Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [124]
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was located just behind Sul-livan's Cove. Growing in size since it was founded as the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1853, the museum complex incorporates the oldest surviving colonial building in Hobart as well as glassy, modern additions. Every year, the museum fields hundreds of inquiries about the thylacine. It's a mecca for thylacine seekers like ourselves. Walking into the galleries was like entering a dream museum, a temple dedicated to our long-lost love. There were taxidermies of thylacines inside glass cases draped in blue velvet. A watercolor of a thylacine dated 1833 by the famous limerick writer Edward Lear. A macabre pincushion fashioned from a thylacine's jawbone. In the natural history galleries, a film loop of the Tasmanian tiger played over and over again on a television monitor. The TV was positioned on top of a crate labeled “Beaumaris Zoo/Fragile/Hobart TAS.” Every time the loop replayed, it offered the following information:
Last known thylacine died in the Hobart zoo on 7 September, 1936.… September that year had very unusual weather. The days were extremely hot and the nights were very cold. Often the animal was left without access to its night sleeping quarters. Thus exposed to the extreme elements, the thylacine passed away that night.
The black-and-white footage made the tiger come palpably to life. It showed the tiger pacing about, crouching as if to spring, sniffing the edge of the zoo enclosure, devouring what looked like a chicken, looking at the camera with unnerving deep black eyes. How many extinct, or probably extinct, species had been filmed in this way? Not many. Though designed as a sort of eulogy to the thylacine, the exhibit didn't put the problem of the tiger's extinction to rest. The tantalizingly short film simply raised more questions. How had the tiger behaved in the wild? Was this really the last Tasmanian tiger or simply the last tiger to live in a zoo?
A glass case beside the television monitor held a log of bounties paid by the Tasmanian government to tiger hunters. The log wasn't the original but a reproduction produced by the Calligraphy Society of Tasmania. The pages showed £1 bounties paid from January 12 to June 7, 1898, and the localities where the skins were collected. In all, thirty-four dead Tasmanian tigers were turned in during that period, and the names of several places we had visited popped out: Stanley, Wynyard, St. Helens, Mole Creek.
We went to talk to David Pemberton, the museum's senior curator of vertebrate zoology. In his office, a taxidermy of a Tasmanian devil sat on a file cabinet, its mouth opened in a full-fanged snarl. On a counter a platypus taxidermy was set up with the front feet splayed out to show the ducklike webbing.
We wondered what David made of all the people who came seeking answers and the never-ending searches. Was looking for the thylacine like trying to get a glimpse of Architeuthis in the wild, difficult but still within the realm of possibility? Or was it more like the search for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster? Creatures that have never been proved to be anything more than imaginary. We weren't quite sure how to pose this question. One more blow to our thylacine dream might prove fatal to our expedition. Fortunately, Alexis jumped right in. “Do you ever hope that the thylacine still exists?”
“Well, we can't escape the fact that the tiger did exist, and it existed here well into the 1950s. It's unlikely that the last one to die in captivity was the last wild thylacine. Then sightings like Naarding's arguably put the animals into the 1970s and 1980s. That's not long ago. And that gives hope. You can still have hope.”
David had lived in Tasmania for more than twenty