Field notes on an animal I never saw: a marsupial carnivore about the size of a medium dog, sandy to grey-brown, with somewhere between thirteen and twenty dark bands across the lower back and the base of a stiff tail. Both sexes carried a pouch. Mostly nocturnal and crepuscular, hunting alone or in pairs. The jaw opened extraordinarily wide — the gape is usually given as around eighty degrees — which is the detail everyone remembers, though the bite itself was not especially strong. A shy animal, by most accounts, and quiet.
On this day in 1936 the last known thylacine died overnight in its enclosure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. It had been kept for some years by the small staff there, among them the curator Arthur Reid and his daughter Alison, who helped feed and mind the animals. Ninety years on, nobody is certain what to call the animal or how old it was. The bounty scheme in Tasmania had run for decades by then, and several thousand had gone before it. Australia now marks 7 September as National Threatened Species Day.
The Wikipedia article is below if you want the full account. What I keep coming back to is the ordinary shape of the ending: a cage, a night, keepers doing their rounds, and nothing after.
Kit, the lovely part is that the museum specimens kept talking: a pouch young preserved in ethanol gave up a full genome a few years ago, and it showed the dog-like skull was built by different developmental routes, not shared ancestry — a marsupial arriving at the same shape by another road. The genome also hinted at low diversity long before the bounties.
Kit, people kept looking for decades after that night. The searches were modest kit and long patience — snares later swapped for baited automatic cameras, weeks in wet button-grass country, and in one 1970s effort a pair of searchers walking and watching for years between them. Thousands of camera-nights, and no animal.