“We went for a walk in the bush, and they stood out,” he told Stan Shaw on South West & Great Southern Breakfast.

“They went for about a kilometre on a bush track – it gets into a bit of a canter at one point.”

This week the Nannup Geopark opened an interactive Thylacine Trail in Nannup, celebrating the folklore around the tiger.

The trail has reignited the debate on whether the thylacine ever existed and if it's still out there.

Barry Brook is a wildlife ecologist and leading thylacine expert at the University of Tasmania and says they were once widespread across the continent.

Mr Brook says they existed until the arrival of the dingo and the latest fossil evidence shows they were here until about 3000 years ago.

“The karri forest and jarrah forest are prime habit for a creature like that and there is almost no doubt that they flourished throughout there.”

Mr Brook says the sightings were probably a dingo or a fox.

“There is obviously a great desire amongst the general public for the animal not to be extinct,” he says.

“Unfortunately hope doesn’t win over facts.”

However, Mr Brooks won’t rule out the possibility of a thylacine being rediscovered somewhere in Australia.

“I would not be shocked if they were eventually found – I would be surprised,” he says.

“I don’t think it’s a 100 per cent probability that they are extinct, I just think it’s very likely.”

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