BEIJING, July 5 (Xinhuanet) -- It's officially reported the last wild Tasmanian tiger was killed between 1910 and 1920 and the last captive one died in 1936 in the Hobart Zoo, but rumored sightings of the carnivore that looks like a striped coyote continue to emanate from the island's ancient forests.

    In 1986, the Tasmanian tiger was declared extinct. Its exinction marked the demise of the only member of its family, Thylacinidae, and the world's largest marsupial (pouched) carnivore. It weighed about 65 pounds and had a nose-to-tail length of six feet.

    Now zoologist Jeremy Austin of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA are turning over every leaf looking for evidence, especially in the DNA from animal droppings discovered in Tasmania in the late 1950s and 1960s. The scat specimens have been preserved in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

    Eric Guiler, a thylacine expert who found the scats, said he thought the droppings probably came from a Tasmanian tiger rather than a dog, Tasmanian devil or a quoll (cat-sized marsupial), according to Austin.

    "If we find thylacine DNA from the 1950s scats it will be significant," Austin said. "This would prove that either the thylacine produced the scat or a [Tasmanian] devil ate a thylacine and dropped the scat. Either way that is proof that the thylacine was there at the time."

    If they do find evidence the Tasmanian tiger was alive between its last sightings in the wild, that would mean the animal was hidden from humans for 40 to 50 years.

    "If they could survive this long with no real physical proof, then it does add a little more hope to the possibility that they could survive another 50 years without ever being caught, killed [or] hit by a car," Austin told LiveScience. "This chance is of course not great, but the glimmer of hope is ever so slightly brighter."

    (Agencies)