Colourised thylacine video

Sunday 12th September 2021

90-year-old video of extinct thylacinecolorized in stunning 4K scan – New Atlas

“The thylacine is a carnivorous marsupial that was once widespread across Australia. It’s thought to have disappeared from the mainland about 3,000 …”
 
This footage was filmed in the mid-1930s and shows a thylacine, the last in captivity, in the hope that zoo on the Tasmania. He was called Benjamin, And for many years it was claimed that he had been mis-gendered because she was actually a female. However, this story has been proven to be erroneous, and as far as we know Benjamin was male and quite possibly not called Benjamin. This footage was painstakingly recurrent and I found it incredibly poignant.
 
As far as the truth about the name and agenda of the last Hobart Zoo thylacine, Richard Freeman only told me today. This, I think, underlines the fact that one is never too old to learn something new.
 
The thylacine is the creature on the logo, and has basically become a totem animal for the CFZ. We have carried out a string of expeditions to Tasmania in search of these creatures, and we intend to return very soon.
 
The colourisation process was very complicated:
 
”François-Steininger, said a lack of archived footage of the species meant experts relied on written descriptions of the tiger’s coat.

“I have worked on more than 100 archive-based documentary films and series, most of them very complex.

“For the thylacine, I faced a different kind of challenge and responsibility: I had to take care of the rare footage, and pay tribute to the last representative of a species, which disappeared 85 years ago.”

 
Check out more Antipodean stories HERE
Jonathan Downes
Cryptozoologist, naturalist, musician, singer, composer, poet, novelist and Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology since 1992. Jon was born in Portsmouth in 1959 and spent his infancy in Nigeria and his childhood in Hong Kong. His wife Corinna died of cancer in 2020, leaving him with two stepdaughters and a six year old granddaughter called Evelyn.