Where Might a Thylacine Be?
A habitat-suitability read on the Australia-wide Tasmanian-tiger sighting record — plotting catalogued reports from New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland against the terrain, forest and remoteness a thylacine would actually need. This maps where sightings and suitable country coincide; it is not evidence the animal survives.
Thylacines favoured open forest, woodland and grassy-woodland mosaics with medium-sized prey (wallabies, pademelons, bandicoots), water, and rocky or timbered shelter — not dense rainforest interiors. Zones are scored by combining five factors: sighting density, large unbroken wilderness, terrain ruggedness / denning refuge, prey-rich forest–grassland mosaic, and distance from people. Arid and tropical-rainforest country scores lower despite some sightings — poor modern prey base or a climate mismatch for a temperate-adapted species.
The Northern Territory is deliberately absent from this map. Beyond two 18th-century ship-log accounts and thylacine imagery in Arnhem Land rock art — good evidence the species once ranged there in deep prehistory, but not a modern sighting record — there is no comparable catalogued report history to model against. Rather than invent one, we've left it blank.
Built as an analytical thought-experiment.
The thylacine is classified extinct. Sighting data: catalogued NSW, VIC, TAS, WA, SA and QLD thylacine reports (RecentlyExtinctSpecies archive), cross-referenced against published researcher collections including Col Bailey, Tarnee Rutherford, and the WA Museum's own study of alleged sightings. Ecology: Australian Museum; IUCN. Coordinates are approximate (nearest named locality).