Tasmanian tigers discovered in Indigenous rock art in Australia, suggesting these marsupials lived there much longer than thought

Archaeologists in Australia have discovered centuries-old Indigenous rock art depicting Tasmanian devils and the now-extinct Tasmanian tiger, a new study reports. The findings suggest that the Tasmanian tiger may have survived on the Australian mainland until much more recently than previously thought.

The team documented around 14 new rock-art drawings of the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), a carnivorous marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger, and two rock-art images of the Tasmanian devil (Thylacinus cynocephalus) in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, the team said in a statement. The government of Arnhem Land is run by the region's Aboriginal people and, with a population of roughly 16,000 people, it has a relatively low population density with much of its environment preserved.

The Tasmanian tiger is believed to have gone extinct on the Australian mainland around 3,000 years ago, the researchers reported in the study. However, the marsupials survived on the island of Tasmania until 1936, when the last documented one died at a zoo. There are claims that the species still survives on Tasmania, but these reports have never been verified. The Tasmanian devil is now extinct on the Australian mainland but still survives on the island of Tasmania. At one time, the devil also lived in Arnhem Land.

The Tasmanian tiger may have survived on the Australian mainland until just under 1,000 years ago, according to the new study, published March 30 in the journal Archaeology in Oceania.

"The newly documented artworks — some of which may be less than 1,000 years old — raise the possibility that these species survived longer in northern regions than previously thought," the team wrote in the statement.

One painting, of a Tasmanian devil, was found in 2023 on a rock-art panel with figures of humans and other animals. The image of the Tasmanian devil is 1.3 feet (0.4 meters) long, with a painting of an eel-tail catfish (Tandanus tandanus) drawn over part of it, the researchers wrote in the study. It has a robust and short torso, a rounded head with "prominent whiskers," and dog-like back paws, they noted.

The other Tasmanian devil drawing was longer, at 2 feet (0.6 m), and has a slightly open mouth that shows its sharp, pointy teeth. It also has a fish painted over its legs.

Meanwhile, the Tasmanian tiger drawings show a dog-like animal with stripes, rounded ears and a long muzzle. The longest depiction measures 4.7 feet (1.4 m) in length Some of the drawings show the tiger with their stripes while others do not. This indicates that the ancient artists didn't always bother to draw the stripes, the researchers said in the paper.

Some of the newly documented rock art shows Tasmanian tigers drawn with kaolin (also known as pipe clay), a white pigment that tends not to last as long as other colors, such as red ocher, the team wrote in the study. This raises the question of whether the people who drew some of these depictions may have lived in more recent times and actually saw a thylacine in northern Australia.

"The artists who made the more recent paintings may have seen actual living thylacines and some of these creatures may have survived longer in Arnhem Land," study first author Paul Taçon, a professor of anthropology and archaeology and the chair in rock art research at Griffith University in Australia, said in the statement. "Alternatively, artists may have been inspired by earlier paintings."

Cultural legacy

Prior to this research, there were about 150 verified rock-art drawings of Tasmanian tigers on the Australian mainland and 23 known drawings of Tasmanian devils. The difference in the number of "rock art depictions suggest thylacines were more widespread and more culturally important across mainland Australia than Tasmanian devils," the researchers wrote in the study.

The team is working with Aboriginal communities to further understand the importance the Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian devil had for their ancestors. One of the study's co-authors, Joey Nganjmirra, is from an Aboriginal group known as the Djalama. He said in a video that some of the headdresses on people shown in the rock art near the Tasmanian tigers resemble headdresses that the Djalama use in modern-day ceremonies

The oral histories of the aboriginal people say that the Tasmanian Tigers were, "pets of the Rainbow Serpent and lived in rock pools," the researchers wrote in the statement. Rainbow spirits are deities associated with creation and rainfall in aboriginal Australian beliefs.

Even today, the Tasmanian tiger "remains culturally important" for people in Oceana, Taçon said.

"The thylacine lives on in western Arnhem Land not as a ghost from the past but as a meaningful creature that still has present day relevance" the researchers wrote in the journal article.