The case AGAINSTT.
carnifex surviving near **** in Victoria.
The arguments against this entire, extraordinary
narrative are so numerous and powerful that it's hard to know where to
begin. But here goes anyway ...
1/ Europeans have lived in and travelled through the area for about 150 years. How come NO ONE has trapped, poisoned or shot it? What about all the 1080 that's been used in the bush for years? Not a single dead T. carnifex as a result? The animal appears to have little fear of solitary humans and has been reported to approach lone ramblers very closely. Behaviour like that is, surely, a perfect prescription for getting itself shot?
2/ It's been killing cattle for decades. Do you mean to say that ALL the farmers who have lost stock over, at least, the last 90 years have been conservation minded altruists who wouldn't harm a hair on the animal's head?
3/ My first eye-witness saw the cat in his car's headlights. About half the big-cat reports quoted in newspapers are of animals illuminated by car head lights. How come one has never been run over and its dead body brought in? How come council road workers have never reported a dead one? One sees by country roadsides dead animals of every category. What's so special about this one that cars miss every time?
4/ The fossil record of T. carnifex stops in the late Pleistocene. If they're still around, how come farmers, bush walkers, fossickers etc. have never found a rotting carcass or skeleton. T. carnifex's teeth are unusual, to say the least, and its skull would surely attract a second look if noticed lying about on the forest floor. One presumes that these animals are not immortal and must, therefore, leave their remains someplace. Yet not a bone from a modern survivor has ever been brought to light.
5/ The beasts reported from **** are obviously impressive and powerful predators which would seem to occupy the top rung in their food chain. Some of their number appear to grow to a size which would demand respect. How come none of them has ever made a meal of a human when, it seems likely, they would be easily capable of doing so, given the right circumstances? Can we assume that all attacks on humans were invariably fatal and left not one mutilated survivor to gurgle out the tale with his dying breath?
Even if the animal is intimidated by adult humans, children would, one imagines, be a different matter. What about the furore that always ensues when a child goes missing? In such a case the forest would be searched through hill and dale. Even if only one person every ten years unaccountably vanished in the forest, the locale would, over a hundred years or so, acquire a certain reputation. The fact that it has not appears strongly to indicate that the animal does not make a habit of hunting and eating people. But predators like big cats are opportunistic killers. Is such restraint likely?
6/ In the 19th century, naturalists scoured Australia from end to end in order to catalogue the species unique to this continent. You can't hide a large predatory animal. They leave half eaten remains, dung, claw marks on trees and all sorts of signs for the sharp-eyed to spot. Assuming that naturalists one hundred years ago were neither grossly incompetent nor unduly indolent, how could they possibly have missed an animal like this one?
7/ In order to accept the Thylacoleo hypothesis, we have to accept that thylacoleonids have been living in Victoria for millennia, yet the youngest known fossils date to about 19,000 years. That's a big gap! On the other hand, if we go for the panther theory, we have only to believe that panthers or pumas escaped from custody sometime in the last 100 years and have eluded capture for that relatively short time. That, surely, is a more plausible scenario?
1/ It's known that T. carnifex did formerly inhabit Victoria. Fossil remains, about 26,000 years old, have been found at the Lancefield Swamp(1) palaeo site in central Victoria, quite close to the Great Diving Range. The youngest fossil remains in Victoria, appear to date from about 19,000 ybp(2). Not really an impossible gap. It's not as if we're claiming a middle Jurassic dinosaur, for instance.
A consideration to be weighed heavily in the "fossil gap" context is the fact that Australian palaeontological dates are notoriously uncertain. Also relevant, of course, is the fact that Australian palaeontology is dismally under funded by the Government. As for the corporate sector, they have plenty of dough to throw away sponsoring beer and circuses for the masses but none to spare for anything of intellectual value. Figures ...
Consequently, palaeontological exploration in Australia has barely scratched the surface. (Man, I just can't resist a God-awful pun!) It seems plausible that, faced with the aridification of the continent which occurred at the height of the northern hemisphere glaciation, Thylacoleo retreated to refugia in the Great Dividing Range. How many late-Pleistocene, early-Holocene fossil sites in the mountains await discovery? Given the present state of palaeo resourcing, they shall assuredly have to wait a long time yet.
2/ The supposed ancestors of T. carnifex, namely the burryamids(3) or pygmy possums, still inhabit the Great Dividing Ranges, notably in central to eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales. In other words, around the area where the beast is reportedly seen.
Such a state of affairs would be in happy accord with evolutionary theory which requires that a descendant species first appears in or near to, and maintains for a time some association with, the homeland of its forebears. The most notable example of the strength of this requirement is perhaps Charles Darwin's prediction that evidence of humanity's earliest ancestors would be found in or near Central Africa because that is where our closest relatives are still to be found. That prediction was made in the second half of the 19th century, decades before any hominid fossils had been discovered, in Africa or any place else.
