Tales from the Crypt

Most of the bigger animals that have become extinct became so long ago, before humans realised efforts should be made to save them.

An exception to that (not the only one, unfortunately) is the Tasmanian tiger. The last one died in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, and there have been no confirmed sightings since.

It's not like the yeti or the Loch Ness Monster because the Tasmanian tiger defintely existed once.

You can see it's a beautiful animal with stripes on its back and tail. It's a marsupial iike a kangaroo or a wombat and is not related to the more familiar tiger at all. Some people call it the Tasmanian wolf.

 When the European settlers arrived in Tasmania they built farms and the tigers preyed on their sheep, so they were killed.

I don't suppose those farmers wanted to kill every single one of them, but that's what happened. The tiger, also known as the Tasmanian wolf or the thylacine, was made a protected species but that was too late, only two months before the last one died. 

If there are no confirmed sightings for 50 years, an animal is officially declared extinct, and that's what happened to the Tasmanian tiger.

But is it?

Australia's  a modern country but sparsely populated. There are more people in the Indian city of Delhi than there are in the whole of Australia, which is takes up nearly three million square miles and is the sixth biggest country in the world.

Even then, most of the people in Australia live near the coast, so there are vast areas where no one goes. There are mountains, dense forests and an awful lot of rain.

Every now and again people say they have seen a Tasmanian tiger.

There was one as recently as the end of 2025.

A million people every year visit Loch Ness and every single one of them (including me) looks for Nessie.

And over the years there have been dozens of expeditions to find it, of varying degrees of scientific diligence.

(By the way, in The Unicorn Society, Felicity would say it's not an it, it's a he or a she. In fact, a he and a she because if Nessie is alive, she's a perfectly normal animal just like any other. All right, not quite like any other. But not a monster)

Nobody's ever found anything conclusive but on the other hand there have been things that cannot be easily explained. 

To tell the truth, in this photo from earlier this year, below, I'm struggling to see anything at all apart from the loch. Maybe the photo doesn't do it justice. The witnesses said they saw a S-shaped wake extending quite a distance, so maybe they just didn't get the picture right.

Last year, different sighting, the photo was a bit better.

Nessie, or one of the million other things that could have made that shape?

People have been saying there's something in that lake for 1,500 years. It's the deepest lake in Britain, 226 metres to the bottom. The tallest building in Britain is The Shard in London, and even that's only 300 metres high. So pretty deep, and because of the peat that washes into the loch from the surrounding hills, you can't see a thing once you get anywhere near the bottom.

This being Britain, a modern country with all sorts of technical equipment, many people have gone to great and expensive lengths to find Nessie.

And even though they've never found her, they did come up with some stuff that couldn't quite be explained away as a school of fish or something else we know about.

And get this. There was a fish, called a coelocanth (that’s pronounced seal-o-canth) that was thought to have died out around 60 million years ago, give or take the odd million years. It lived at the time of the dinosaurs and the only reason we know about it was because of fossils.

Everyone, all the zoologists and naturalists, didn't even think about it still being alive. Until it turned up.