On the Trail of the Baw Baws Beast?
SEPTEMBER 1998: A close encounter with a living Thylacine?
We've just got back from the second of this month's field excursions, this time up in the eastern mountain
country. It's flooded, wet & miserable up there. Late on the 24\9\1998. I decided to explore along a mountain creek which had plentiful flat mud deposited along its banks after recent heavy flows.
I'd used up all my digital frames and had ONE shot left in my analogue camera when I came upon the first
tracks. Damn! ONE pic to go at the end of a long day and THAT'S when I have to find something interesting. I DIDN'T have any Plaster-of-Paris with me and I FORGOT to lay something next to the print for a scale. (Actually,
I thought I had a 36 shot roll in the camera but it must have been a 24 with an extra frame.) Going back isn't an option either - the tracks will have been washed away by then. Anyway, here is what happened ...
| The creek leads deep into the rainforest. Australia was once covered by such vegetation. One gets the feeling of stepping far back into Pleistocene times. |  |
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As I push further in, the fern canopy closes over and daylight is dimmed. It's a world of perpetual twilight and running water down here. One has to crouch low and stumble along, holding equipment up, out of the water. Yes, I'll admit it; I am a little nervous. Our bipedalism is said to perturb most animals who, as quadrupeds, supposedly find us quite frightening. But down here, where I am obliged to scrabble about on hands and knees, hardly able to see in the semi-dark, impeded by water and cumbered by equipment, here a human might not seem so intimidating after all to a powerful, self-confident predator ... |
TRACKS FOUND ...
"TRACKS" Clickable Image (140KB)
The original picture was taken on Thursday, September 24, 1998, with a SAMSUNG AF ZOOM 700 analogue camera using AGFA HDC100 colour film. After retrieving the finished photos from the developer's lab, I re-photographed the picture with a KODAK DC50 digital camera and converted the image to a "high-quality" JPEG file in order to
retain maximum detail in a format suitable for internet dissemination.
It is accessible via this clickable image. Apart from cropping the periphery of the photo using COREL PHOTO-PAINT, and inserting a copyright protection mark, I have not enhanced or processed the image. The full-size 140KB image
is made available for people who may wish to do their own image analysis\enhancement in the course of private study or research.
PLEASE NOTE: permission is given to reproduce images on this website for personal study or research purposes, however NO permission is herewith granted for commercial use.
The tracks were apparently fresh, made within the hour because there had been intermittent showers all day. Although they were in mud, under cover of a fern canopy, water percolated down during rain. The tracks, though, didn't show any pitting from water drops although the surrounding mudflat did.
Firstly, I do NOT claim that these prints were made by a living thylacoleonid : there are other candidates we must eliminate first. However, the fifth, somewhat opposed, digit on the front paw is, shall we say, interesting, in view of what is known about the contruction of Thylacoleo's "hands".
Some
of the details, especially the animal's thumb, aren't especially obvious from this lone picture, so it should be viewed in conjunction with the sketch I drew at the time. The fifth digit seems definitely to represent an opposable thumb. The front prints, which are bigger than the rear ones are about the size of a man's hand with fingers spread out & thumb tucked in. Dimensions are approx 17cm x 12 cm. It's a heavy animal because
the impressions were sunk deep in the mud.
We can rule out kangaroos, wallabies, cats & dogs, I think. The wombat, koala and, perhaps, the Tasmanian Devil are the candidates we'll have to consider carefully. I shall try to find out what their prints look like. Trouble is, they all are likely to be too small : it's going to take a pretty impressive koala or wombat to fit this particular shoe ....
Can we rule out the possibilty that these prints were made by a thylacine? It was suggested to me recently (December 1999) that Thylacinus cynocephalus is a candidate to be considered. View the photograph and consider the history of the alleged sightings of Thylacines in Victoria and you decide ....
These were the clearest tracks on the creek bank: I departed with the impression of a beast which locomotes
by placing its forepaws firmly on the ground beneath its chest, and then swings its hind feet forward to the outside of its "hands", which are presumably used to support its upper body during the manoeuvre. Exactly the same as a kangaroo, except the front paws here are larger than the rear ones, which, in any case, lack the roo's elongated central claw.
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