New images of the extinct Tasmanian tiger have emerged thanks to the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia (NFSA). They show the last known member of the species in a dirty cage .
At just 21 seconds , the new video clipped the cage at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. You can see it below.
NFSA
This clip is believed to be the last filmed of Benjamin, the last surviving Tasmanian tiger. The famous video existing until now was filmed in December 1933, while the newly discovered clip dates from 1935 . That places him just a year before Benjamin’s death in September 1936.
The clip was recently discovered in the NFSA vault and has been digitized in 4K and released online. In total, there is only a little over three minutes of video currently available. We don’t have any color video. As NFSA curator Simon Smith explains:
The scarcity of thylazine images makes every second of the moving image truly precious. We are very excited to make this digitized footage available to everyone online.
The Tasmanian tiger was native to Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea and is believed to have become extinct in the 20th century. It was the last living member of its genus (Thylacinus), whose other members lived in prehistoric times from the early Miocene .
Although long extinct on the Australian mainland when European settlers arrived, marsupial wolves survived until the 1930s in Tasmania.