Thylacine

• 1. Introduction

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  The thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger, died at Hobart Zoo on the evening or night of the 7th of September 1936. It is the last known member of its species, and a striped marsupial predator vanished with it. Almost nothing about that final animal is settled. Researchers disagree about when it was captured, whether it was male or female, and even how it died. Behind that one enclosure sit larger questions. How does a hunter go from roaming wild country to a single captive in a zoo? Was the blame really limited to the farmers and bounty hunters who pursued it? And why do people still report sightings, none of them confirmed, while scientists try to rebuild the animal from its DNA?

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• 2. Stripes, Pouches, Jaws

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  Fifteen to twenty dark stripes crossed the yellow-brown back of an adult thylacine, running over the rump and onto the base of the tail. Those bands earned it the name Tasmanian tiger. They were sharpest in young animals and faded with age, and one stripe curved down the outside of the rear thigh. The coat ranged from light fawn to dark brown, the belly was cream, and the dense, soft hair grew up to 15 millimetres long.

  Beneath the coat was a body like a large, short-haired dog, with a stiff tail that flowed straight out from the spine in the manner of a kangaroo. A mature animal stood about 60 centimetres at the shoulder and measured 1-1.3 metres in body length. The tail added another 50-65 centimetres. Weight was long guessed at 15-35 kilograms. A 2020 study of 93 adult specimens used volume analysis to put the average at 16.7 kilograms, with a range of 9.8-28.1. Males averaged 19.7 kilograms and females 13.7.

  Both sexes carried a pouch. The female's held four teats and, unlike the pouch of many marsupials, opened toward the rear of the body. The male's was a protective sheath for his external reproductive organs, a feature unique among Australian marsupials. The mouth was just as unusual. The jaws could open as wide as 80 degrees, and they held 46 teeth.

  On the ground, the animal moved stiffly and awkwardly and could not run at speed. Captive animals sometimes hopped on their hind legs like kangaroos, and Guiler speculated that this was a quick burst of movement when alarmed. It could also stand upright for brief periods. Its tracks were distinctive: a very large rear pad and four obvious front pads, set in a nearly straight line. The claws did not retract.

  An agitated thylacine growled and hissed, often with a threat-yawn. While hunting, it gave out a run of rapid, guttural, cough-like barks, described as "yip-yap", "cay-yip" or "hop-hop-hop". These were probably calls between members of a family group. It also had a long, whining cry, probably used to identify itself at a distance. Early researchers credited it with an acute sense of smell, but its olfactory bulbs turned out to be poorly developed. It probably hunted by sight and sound instead.

  About 25 million years ago, in the Late Oligocene at Riversleigh in Queensland, lived Badjcinus turnbulli, the earliest known member of the family Thylacinidae. It was quoll-sized, well under 10 kilograms, and probably ate insects and small reptiles and mammals. By the early Miocene, Wabulacinus already showed signs of a more carnivorous diet. The genus Thylacinus then brought a dramatic rise in both size and meat-eating teeth. Its largest species, Thylacinus potens and Thylacinus megiriani, approached the size of a wolf. The family eventually included at least 12 species in eight genera, and the oldest fossils of the modern thylacine come from southeastern Australia, 1.77-0.78 million years ago.

  The thylacine is a classic case of convergent evolution. It filled the niche that canids held in the Northern Hemisphere, and so it grew sharp teeth, powerful jaws, raised heels and a similar body plan. Its skull most closely resembles that of the red fox, yet it is unrelated to any Northern Hemisphere placental predator. Its closest living relatives are other members of the group Dasyuromorphia, including the Tasmanian devil, which split from the thylacine line an estimated 42-36 million years ago. The two may later have competed for the same food.

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• 3. A Weaker Bite

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  A 2011 computer-modelling study from the University of New South Wales delivered an unwelcome surprise about the thylacine: its jaws were surprisingly feeble. The researchers treated an adult as weighing about 30 kilograms, and found it could not handle prey much larger than 5 kilograms. That pointed to a diet of animals such as bandicoots, pademelons and possums. It also suggested direct competition with the Tasmanian devil and the tiger quoll, whose dental wear patterns overlapped heavily with its own.

