Big Tasmanian Tiger – Mole Creek

The location gives the object real weight. Mole Creek sits at the foot of the Great Western Tiers, on the edge of country that was thylacine habitat, and the surrounding district produced a number of the last credible records of the animal. Trapping and a government bounty scheme that paid for carcasses into the 1900s did most of the work; the last known animal died in captivity in Hobart in 1936.

The hotel has form. It has long traded on the thylacine – the story goes that it once served a Tasmanian tiger beer, and the pub is a fixture of the local mythology around sightings that continue to be reported and never confirmed.

That is the interesting thing about a giant thylacine. Every other extinct animal in this catalogue is safely gone. This one is not quite: people in Tasmania still report seeing them, searches are still mounted, and the possibility is treated with more seriousness here than anywhere else. A large one outside a pub is standing in that ambiguity.

Mole Creek's other oversized object is the giant devil at Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary – so the village has monuments to Tasmania's most famous extinct carnivore and its most endangered surviving one, a few kilometres apart.

The date, a named maker and the measurements were never written down.