Of course, Thylacoleo was many evolutionary steps removed from its putative forebears, the burryamids. But if they can still be found in the home range, why not their descendants?
3/ These animals, being the local top predators, would be extremely few in number and not likely to be seen often.
4/ The great climatic dessication and consequent mass extinction of Australia's megafauna towards the end of the Pleistocene certainly removed nearly all the big animals from the continent's interior. However, modern rainfall and general environmental conditions in the Great Dividing Range today are not all that different from times long ago. Many areas have remained more or less undisturbed in spite of European settlement in lowlands and valleys. We can surely imagine that a versatile predator could have held on there.
Even in the face of the great late Pleistocene dying, the Thylacine or Marsupial Wolf did manage to survive on the mainland until being finally displaced by dingoes introduced in recent times, geologically speaking, by the aborigines.
We may note, in passing, that the dingo, being a terrestrial predator would have offered direct competition to the likewise terrestrial Thylacine. But what imported animal species could have been a direct competitor with the arboreal Thylacoleo?
Europeans may well have caused a diminution in numbers of T. carnifex's prey, presumably kangaroos and wallabies. In the absence of alternative food sources, such a circumstance would have threatened the continued existence of any surviving T. carnifex population.
But Europeans have also introduced many new species which might serve as culinary replacements. Feral pigs and dogs, maybe wild brumbies or their foals, certainly foxes and rabbits, for instance.
5/ Some weight might be placed on the absence of Aboriginal legends relating to big cats in New South Wales and Victoria. I've heard it suggested that, because the only place where such folklore includes a "wild cat" is Queensland, then Queensland is the only place where such an animal is likely to be found.
However, as my friend **** thoughtfully pointed out after I had related this story, traditional aboriginal society in nearly all of Australia has been, for all practical purposes, totally extinguished. Their traditional knowledge of rare native animals, or legends of extinct ones, would therefore have been lost. Contrary assertions by mixed blood descendants should be discounted: many of them, after all, are hopeful of staking successful land claims based upon the accident of their racial ancestry.
But, in north Queensland where aboriginal people have a continuous or, at least, less disrupted history, there, so I'm told, they do have a big cat folklore. So the argument can in fact be turned on its head: where native Australians have maintained their traditions and contact with their local environment, then the big cats appear in their local lore. Where such a circumstance is not true, the big cats could still exist and yet the aborigines' descendants might have no genuine knowledge of them.
6/ Science has a long history of extinct animals being unexpectedly rediscovered or unknown ones being recognised. In such cases, it invariably turns out that the creatures were well known to local people for generations previously.
It's also frequently the case that claims for some putatively extinct animal's continued existence, or the discovery of an unusual new genus, are tenaciously disputed by establishment science, sometimes even in the face of strong evidence. By way of example, one could advert to the cases of the coelocanth and the platypus.
Your writer by no means asserts that the animal being considered here definitely exists. But some local people do hold that belief. It must be admitted that such a pattern does conform to instances from history.
The reportees are, almost entirely, country folk. It's easy for city dwellers to dismiss many of them as possibly "eccentric". This is not a legitimate course to follow. In my opinion, we must assign at least some weight to personal observation. Especially in cases where observations from widely separated parts of the continent tend to possess a certain sameness of character and where some physical evidence, in the form of animal kills and plaster casts are available.
Because such a creature is unexpected, it's easy to provide theoretical reasons why it should not exist. From there it's but a small step to conclude that it does not exist. That particular chain of reasoning is one of the most egregious intellectual errors it's possible to commit, in my opinion.
Unlike other fields of intellectual endeavour, natural science is rooted in empirical facts. And facts can only be discovered, never deduced. (So as to head off nitpickers, I exclude mathematics from the definition of "natural science".) While skepticism is an essential part of the scientific process there is such a thing as pathological scepticism. Although the proposition that Thylacoleo is still alive seems hugely unlikely, I strongly advocate keeping an open mind until - or if? - some hard data become available.
7/ I entirely agree with the proposition that escaped pumas are, far and away, a more plausible explanation than a hidden survivor from the deep past. However, scientific enquiry relies upon observation. With reservations, I think we must therefore grant some weight to witnesses' accounts.The animal which actual eyewitnesses describe just does not seem to me, subjectively I admit, to be a puma.
We seem to have here a clash between our theoretical
expectation that such a thing cannot be and descriptions
in our hand of something that apparently is. Such a state
of affairs jars my sense of - I don't know how to put it - my sense of
how the world ought to be? I just can't walk away and forget about
it.