Speculation, Fact and Fiction

The Guardian today has a piece about a new trove of skeletons found in Australia, of animals long since extinct, including the marsupial lion, or thylacoleo, which was nine feet long and reckoned to be a fearsome predator. Oh, and horned kangaroos. And ones that lived in trees - mind you, there still is one of those on New Guinea. I saw it on a David Attenborough BBC programme, and for an arboreal creature, it didn't really look comfortable in the branches.

A lot of these things all died out suddenly about 100,000 years ago and there's much debate as to whether that was due to climate change or the impact of hominids/early Man arriving.

What The Guardian article doesn't mention is that the Thylacoleo is an animal that a good number of cryptozoologists* are convinced is still alive out there, lurking in the remote corners of the Australian Bush. And let's be honest, there's a lot of remote out there.

I do like to hope that things like this can still be discovered - or rediscovered, like, for instance, the Thylacine/Tasmanian Wolf.

*cryptozoologists do the following:
determining a particular small insignificant brown bird on an Indonesian island is a different species to the small insignificant brown bird on the next island over;
investigating the spread of non-native species
finding creatures that have been thought extinct for years;
finding creatures entirely new to science, including quite big ones, not just bugs;
searching for things like the Yeti and/or Sasquatch;
developing fabulous theories to explain mankind's prediliction for myths about dragons and the like.