  Later work pushed the same way. A 2020 study, using the lower average weight of 16.7 kilograms, concluded that the animal hunted much smaller prey but could take larger animals when it had to. Its skull and face suggest prey under 45 percent of its own body mass. A 2014 comparison with an earlier thylacinid, Nimbacinus, found that the thylacine skull showed far higher stress in every area because of its longer snout. Not every result agreed. A 2005 study gave it a bite force quotient of 166, similar to most quolls, which hinted at relatively large prey. If it really was a small-prey specialist, that narrow focus would have left it exposed to small shocks in the ecosystem.

  Accounts from the wild describe waterbirds as the most commonly recorded bird prey, including black ducks and teals. The red-necked wallaby was the most commonly recorded mammal. Tasmanian pademelons and short-beaked echidnas also appear in the record. After European rabbits were introduced to Tasmania and multiplied, a number of accounts report thylacines taking them. Trappers described an ambush hunter working alone or in pairs, mostly at night, which fits what its elbow joint and forelimb anatomy suggest.

  By day the animal rested in small caves or hollow tree trunks, in a nest of twigs, bark or fern fronds. At night it hunted the open heath. Its typical home range was between 40 and 80 square kilometres, and it did not defend that ground as a territory. Its stomach was very muscular and could stretch to take in a large meal, probably to cope with long stretches when hunting failed.

  Captive animals were fed dead rabbits and wallabies, beef, mutton, horse and occasionally poultry. One report describes a captive that refused wallaby meat, dead or alive. It was "ultimately it was persuaded to eat by having the smell of blood from a freshly killed wallaby put before its nose."

  The fierce reputation that settlers gave the animal rested on shaky ground. Robert Paddle found little evidence that thylacines were significant killers of sheep or poultry, and he suggested feral dogs caused many of the sheep deaths. The popular image of a blood-drinker seems to trace back to a single second-hand story that Geoffrey Smith (1881-1916) heard in a shepherd's hut. Settlers were nonetheless convinced, and they were about to act on that conviction.

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• 4. Names and First Encounters

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  When Abel Tasman first reached Tasmania in 1642, his shore party reported footprints of "wild beasts having claws like a Tyger". Europeans may have crossed paths with the thylacine that early. In 1772, Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne arrived aboard the Mascarin and reported a "tiger cat".

  The first definite encounter came on the 13th of May 1792, noted by the naturalist Jacques Labillardiere in his journal from the expedition led by d'Entrecasteaux. In 1805, William Paterson, the Lieutenant Governor of Tasmania, sent a detailed description to the Sydney Gazette. He also described the animal in a letter to Joseph Banks dated the 30th of March 1805.

  The first detailed scientific description came in 1808 from George Harris, Tasmania's Deputy Surveyor-General. He placed the animal in Didelphis, the genus Linnaeus had made for American opossums, and called it Didelphis cynocephala, the "dog-headed opossum". Scientists then realised that Australian marsupials were fundamentally different from the mammal groups they already knew. That realisation shaped the modern classification scheme. In 1810, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire placed the thylacine in the genus Dasyurus. The species name became cynocephalus to agree in gender with the new genus name.

  In 1824, Temminck gave the animal a genus of its own, Thylacinus. The everyday word comes straight from that name, which derives from the Greek thýlakos, meaning pouch or sack. It is pronounced THY-lə-seen or THY-lə-syne. People had already coined the other two names for different reasons. "Tiger" came from the stripes, and "wolf" from its resemblance to a medium to large canid.

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• 5. How It Vanished

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  Around 3,600 to 3,200 years ago, the thylacine disappeared from New Guinea and the Australian mainland. The timing matches the earliest record of the dingo, a dog that never reached Tasmania. Between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, Australia had already lost more than 90 percent of its megafauna. The thylacine was one of the notable survivors, along with several kangaroo and wombat species, emus, cassowaries and large goannas. Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion, was a larger carnivore only distantly related to the thylacine, and it did not survive.

