‘Tasmanian tiger’ footage not of a thylacine but a pademelon, experts say

“We found a thylacine.”

They’re the words so many of us would love to be true.

And when we heard them (again) this week, this time in the title of a video posted to YouTube by the president of the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia (TAGOA) Neil Waters, we couldn’t help but become a little bit excited, albeit against our better instincts.

In the video uploaded on Monday, Mr Waters claimed to have captured footage of not one, but three thylacines — proof, he said, “of breeding”.

Addressing a handheld camera as he strolled through “some little town in north-east Tassie”, Mr Waters admitted the footage of the “mum and dad” thylacines was “ambiguous”.

“However,” he claimed, “the baby is not ambiguous”.

“The baby has stripes, a stiff tail,…