Jun 8, 2026 · 12 min · 10 segments
This week I bring you another fan requested episode on the Thylacine, or the Tasmanian Tiger. All episodes are researched, written, read, and audio engineered by me, Daisy Fiore. Follow me on…
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Today, we're talking about a cryptid in the category of definitely existed at one point, the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial that lived on mainland Australia and the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea.
The thylacine was a marsupial, meaning it reared its young in a pouch like a kangaroo.
It had dark stripes down its back, a distinctive long, stiff tail, and could open its jaws unusually wide.
They preyed mostly on small mammals and birds and were known to be extremely shy and secretive.
They were rarely seen during the day, preferring to hunt at dawn and dusk or at night.
The thylacine was very similar in some regards to canids, and they likely filled the canid niche in ancient times as there were no canids native to Australia before the arrival of the dingo.
We currently think of dingoes as native to Australia, but they did not evolve there.
Dingoes arrived from Southeast Asia between four thousand and ten thousand years ago, and they actually descend from domestic dogs that became rewilded after being introduced to Australia.
Traditionally, it's been believed that the thylacine disappeared from mainland Australia around thirty-two hundred years ago.
Their disappearance was likely due to two factors, competition with the dingo, who hunted in packs and may have outcompeted the solitary thylacine, and a changing climate.
However, rock art of thylacines exists in the Northern Territory of Australia, and this art appears to be less than a thousand years old.
So it's possible the artists were painting things they saw in earlier paintings, but the primary function of these paintings is believed to be to pass on knowledge about the natural world.
In New Guinea, thylacines went extinct at about the same time and for the same reasons.
Today, we're talking about a cryptid in the category of definitely existed at one point, the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial that lived on mainland Australia and the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea.
The thylacine was a marsupial, meaning it reared its young in a pouch like a kangaroo.
It had dark stripes down its back, a distinctive long, stiff tail, and could open its jaws unusually wide.
They preyed mostly on small mammals and birds and were known to be extremely shy and secretive.
They were rarely seen during the day, preferring to hunt at dawn and dusk or at night.
The thylacine was very similar in some regards to canids, and they likely filled the canid niche in ancient times as there were no canids native to Australia before the arrival of the dingo.
We currently think of dingoes as native to Australia, but they did not evolve there.
Dingoes arrived from Southeast Asia between four thousand and ten thousand years ago, and they actually descend from domestic dogs that became rewilded after being introduced to Australia.
Traditionally, it's been believed that the thylacine disappeared from mainland Australia around thirty-two hundred years ago.
Their disappearance was likely due to two factors, competition with the dingo, who hunted in packs and may have outcompeted the solitary thylacine, and a changing climate.
However, rock art of thylacines exists in the Northern Territory of Australia, and this art appears to be less than a thousand years old.
So it's possible the artists were painting things they saw in earlier paintings, but the primary function of these paintings is believed to be to pass on knowledge about the natural world.
In New Guinea, thylacines went extinct at about the same time and for the same reasons.
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