  A desiccated carcass found in a cave on the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia in 1990 proved the animal lived on the mainland. Carbon dating put it at around 3,300 years old. The northernmost record comes from the Kiowa rock shelter in Chimbu Province, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, dating to roughly 10,000-8,500 years ago. The youngest radiocarbon dates on the mainland are around 3,500 years old, with extinction estimated at 3,200 years ago, at the same time as the Tasmanian devil's disappearance there.

  One study argues that the dingo outcompeted the thylacine for the Tasmanian nativehen. Dingoes were more likely to hunt in packs, while the thylacine was more solitary. Skull comparisons show the dingo had a weaker bite, but its skull withstood greater stresses, letting it pull down larger prey. The thylacine was a hypercarnivore with a less flexible diet than the omnivorous dingo. Indigenous peoples adopting the dingo as a hunting companion would have added more pressure. A 2013 study held that dingoes contributed but that intense human population growth, technological advances and abrupt climate change mattered more. A study published in 2025 added a genetic twist. It proposed that gene losses over the animal's long history had stripped away traits that would have helped it adapt.

  Aboriginal Australians may have watched the decline happen. Ken Mulvaney has suggested that the many thylacine carvings on the Burrup Peninsula show people were aware of, and concerned about, the animal's dwindling numbers. Recent studies also describe thylacine images in Arnhem Land in rock art styles that may fall within the last 1,000 years. Whether the animal survived locally that late remains uncertain.

  On Tasmania, an estimated 5,000 thylacines lived at the time of first European settlement, most densely in the northeast, northwest and north-midland regions. They were rarely seen, but attacks on sheep were increasingly blamed on them. The Van Diemen's Land Company offered bounties from as early as 1830. From 1888 to 1909, the Tasmanian government paid £1 for each dead adult and ten shillings for each pup. It paid out 2,184 bounties in all, though many more animals were probably killed than were claimed.

  Persecution was probably not the whole story. Wild dogs brought by settlers competed with the thylacine, its habitat eroded, its genetic diversity was already low, and some prey species declined or vanished. A distemper-like illness, later called marsupi-carnivore disease, struck many captive animals. A 2012 study suggested humans introduced it and that it also spread through the wild population. It sharply shortened lifespans and raised pup mortality. Genetic work in 2017 showed the loss of diversity began long before humans reached Australia, possibly 70-120 thousand years ago.

  A 1921 photograph by Henry Burrell, showing a thylacine with a chicken, was widely circulated and may have strengthened its reputation as a poultry thief. The image was cropped to hide that the animal was in captivity. One researcher concluded it was a dead specimen posed for the camera, and the photograph may even have been manipulated.

  By the late 1920s the animal was extremely rare, and in 1928 the Tasmanian Advisory Committee for Native Fauna recommended a reserve, with the Arthur-Pieman area as one possible site. The scarcity itself created new demand from zoos abroad, which added pressure on a tiny population. Breeding pairs were exported, but captive breeding failed. Only once did thylacines breed successfully in captivity, at Melbourne Zoo in 1899. The last one held outside Australia died at London Zoo in 1931.

  The last known thylacine killed in the wild was shot in 1930 by Wilf Batty, a farmer from Mawbanna in the northwest. It was believed to be a male and had been around his house for weeks or months. The last definite record of a wild animal came in late 1931, when James Millar Kaine caught a young male alive. It had a broken leg and had been beaten with a farm hoe. A local doctor treated it, and it was returned to the animal dealer James "tiger" Harrison.

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• 6. The Last One

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  The Delphin family, in one account, kept a young thylacine as a paid attraction along with an injured juvenile female. Authors Gareth Linnard and Stephen Sleightholme say the male had been accidentally snared as a juvenile in 1930 near Mount Bischoff. They say Hobart Zoo bought it in late 1930, after the female, possibly its sibling, had died. A distinctive snare scar circled its leg and shows in every photo and video of the zoo's thylacine in the 1930s. By their account, it declined through 1936 and died of age-related complications after nearly six years at the zoo. Its body was apparently lost, possibly sent to Colin Mackenzie.

