Maybe you thought it was just a cartoon character. But in reality it did exist. And you can see it not only in photos, but also in videos. Thanks to the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. He published the video of the last Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, which was recorded in 1935. It has been digitally restored.
Few records
The lack of material on the Thylacine makes every second of the moving picture really valuable. This video, recorded in 1935, was digitized and remastered in 4K. The Australian National Film and Sound Archive -NFSA for its acronym in English- just brought it to light. It can be seen who is the last representative of the species Thylacinus cynocephalus. It was a carnivorous marsupial from Australia and New Guinea that was extinct in the 20th century. The clip lasts about 21 seconds. It comes from the Tasmania travel documentary The Wonderland. It collects the last pictures of Thylacine, nicknamed Benjamin, a few months before his death in 1936. And of the disappearance of the species.
The audiovisual piece has been missing for the past 85 years. It shows the wolf, also known as a marsupial or thylacine, walking quietly in its enclosure. “The Tasmanian tiger is very rare today and had to leave its natural habitat due to the progress of civilization,” says the announcer of the video. At one point you can see two of their caretakers shaking their cages. They try to provoke a reaction in the animal. Or maybe one of the famous yawns that this marsupial showed characteristically when threatened.
the last one on the line
Benjamin was the last known thylacine. It survived in captivity after the death of the penultimate specimen of the London Zoo in 1931. It was purchased in the same year from the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Australia. The protagonist of the video would die 5 years later, on September 7, 1936. A day celebrated today as the National Endangered Species Day.
“We are very excited to make this digitized footage available to everyone,” said Simon Smith. He is the NFSA commissioner.
The legacy that lasts
The recently rediscovered material is part of a collection of less than a dozen Thylacine films. Fortunately, they resisted the course of the years. The films were made in the Beaumaris and London zoos. It is known that a little more than three minutes of black and white film of the carnivorous marsupial exists. In fact, no color or sound recordings of this amazing animal were ever found.
On the other hand, it is believed that Tasmania The wonderland It was filmed by filmmaker Sidney Cook. The travel diary shows some of Hobart’s main attractions. Sandy Bay Beach and the Lady Franklin Museum appear. Australia’s only double-decker tram system and the Beaumaris Zoo. But nothing is as spectacular as the video of the last Tasmanian tiger.
