Maybe.

You can spend endless time going backward and forward between the reasons for why it should be there and why it shouldn’t.

Then you can spend even more time counter-arguing each of the reasons on each side.

Here is why I write “maybe”:

In large part, everyone’s opinion on this question is just that: an opinion.

Those who point to statistics, such as saying that in over 80 years we have not had one shred of irrefutable proof, make a good case, but it’s not watertight. Some species have (in rare occasions) been rediscovered after long absences.

So what evidence do we have - beyond the hearsay of eyewitness testimony - that the thylacine might have made it to 2017?

To my mind the key piece of evidence rests with the “Adamsfield thylacine”.

In 2013, author Col Bailey published an account suggesting that in 1990 a Tasmanian tiger had been shot dead near Adamsfield, in Tasmania. He supplied a photograph showing a thylacine foot.

Soon after, the Thylacine Research Unit (TRU) published a video interview with a man from Tasmania who admitted having taken the photographs but debated the circumstances under which the thylacine died. His account was that he found it deceased in a den.

Both versions of events are still simply testimonies and as such are generally not taken as proof. What is notable, in my opinon, is that regardless of the circumstances of the thylacine’s death, both accounts are in agreement about there having been a freshly deceased thylacine in 1990.

*If* those accounts are true - and this is where it remains a matter of opinion - then the thylacine made it from 1936 (the time of the last known living individual) to 1990 (54 years later) without any evidence that was taken as proof.

And if that’s true, then the 27 years from 1990 to today is just half that time.

Maybe.

Find out more about Tasmanian tigers at my website Where Light Meets Dark or follow along on Facebook Where Light Meets Dark