In Thylacinus, there is a fusion of the three interdigital pads to form a single, trilobed plantar pad.  A long area of bare skin behind this pad separates it from a carpal pad that is twice as long as wide.  Hair encroaches on the carpal region, but all skin around the plantar pad is devoid of hair, and the creases between toes 2, 3 and 4 appear granular.
 

. The left manus of a thylacine skin (female) in the collection of the Australian Museum in Sydney.  Despite the structural differences pointed out above between the feet of a canid and the thylacine, you can see from this photo that the nails are in fact very similar in form to those of a dog.  Unlike the sharp, gripping claws of felids, they are nonretractile and quite blunt.

Ground contact is made by the digital pads on the tips of the toes and the anterior area of the plantar pad.  Finely pointed papillae (tiny skin projections which aid in traction) cover these pads.      The pes (hind foot) of the thylacine is much longer than the manus.  There is no hallux (the foot's first digit -  analogous to the hand's thumb), but the four remaining toes are long and un-webbed.  There is a single plantar pad which is bilobed posteriorly, but without any trace of a pad behind it.  Instead, hair encroaches on the heel, leaving a long and narrow patch of naked skin which reaches to the end of the heel.

    The hair of the thylacine is thick, short and rather crisp, with a greyish brown to yellowish brown hue.  There are between 15-20 black or very dark brown stripes which extend from just behind the shoulders to near the base of the tail, in a series of unbroken bands.

This characteristic type of pattern is shared with only three other living species of mammals: the Banded hare wallaby (Lagostrophus fasciatus), the Zebra duiker (Cephalophus zebra), and the Banded palm civet (Hemigalus derbyanus) (Renshaw 1938).  As is the case with all striped animals, there is much variation between individuals (Moeller 1968), although the longest stripes are always those over the rump.  From there, they descend from the hip nearly to the knee, gradually becoming shorter anteriorly until they disappear.  The stripes never extend all the way to the abdomen.

. A close-up of the thylacine's coat.  From this you can get some impression of the hair texture of this species.  It is somewhere in between coarse and soft - rather similar to the coat of a kangaroo.  View detail.  Also, you can see an even more magnified view of the thylacine's coat here.

    What appear to be very faint stripes can occasionally be seen on the tails of thylacines.  However, this is actually an effect of light and shadow across the individual joints of the tail when viewed from certain angles, and is not due to pigment.  These "pseudo-stripes" are only seen in photographs of living thylacines, and are not present on preserved specimens such as taxidermies.
 

. Note that the thylacine's tail gradually tapers from the hindquarters, readily distinguishing from that of a dog.

The shape of the thylacine's hindquarters is very distinctive.  The tail is not abruptly separated from the body, but tapers gradually, rather like that of a kangaroo or wallaby.  This characteristic feature immediately distinguishes the thylacine from all canids, and is thus a key feature to look for in cases of possible sightings of the animal.  The tail is only rather thinly haired, except at the base, and bears a dark tip and a very slight crest above and below (Thomas 1888).