THYLACINE (Thylacinus cynocephalus), extinct carnivorous marsupial indigenous to continental Australia, also known as the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf. The thylacine was Australia’s only marsupial apex predator.
With a front half that looked like a dog’s and a back striped like a tiger’s, the thylacine had an almost centaur-like appearance. It had formidable jaws and could open them as wide as eighty degrees, a highly unusual feature. First impressions asides, it was not a canine but a marsupial. Female thylacines possessed a back-opening pouch, with litter sizes reaching up to four joeys (marsupial offspring). (Males also had a back-opening, albeit partial, pouch.) The joey would generally live in its mother’s pouch for up to three months, until it reached half adult size.
Thylacines once roamed over all of Australia but died out on the mainland some three thousand years ago, likely as a result of human population growth and accelerated climatic change. They survived on the island of Tasmania but were hunted intensively throughout the nineteenth century by sheep and poultry farmers anxious about their livestock. By the first decades of the twentieth century the animal had become extremely rare in the wild, and the last known thylacine died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania in 1936.
Though efforts to preserve the thylacine, such as breeding programs and expeditions to find surviving populations in the wild, came too late, latter-day biotechnological breakthroughs may yet “save” it. In 1999 the Australian Museum introduced a cloning project to attempt to resurrect thylacines. Though scientists successfully extracted DNA from early-twentieth-century specimens, the cloning effort has so far been unsuccessful. In 2022 the University of Melbourne and American biotech company Colossal Biosciences announced that they had established a thylacine genetic-restoration laboratory and planned to recreate the animal using the fat-tailed dunnart, its closest living relative.