The Tasmanian tiger is still extinct. The reports of its existence are greatly exaggerated.
The large marsupials, which looked more like wild dogs than tigers and spread across Tasmania and mainland Australia, were officially known as a thylacine, and became extinct in 1936. But on February 23, Neil Waters becomes president of Thylacine Awareness. Group Australia, has promised conclusive photographic evidence of a surviving thylacine. According to the four photos, a family of thylacines, including a juvenile, moved through a dense brush. The announcement started a wave of excitement among game lovers.
But the analysis by thylacine specialists quickly dismissed the photos as a case of false identity. The event is the latest in a tradition of extravagant allegations about photographic or video evidence of lost or unknown species not inventing. Why do these cycles occur so frequently, and sometimes experts also convincingly? The answer, psychologists say, may lie in the human mind and how we process information that is both known and difficult to perceive.
Although such recordings are sometimes a joke, it appears from many photos and videos of real animals, even if it is not what people say. In 2005, a WWF camera trap captured footage of a ‘mystery carnivore’ – probably a flying squirrel – in the jungles of the Indonesian Borneo. In 2007, 2011 and 2014, cuts of hairless dogs and raccoons were described in Texas as chupacabras.
In the same year, a kayaker recorded footage claiming to have displayed an extinct woodcutter in ivory in a swamp of Arkansas, sparking coverage and great scientific interest. Many experts have finally come to the conclusion that the bird is probably a woodcutter.
It is not impossible for the suspected species to reappear. Last month, news of the rediscovery of the Black-Browed Babbler, who had been missing since the 1840s, appeared after two Indonesian men captured and photographed a specimen. A day later, an entomologist announced the discovery of a small population – just six specimens – of the Australian robe, last seen in 1923.
This is part of the reason why hopeful researchers were the prospect of taking thylacine uptake. Unlike Bigfoot or Nessie, such animals were undoubtedly real, they were well photographed while alive and they almost became extinct in living memory. Capturing a photo of one does not necessarily look like a bit.
And in the age of smartphones, there are cameras everywhere. In fact, footage taken by camera traps or amateur physicists can help determine the presence and activity patterns of animals in the area, said Holly English, a doctoral student in wildlife ecology and behavior at University College Dublin. , said.
“There are animals that visit my own garden that I only know about by camera-capturing,” she said. English said.
Photos can also help reveal animals that live in unexpected places. Her research on breeding populations of exotic wallabies in Britain, for example, relied in part on images shared on social media.
Susan Wardle, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, says that cycles of expectant faith undone by deeper analysis can be explained in part by human psychological peculiarities.
The processing of every individual sensory detail is impossible, she says, and our brain actively reconstructs our visual world based on the complex but ambiguous input we receive. Research has shown that unclear sensory data – such as a blurred image – causes the brain to rely more heavily on preconceived patterns to make sense of it.
‘This means that there is an interesting interplay between perception and cognition – our beliefs and past experience can influence what we see. Or more accurately, what we think we see, ”said Dr Wardle.
This tendency can deceive people if they study photographic evidence of long unseen animals, sometimes called cryptids, especially if they already have an idea of what they are looking for. Many people who go looking for such mysterious creatures have an emotional investment to identify them, ‘and are already convinced that the creatures are already there’, Christopher French said. He established the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London.
The existing belief makes it easier to start seeing quarries in every shade and rustle of brush, adds dr. French at, or on photos that the animal does not see clearly. It can also cause people to really miss details that their hypothesis prefers.
In a YouTube video posted on February 23, Mr. Waters, formerly a professional horticulturist, that he captured footage proving that the thylacine is alive. As he walks past a landscape of felled trees, he describes the capture of camera traps in the Tasmanian forest, and the capture of four “non-ambiguous” stills of a thylacine family.
Thylacine populations began to decline rapidly after European settlers arrived in Tasmania, an island south of the Australian mainland, in 1803, won by government-encouraged hunting, wild dog competition, habitat loss, and disease. The last known person, ‘Benjamin’, died in captivity in 1936, leaving only successive pieces of film material.
Observations have been seen in the ensuing decades that have led multiple expeditions into the Tasmanian wilderness to search for survivors, said Darren Naish, a paleo-zoologist at the University of Southampton in England. No one was successful. Yet the observation continued and even increased in the 1980s, and it is still reported today.
“This suggests that observation was a social phenomenon, not a zoologist,” said Dr. Naish said.
Mr. Waters sends his photographs to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery for analysis by Nick Mooney, a thylacine expert. He and his colleagues dismissed the claims of Mr. Waters rejected.
“TMAG regularly receives requests to verify from members of the public hoping that the thylacine is still with us,” the museum said in a statement. “Based on the physical properties shown in the photos provided by Mr. Waters, it is highly unlikely that the animals are thylacines.”
Instead, it is said to be most likely Tasmanian trademarks, a tough marsupial that looks like a wallaby.
Many observations of thylacine are similar misidentifications, said Adam Pask, a thylacine researcher at the University of Melbourne. “There are quite a few wild dogs running around in Tasmania,” said Dr. Easter said. ‘It is therefore very easy to find a’ thylacine ‘animal in the forest if you look hard enough and want to see one enough. “
These types of errors are common, said dr. Naish said in part because humans and researchers outdoors are not always skilled at identifying animals from unknown angles or in unfamiliar conditions. Size and distance can be difficult to judge on photos, causing domestic cats to look like big cats. Peel off fur, as in the occasional rotting raccoon carcass or almond fox, and even famous mammals may look deeply strange – or like an extinct marsupial.
“We all make mistakes: even the most experienced physicists make wrong identifications, sometimes hilarious,” said Dr. Naish said. However, those dedicated to hunting cryptic animals are often willing to accept ambiguous imagery, while rejecting critical opinions from qualified experts.
“The most pervasive cognitive bias we all suffer from is affirmative bias,” said Dr. French said. If you are invested in finding the cryptid you are looking for, you are more likely to find the evidence compelling.
On March 1, Mr. Waters – who did not return multiple requests for comment – released the photos as part of a 19-minute video in which he urged viewers to make ‘their own thoughts’. In a subsequent interview with News.com.au, he said that the answers to expert analysts on his photos “gave more fire in my stomach to prove it wrong.”
“It will not take much longer,” Waters said. “Because we are very close to getting irrefutable evidence, the animal is still here.”