  Robert Paddle and Kathryn Medlock tell a different story. They say the Delphin male died in May 1936 and was quickly replaced by an elderly female that Elias Churchill had caught in a snare trap. The sale was never announced, they argue, because trapping was illegal and Churchill could have been fined. After her death, the remains went to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where they were poorly recorded because of how she had been caught. They lay undiscovered for decades, until a taxidermist's record from 1936 or 1937 was noticed in 2022. Linnard and Sleightholme reject this. They note that May 1936 came before the species was protected, so no secrecy was needed. They also point out that Churchill described catching a thylacine alive in the 1920s, and that a 1937 report noted no reliable wild sightings for years.

  Earlier, Sleightholme and coauthors had proposed that the animal Kaine caught in 1931 might have been sold to Hobart Zoo. Sleightholme and another author later judged that wrong. They suggested Harrison sold it to a buyer who was neither a zoo nor a museum. The capture date, and sometimes the death date, is reported as 1933 or 1934, yet no record survives of any live thylacine being sold after 1931.

  Paddle once wrote that the animal died of neglect, locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters during a rare spell of extreme heat by day and freezing cold by night. That story spread widely. It has since been questioned. The sleeping quarters could apparently be opened easily from outside, and the zoo valued the animal as a star attraction. Visitors near the end described it as mangy, limping and old, matching the two last photographs, taken in 1936. Old age seems the likelier cause.

  In May 1968, a man named Frank Darby, claiming to be a curator at Hobart Zoo, invented the story that the last thylacine was called Benjamin. He told it to the Victorian naturalist Graham Pizzey, and it spread through the Melbourne press. Darby never worked at the zoo and plainly did not know the animal. The myth has been debunked repeatedly, yet it still turns up in modern media.

  A 45-second black-and-white film of the animal was shot in 1933 by the naturalist David Fleay. It shows the thylacine seated, pacing the edge of its enclosure, yawning, sniffing the air, scratching like a dog and lying down. Fleay was bitten on the buttock while filming. In 2021, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia released an 80-second colourised clip, guided by historic descriptions. The last footage of this individual and of the species was shot in 1935 by Sidney Cook for the promotional film Tasmania the Wonderland.

  A conservation movement had pressed for protection since 1901, partly because specimens for overseas collections were getting hard to find. Political difficulties blocked action until the Tasmanian government introduced protection on the 10th of July 1936. That was 59 days before the last known animal died in captivity. The thylacine stayed on the endangered list until the 1980s, because the standard at the time required 50 years without a confirmed record before extinction could be declared. The International Union for Conservation of Nature declared it extinct in 1982 and the Tasmanian government followed in 1986. In 2013, it was removed from Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

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• 7. Searches and Revival

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  Between 1967 and 1973, zoologist Jeremy Griffith and dairy farmer James Malley carried out what is regarded as the most intensive hunt ever mounted for living thylacines. They surveyed Tasmania's west coast, set up automatic camera stations and quickly investigated reported sightings. In 1972 they formed the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team with Dr. Bob Brown. It ended without any evidence the animal still lived.

  Sightings have continued anyway. The Department of Conservation and Land Management recorded 203 reports in Western Australia from 1936 to 1998. On the mainland, southern Victoria produces the most. Tasmania's Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment logged eight unconfirmed reports between 2016 and 2019, the latest visual sighting being on the 25th of February 2018. A 2023 study by Brook and colleagues compiled alleged Tasmanian sightings through the 20th century. It argued that the animal may have survived much longer than the 1930s, with a likely extinction date between the late 1990s and early 2000s.

  Money has been offered for proof. In 1983, the American media mogul Ted Turner put up $100,000. In March 2005, the Australian news magazine The Bulletin offered $1.25 million for a safe live capture, as part of its 125th anniversary. The offer closed at the end of June 2005 with no evidence. A Tasmanian tour operator, Stewart Malcolm, later offered $1.75 million.

