History
The earliest documented witness reports of the Queensland marsupial tiger date from 1871, with indigenous traditions of the yarri preceding these. Reports indicate that it is fast and agile (Welfare & Fairley, 1981). Reports have come consistently from the Northeast of Queensland. Though these have diminished in number since the 1950s, they continue to occur (the Beast of Buderim being one recent example of the phenomenon).
Thylacoleo, an animal of similar size and predatory habits, did live in Australia as recently as the late Pleistocene period, perhaps coexisting with the very first humans that arrived at Australia who were the ancestors of modern Australian Aborigines. However, scientists estimate that Thylacoleo went extinct 30,000 years ago. Modern sightings of an animal described as remarkably like Thylacoleo have led some researchers to speculate that a small relict population has somehow survived in remote areas. Cryptozoologists who promote the theory of survival of the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine Thylacinus cynocephalus, a Thylacinid, and also currently accepted as extinct, favour proposed survival of The Queensland Tiger. The fundamental difference between the two cases, however, is that the last Tasmanian Tiger in captivity died in 1936, and the species was not officially declared as extinct until 1986. This makes the prospect of species survival of the Thylacine more likely than that of Thylacoleo.
Read more about this topic: Queensland Tiger
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)