Paddle devotes considerable space to reconstructing and analysing five distinct vocalisations and provides written evidence that the sounds could be quite loud. Far less inclined to be certain—reflecting that uncertainty is the governing factor in so much information about the thylacine—is David Pemberton, zoology curator of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. He cites a woman who reported that it has a ‘ping'-sounding call. Were that to find its way into a newspaper, says Pemberton, ‘then suddenly we have the sixth call of the thylacine: the ping call'.
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Why the stripes? They too are surely multifunctional. The traditional explanation is camouflage but, as with the stripes of the zebra, reassessment of the seemingly obvious is no bad thing. Individual recognition is a likely function, as is the converse of camouflage: a visible predator striking sudden panic into a prey group, which flees, with the weakest quickly becoming the target. Striped and spotted cats hunt like this.

A less desirable outcome of having a striped hide is that a thylacine waistcoat apparently became a sought-after fashion item in Victorian England and in the United States. Although folklore has it that they were popular, no such waistcoat is now known to exist, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's Kathryn Medlock, who maintains the museum's thylacine collection and researches thylacine collections and information worldwide, is sceptical: ‘It was written once by [thylacine fanatic and former head of the Tasmanian Film Corporation] Norm Laird and it's been quoted ever since. I've been through his papers and I've been through export deeds and we've never found anything. Apparently one was sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum, so I wrote to them and they said no, that never happened'.
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Reproduction and its consequences arc across anatomy and physiology. The female thylacine raises up to four young, having that number of nipples in her backward-opening pouch. Breeding is confidently thought to take place once a year. It follows that the thylacine family unit is small. (African hunting dogs have up to sixteen pups in a litter.) It may even be that the father—which, like the devil, has its testes in a semi-pouch— doesn't form part of this family unit. What is certain is that the young stay permanently in the pouch for the first few months of life as fur and limbs develop, then spend a period of time outside the pouch and fully mobile, but still returning to it until they are weaned. Thereafter, speculation and conflicting hearsay again take over. Do the cubs run with the mother while she hunts, or does she stash them in the den, returning there with food for them? The relatively large number of mothers and cubs captured for zoos and bounty claims indicates that the cubs were often with the mother. (Mary Roberts, who owned and ran the original Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, wrote that thylacines were attentive mothers.)

Thylacine males and their closest relatives Tasmanian devils have pseudo-pouches in
which the testes are normally protected.
(Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery)

The fundamental notions of territory and home range must also be inferred, because conflicting first-hand reports indicate the animal as having been strongly territorial but also as wide-ranging and even nomadic. (The Tasmanian devil is not particularly territorial.) Could it be that as the European settlers dispersed across the island state they observed both natural thylacine behaviour and behaviour influenced by human encroachment? Guiler suggests that the killing of thylacines freed up choice areas of territory into which new individuals or family groups moved, so creating ‘an impression of constant movement'.
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It is likely that in their natural state, perhaps especially on an island with distinct microclimates, thylacine populations would tend to confine themselves to defined, scent-marked ranges. Thus Guiler's view makes sense—that when nature's equilibrium is disturbed, unlikely patterns emerge and can appear to be normal.