Hans Naarding's thylacine sighting near Togari, Tasmania (1982)

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was thought to have died out with the last captive animal at Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo in September 1936. Reports kept coming, but most were fleeting. In 1982, the same year the IUCN declared the species extinct, one came from a man whose job was to know Tasmanian wildlife. Hans Naarding was a tall, thin Dutchman with many years of bush experience in Africa and Australia. He worked for the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, and that autumn he was surveying snipe in the forests near Togari, south of Smithton.

He had driven down a disused forest track. The weather was ghastly. A howling gale. Horizontal rain. He switched off the engine and climbed into his sleeping bag in the back of his Landcruiser.

At 2 a.m. he woke. He grabbed his spotlight, opened the window and swept the beam around. It came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side-on some six to seven metres away. "I realised immediately what it was: its dropped jaw was a dead giveaway." It turned its head. He could see the yellow light reflecting in its eye.

It was an adult male in excellent condition, with twelve stripes on a sandy coat. A massive butt to the tail, overhanging the hindquarters, "more like a striped hyena." Water ran down Naarding's arm into the sleeping bag. The animal moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth. "He didn't take the slightest notice of the light."

After three minutes, he drew his arm in to reach for his camera bag. That upset the animal. It turned round and disappeared into the bush. Naarding shot out into a solid wall of undergrowth. All that was left was a pungent scent, very similar to hyena.

At first light he drove to the nearest town and rang the director. "You'd better go back, he might return." He went back and photographed a jerrycan where the animal had stood. Director Peter Murrell called it the best sighting "in the history of the service", "irrefutable and conclusive". The service kept it secret.

A search near the Arthur River followed, led on the ground by Nick Mooney, with Dr Eric Guiler involved. Accounts of its length run from a year to more than two. Rangers checked creek banks and muddy ground for footprints. They found none.

When chief wildlife officer Rod Pierce announced the sighting, he withheld the ranger's name and the area. The service "didn't want all sorts of people going out and looking for it."

Pandemonium broke out as television crews arrived from Japan, Argentina and Europe. "If I'd known before what was going to happen, I'd have kept my trap shut," Naarding said. "It will always be a red-letter day. But it was also a curse." He left Tasmania shortly afterwards, and the Tasmanian government declared the species extinct in 1986.

No one has accused Naarding of a hoax, and no source offers another animal. Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania put it plainly: "This was someone who knew Tasmanian wildlife and was unlikely to have made an error." A 2023 study that modelled the extinction from 1,237 Tasmanian records places the sighting among its highly rated reports. Naarding himself stayed sceptical after spending weeks at the site without seeing the slightest sign again. Asked by Nicholas Shakespeare whether any tigers remain, he answered: "Frankly, I don't think there are."