But as the decades pass, and a more than million-dollar reward offered in 2005 for conclusive evidence of the thylacine’s existence goes unclaimed, the species’ extinction becomes ever more certain-and ever more regretted.Īustralian Museum Chief Scientist Kris Helgen, a mammalogist and National Geographic Explorer, has examined thylacine specimens in most museums that have them. Many rejected that verdict: At one time it was estimated that one in three Tasmanians had a “true” tiger-sighting story. In 1986, with no confirmed sightings in the wild for 56 years, the thylacine officially was declared extinct. Calls for the animals’ protection came too late. By the early 1900s, thylacines were so scarce that payouts dwindled and then ceased. Over the next two decades thousands of thylacines were trapped, shot, and poisoned by shepherds and hunters. The “native tiger” was demonized as a blood-drinking sheep killer, and in 1888 a bounty was approved. Despite scant evidence that thylacines caused significant stock losses, sheep ranchers made them a scapegoat. But what might have been the animals’ sanctuary became, instead, their death camp. Only the Tasmanian population of thylacines remained, marooned on lutruwita since sea-level rise submerged the land bridge to the mainland some 10,000 years ago. No one is sure why, but a changing climate and competition with the recently introduced dingo are the likely causes. About 3,000 years ago this species disappeared from the Australian mainland. The last to survive was the so-called modern thylacine, which at one time inhabited the entire Australian continent as well as the island of New Guinea. )Īt least five thylacine species once existed. ( Here's what we lose when an animal goes extinct. The thylacine’s extinction is a symbol of that folly. This colonial fervor led to an ecological makeover from which Australia hasn’t recovered. It was a short step from misnaming and maligning the native wildlife to seeking its replacement with introduced varieties. Northern Hemisphere mammals were considered superior in every way to Australian marsupials that early observers deemed “helpless, deformed and monstrous works of nature.” Today’s much loved koala was derided as “uncouth … awkward and unwieldy,” and the thylacine, the world’s largest marsupial predator to survive into modern times, was dismissed as a primitive scavenger, “brutish” and “stupid.” Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įuropeans pinned various names to the animal-zebra opossum, marsupial wolf, Tasmanian dingo-out of colonial prejudice as much as ignorance. A party of Tasman’s sailors looking for fresh water saw the footprints of creatures “having claws like a tiger.” In his search for exploitable southern lands in 1642, Tasman fetched up on the eastern shores of the island he called Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania in his honor but also known by its traditional Aboriginal name, lutruwita). The Dutch explorer and navigator Abel Tasman spawned the tiger meme. In its existence as in its demise, the animal also known as the thylacine was a victim of European misunderstanding and error. The first thing to say about the Tasmanian tiger is that it wasn’t a tiger and it didn’t live only in Tasmania. Not literally alive-there hasn’t been a verified sighting of Australia’s iconic marsupial predator for close to a century-but alive in imagination, in memory, in cultural recognition, and in collective regret over its extinction.Īlive, too, in the quest of a handful of scientists and entrepreneurs to “de-extinct” the species and bring it back to the wild.
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