Thylacine

Reports cluster in the button-grass plains and wet eucalypt forest of
Tasmania’s Central Highlands, in country that is mostly logging track,
tussock and standing water. Witnesses describe an animal the size and shape
of a medium dog, sandy or grey-brown, carrying between sixteen and eighteen
dark bands across the lower back and the base of the tail. Two details recur
and are worth recording: the tail is described as stiff, held out straight
and never wagging, and the jaw is described as opening far wider than a
dog’s — past a right angle, in several accounts.

This file should have closed on 7 September 1936, when the last animal held
in captivity died overnight in Hobart. It did not. What holds it open is not
any single account but the shape of the whole set. The reports have not
decayed the way hoax clusters decay. They arrive from people with nothing to
gain and no apparent knowledge of one another. And they keep volunteering
the stiff tail, a detail almost entirely absent from the
photographs and drawings the public actually sees.

Half a century of government survey, camera trapping and scat analysis has
produced nothing that survives examination. No body, no den, no image that
holds up under enlargement. The file stays open because the descriptions
keep agreeing about details the popular record does not emphasise, and
because no one has yet explained why they should.