The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/the-obsessive-search-for-the-tasmanian-tiger [www.newyorker.com]
2018-07-22 16:42
The photos were part of Orchard’s arsenal of evidence against a skeptical world—proof of his fervent belief, shared with many in Tasmania, that the island’s apex predator, an animal most famous for being extinct, is still alive. The Tasmanian tiger, known to science as the thylacine, was the only member of its genus of marsupial carnivores to live to modern times.
“Every other group is believers, and we’re skeptics, so we’re heretics,” Bill Flowers, one of the group’s three members, told me one day in a café in Devonport, on the northern coast. Since Flowers began investigating thylacine sightings, he has been reading about false memories, false confessions, and the psychology of perception—examples, he told me, of the way “the mind fills in gaps” that reality leaves open.