Tourist claims to have snapped Tasmanian tiger

March 1, 2005 - 4:16PM

A wildlife expert has revived the possibility that the Tasmanian tiger may not be extinct after claims that a tourist took pictures of the animal in the wild.

Wildlife expert Nick Mooney said while the image was "very much like a thylacine", the photograph needed to be authenticated before any action could be taken.

The German tourist and his Victorian brother showed the colour digital pictures to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on Friday.

The tourist claimed to have taken them during a bushwalking holiday in remote wilderness near Lake St Clair in central Tasmania earlier last month.

The men refused to leave copies of the pictures, and the state government has since encouraged the man to come forward again to authenticate the images.

Acting Environment and Planning Minister Steve Kons said determining the authenticity of the images was the vital first step of investigating the claims.

Mr Mooney - part of the nature conservation branch at Tasmania's Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment - has received hundreds of sighting reports in the past 20 years.

"There are plenty of people who believe they've seen a thylacine. Whether they have or not is a different issue," he said.

Mr Mooney said most sighting reports were based only on soft evidence - eyewitness accounts, old scats or shonky photographs - but he had received two reports in his career that he considered credible, neither of which could be confirmed.

In 1982 he undertook an extensive but unsuccessful search to confirm an earlier sighting near Arthur River in the state's north-west, reported by former wildlife officer Hans Naarding.

It was one of nine major searches for the animal since 1937. The only evidence uncovered has been "possible footprints".

"The classing as extinct is a political process, it's a bureaucratic thing to allow you to move on to deal with other species. It doesn't mean anything in biological terms. The animal doesn't give a stuff what it's classed as. It's either dead or it's not," Mr Mooney said.

The mountain pygmy possum was thought to be extinct until its rediscovery in 1966. By 1992, two geographically isolated populations had been found in Victoria and New South Wales.

"If you have an animal that has some kind of bizarre resistance to inbreeding, and a lot of island animals have because they've had problems in the past, maybe just a few (thylacines) could be overlooked somewhere. But it's a long time," Mr Mooney said.

Of the top 50 sighting reports received by the government in the last 20 years, half of those were from Victoria.

But Mr Mooney said the possibility of the animal living in Victoria was even more remote than finding a live thylacine in Tasmania.

The last known thylacine died in Hobart Zoo on September 7, 1936.

