Thylacine, the biggest carnivorous marsupial of the present world which was believed to be extinct 2000 years ago, once roamed in the mainland in Australia. Thylacines were known as Tasmanian tigers in the wilds of Tasmania. Unfortunately, as same as the fate of all the other species, humans once again put an end to them. The last known Thylacine which was Benjamin by name is believed to be killed in the 1930s. The last creature died at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo on the 7th of September, 1936.
By today, only a few footages of these specific animals are available as the crowd in the 1930s didn’t have smart technical items with them at the time. However, by now only a very few: less than a dozen films featuring this striped Thylacine mammal are available.
Fortunately, now, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) has released a digitalized 21-second clip of the Thylacine which was named Benjamin. The video comes from a film in 1935, “Tasmania The Wonderland,” a “talkie travelogue” complete with classic Mid-Atlantic narration.
This particular film hasn’t been seen for 85 years and it shows poor Benjamin in its zoo enclosure. “At one point, two men can be seen rattling his cage at far right of the frame, attempting to cajole some action or perhaps one of the marsupial’s famous threat-yawns,” states NFSA.
Simon Smith, a curator at NFSA states, “The scarcity of thylacine footage makes every second of moving images really precious. We’re very excited to make this newly-digitized footage available to everyone online.”
The most recent film regarding Benjamin, prior to this, was made in 1933 and it was known as “Tasmania The Wonderland”. This was the last known moving picture of the now-extinct animals. As per the explanations of the narrator of the film, ”[The Tasmanian tiger] is now very rare, being forced out of its natural habitat by the march of civilization” … a march that we can never remove from our minds.
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