Tasmanian Tigers Could Still Have Been Alive in the 2000s, Scientists Argue Photo: Ben Sheppard Of all the animals to have gone extinct since humans were around to notice, perhaps none loom as large in our collective consciousness as the thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. Unlike the dodo or the woolly mammoth, the thylacine is still lit, however dimly, in living memory. In fact, since the last known member of the species died in a zoo in 1936, supposed sightings of the creature have continued to be reported at a steady clip, including one just last week. Advertisement Recently, a study posted as a preprint on bioRxiv—meaning it’s yet to go through peer review—has compiled decades of reports of sightings (spanning from 1910 to 2019) in one database, in an attempt to better estimate the extinction timeline of the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. Based on their analysis of these reports, the team places the thylacine’s likeliest extinction timeline somewhere between the 1990s and the turn of the new millennium—a far cry from when much of the world gave up on the animal.