  Research instead depends on museum specimens. As of 2022, the International Thylacine Specimen Database recorded 756 specimens held in 115 museums and university collections in 23 countries. In 2017, CSIRO and Where Light Meets Dark produced a reference library of 159 micrographic images of thylacine hair. In 2018, Newton and colleagues CT-scanned every known preserved pouch young to rebuild its growth inside the pouch. The work showed that two young held at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery belonged to another species, leaving 11 known worldwide.

  In 2017, Feigin and colleagues produced a draft genome from an ethanol-preserved pouch young provided by Museums Victoria. In 2019, researchers found many non-coding regions evolving at accelerated rates in both the thylacine and the grey wolf. In 2021, they linked the similar skull shapes of the two animals to groups of bones that grow from neural crest cells. In 2023, RNA was recovered from a 130-year-old specimen in Sweden, the first time it had been extracted from an extinct species. In October 2024, a 99.9 percent genome came from a well-preserved skull about 110 years old, and the full genome followed three months later.

  Attempts to bring the animal back began in 1999, when the Australian Museum started a cloning project using preserved early 20th-century specimens. Several molecular biologists dismissed it as a public relations stunt. In late 2002, the team extracted DNA that could be replicated. On the 15th of February 2005, the museum announced it was stopping, and in May 2005 a group of universities and a research institute restarted it. In August 2022, the University of Melbourne announced a partnership with the Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences. Their plan is to recreate the thylacine from its closest living relative, the fat-tailed dunnart, and return it to Tasmania. Andrew Pask led the university's research, and uninvolved scientists were sceptical.

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• 8. Icon and Legend

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  Since 1998, the thylacine has been prominently displayed on Tasmanian vehicle number plates. It also appears on the official Tasmanian coat of arms, in the logos of the Tasmanian government and the City of Launceston, and on the University of Tasmania's ceremonial mace. Stamps from Australia, Equatorial Guinea and Micronesia have shown it. Since 1996, Australia has marked National Threatened Species Day on the anniversary of the last known animal's death.

  The best-known picture of the animal appeared in John Gould's The Mammals of Australia, published from 1845 to 1863. It has been copied often. Louisa Anne Meredith reproduced it in Tasmanian Friends and Foes in 1881, and the Tasmanian government published a monochrome version in 1934. Cascade Brewery put it on its label in 1987. The thylacine is also the mascot of the Tasmanian cricket team, and a series of stamps pairing Mickey Mouse characters with Australian animals includes one.

  Video games have adopted the animal as well. Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, a boomerang-wielding hero, starred in his own trilogy in the 2000s. Tiny Tiger, a villain in the Crash Bandicoot series, is a mutated thylacine. In Valorant, the agent Skye can send out a Tasmanian tiger to scout enemies and clear bomb-planting sites.

  On screen, the early 1990s cartoon Taz-Mania featured Wendell T. Wolf, a neurotic character billed as the last Tasmanian wolf. The Hunter, a 2011 Australian drama based on Julia Leigh's 1999 novel, stars Willem Dafoe as a man hired to track a Tasmanian tiger. In the 2021 film Extinct, a thylacine named Burnie helps a group of extinct animals travel through time. The 2022 science-fiction show The Peripheral has the animal brought back from DNA extracts. Colossal Biosciences and the University of Melbourne released an animated web series, De-extincting Tasie, whose thylacine Tasie parodies the Mr. DNA character from Jurassic Park.

  Rock art showing thylacine-like animals appears across Northern Australia, especially in the Kimberley region. Aboriginal Tasmanian names recorded for the animal include coorinna, kanunnah, cab-berr-one-nen-er, loarinna, laoonana, can-nen-ner and lagunta. In Palawa kani, the word is kaparunina. An early European record says Aboriginal people believed bad weather came when a thylacine carcass was left exposed on the ground rather than covered by a small shelter.

  A Nuenonne myth recorded by Jackson Cotton explains the stripes. A thylacine pup saved a spirit boy named Palana from a giant kangaroo. Palana marked the pup's back with ochre in honour of its bravery, giving thylacines their stripes. A constellation, Wurrawana Corinna, identified as within or near Gemini, was created to commemorate that act of courage.

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