The director of Tasmania's National Parks at the time, Peter Morrow, decided in his wisdom to keep Naarding's sighting of the thylacine secret for two years. When the news finally broke, it was accompanied by pandemonium. I was besieged by television crews, including four to five from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America ,said Naarding.
Government and private search parties combed the region ,but no further sightings were made. The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair, a place many insist exists only in our imagination. But since then, the thylacine has staged something of a comeback, becoming part of Australian mythology.
There have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the beast since it supposedly died out, and the average claims each year reported to authorities now number 150. Associate professor of zoology at the University of Tasmania , Randolph Rose, has said he dreams of seeing a thylacine. But Rose, who in his 35 years in Tasmanian academia has fielded countless reports of thylacine sightings, is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled.
"The consensus among conservationists is that, usually, any animal with a population base of less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years, "says Rose. "Sixty years ago, there was only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo, "he says.
Dr.David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, whose PhD thesis was on the thylacine, says that despite scientific thinking that 500 animals are required to sustain a population, the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals and, while it does have some inbreeding problems, is still ticking along. "I'll take a punt and say that, if we manage to find a thylacine in the scrub, it means that there are 50-plus animals out there."
After all, animals can be notoriously elusive. The strange fish known as the coelacanth, with its proto-legs, was thought to have died out along with the dinosaurs 700 million years ago until a:specimen was dragged to the surface in a shark net off the south-east coast of South Africa in 1938.