By the time the early European settlers arrived, the animals were rare, if not extinct, on the mainland, but survived in good numbers in Tasmania, an island state of Australia.Īs the largest modern marsupial carnivore, Tasmanian tigers (Thylacinus cynocephalus, also called simply "thylacines") baffled the European naturalists who first laid eyes on them. The Tasmanian tiger is certainly one of the most exotic animals you could meet in a novel – it isn't related to the Asian tiger that we're all familiar with but was a marsupial mammal that evolved to fill a similar niche in Australia. I'd have bailed out if it were not the most bonny, handsomest thing I ever seen. It stared at us with huge black eyes, then it opened its jaw real slow till I thought it could swallow a baby. It's like a wolf, I heard me mother say, and indeed it looked like those wolves I seen in me fairy-tale books. The tail were thick and the fur so fine and smooth, it were like it didn't have hair. It were about the size of a real large dog…It had a long muzzle and stripes on its sides like a tiger. I turned and there, on the bank not more than ten yards from us, were a wolf creature with yellow fur and black stripes. When Hannah, the narrator of Lois Nowra's Into That Forest, encounters her first Tasmanian tiger, she is mesmerized:
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