Thylacine at the Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, in the 1930's.

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, so far has the dubious distinction of being one of the few animals to go extinct so recently that it has been captured in motion pictures before its demise. I have seen excerpts of the films here and there on television, but today I stumbled upon this good collection of them online, at a site called the Thylacine Museum.

They are haunting. The animal is familiar-looking at first– we see the small, delicately balanced feet of a carnivore, the pointy ears reminiscent of a coyote, the muzzle– but also so alien. Especially when it opens its mouth. Where is familiar pattern of incisors and canines? And how can it open so wide? It’s crocodile-like, and the long, long, wedge-like head and strangely expressionless eyes give it an eerie, prehistoric countenance that I find thrilling.

But, despite the constant hopes and occasional reports, the thylacine is gone for good. One of the more interesting books on the subject is Michael Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, illustrated by the great Alexis Rockman. Above all, it’s a story about desire and regret– regret that it’s gone, and desire for one of the many sighting reports to be true. Well worth the read– and funny as well.

The most interesting thylacine story I have ever come across was an article in the in-flight magazine of Air Niugini, the national airline of Papua New Guinea, from the early 90’s. It was a back issue that Ralf Stüttgen had kicking around his guest house in Wewak when I was there in ‘93. This missionary in the highlands of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian side of the border, near Puncak Jaya, had brough a picture book of animals with him to show the children at the school where he taught. People in the village got to looking at it, and amongst the photos was one of a thylacine.

The villagers got quite excited, and said they knew this animal. The missionary, of course, pointed out that was impossible; they were from Australia and Tasmania, and the last of them died out decades ago. Not so, insisted the people, there were some in the general vicinity. Well, a couple expeditions were launched and turned up nothing, although it did turn out that the local people could describe the animal’s habits, footprints, and scat with uncanny accuracy.

And, let’s not forget, Australia and New Guinea were once a single land mass, up until very, very recently: about 8,000 years ago, with the final melting of the Pleistocene glaciers. In evolutionary terms, that’s like yesterday. Recently enough, one might even think, to be remembered.

So for a couple years now, I have been following the controversial opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati). My good friend Sean Miller, director of the John Erickson Museum of Art, proposed that I do a show for one of the museum’s location-variable galleries, that would somehow take in the phenomenon of alternative natural histories via Biblical literalism. Sean is a pretty brave guy, and while I have been keen on the project, the prospect of vexing the famously well-armed and bellicose security staff at the museum has put me off it for a bit. Besides, funding seems to have run dry.

Well, now Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has a scathing review (hat tip to Pharyngula). He does the dirty work so you don’t have to. There’s even a slideshow with lots of pictures.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do.

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As always, Jason Meert, my amazing photographer, delivers the goods. Photos of my recent installation, Bigfoot is Probably Real, at Gallery 4Culture. Click the image or click here for an annotated slideshow.

Yeah, it's not a great photo. The cell phone's camera doesn't have a zoom.

This morning, as I was drinking my coffee and surveying the backyard from our top-floor kitchen window, wondering what needed to be done yet before spring, I caught sight of a coyote in our backyard. This is not uncommon in Seattle: coyotes are regularly spotted even downtown (a security camera once famously caught an image of a coyote trapped inside the elevator of Smith Tower), and in our wooded, fringe neighborhood of the city, near a large beach park, they are common as raccoons.

The neighbor’s golden retriever was in its yard, and it was at attention: it could smell the coyote, but not see it. The coyote popped over into our other neighbor’s yard for a moment, then circled back around, paying special attention to the blackberry thicket which grows over the fencerow in the back corner of our yard, where raccoons regularly sleep. I could see its breath steaming in the dawn light. Our crows circled overhead, making their alarm sound ( I say our crows because like most animals, they are territorial, and usually in the large fir tree in the corner of our lot).

A second coyote appeared a few moments later, as I went downstairs to summon my wife so she could have a look. Then the first re-appeared, this time with something dark and furry in its mouth. It turned out to be half of the neighbor’s cat. The front half, to be precise.

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The ancient Egyptians loved mummifying other things besides people. I remember visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo once, years and years ago, and, despite just being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of amazing things to see, somehow the mummified crocodile stuck in my mind. I found an image of one quite similar on Flickr:

Mummified crocodile. Apparently from a museum in Wien.

The Egyptians also mummified cats. The image here is funny and macabre at the same time. It looks as much like a homemade child’s doll from a pioneer homestead as it does an Egyptian mummy– or possibly a rejected prop from a Brothers Quay film.  So much attention is paid to the ears and eyes, they are rendered right in the cloth, and the pupils are even painted on. It’s cute and slightly eerie at the same time.

A mummified cat on display at the British Museum, London.

From this article in Scientific American on the origins of the domestic house cat:

By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

Apparently the export of live cats from Egypt was banned for centuries, but there was a thriving cottage industry in cat mummies, which were created as offerings to the goddess Bastet and, assumably, sold to pilgrims, who them presented them to the goddess at the temple. Which, I suppose, would explain the effort expended to make them look cute– who wants to go to church with an ugly kitty mummy tucked under one’s arm?