Yes, the article mentions that the females don’t travel nearly as far as the males.
Short of managed reintroduction, which is v unlikely in most areas, unless they somehow stepped up their eastward progress out of the Rockies, it could be a v long time before they could establish an eastern range.
We’ll get the wolf back long before we get the cougar. The Eastern coyote is under selective pressure to breed itself into a wolf - and has a lot of wolf and domestic dog DNA anyway. It’s already much bigger and more wolf-like in behaviour than its Western counterparts. Several taxonomists have started referring to it as Canis oriens and considering it to be a distinct species from Canis latrans.
None of this has anything to say about the thylacine, of course.
I found this so depressing I had a hard time watching it to the end. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Thylacines were trapped for zoos. This page has some interesting descriptions of the animal, that of course are also sad:
http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/captivity/zoos/internationally/internationally_1.htm
This page has more info on the many searches conducted for the thylacine, and notes that thylacines only bred in captivity once, in Melbourne in 1899:
https://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=342
The animal had been wiped out in Australia before it went extinct in Tasmania, too. And reading about the ecology of Tasmania made me wonder how this kind of predator might have interacted with these incredible beasts (currently on the ropes themselves, unfortunately):
I recall a dead Thylacine being discovered in a cave on the Nullabor Plain but evidently it was a lot older than it first appeared: http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/cave/discovery
and then of course there have been more recent sightings in South Australia: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/footage-claims-to-show-tasmanian-tiger-roaming-adelaide-hills/news-story/610af2e75314d491eaafd6c384835385
The last thylacine:
Yeah, we have 6 states and 2 territories.
My brain kinda skipped to Tamil tiger & mashed it with the headline into wondering whether @Wanderfound had started his own guerrilla movement now.
OTOH, many Tasmanians are happy to view themselves as somewhat distinct.
From a Tassie perspective, all other Australians are “mainlanders”.
Incidentally, in the canon of Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars, 21st century Tasmania is divided by a civil war between environmentalist guerrillas and the corporate-controlled state government.
How the hell you guys know the germanest Rockbands? I mean, why?
I lived through the 80’s?
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