Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?

Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.

There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.

When he tested the look at outdoor Los Angeles shopping mall The Grove, “Nobody recognized me,” Bacon said. But the tide evidently soon turned. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f***ing coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”

Lmao this has to be a joke. Is this really what life is like for these people? No one said “I love you” to a stranger at the mall? He had to wait in lines? Maybe the most eye-opening thing about this is that Kevin seemed to expect to be treated more or less the same way he is as a celebrity, just without the selfies, which says to me that he thought everyone gets treated the same way famous people do. Sometimes it’s interesting to get a reminder of how out of touch these people really are.