![]() No confirmed sightings have occurred since 1936, however, and the species was declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1982. Several people have since claimed thylacine sightings, and some researchers have argued the animal could have survived longer than thought. ![]() The last known of its kind, a thylacine named Benjamin, died in September 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, just two months after its species was granted protected status. For hundreds of years, the animal clung to the island of Tasmania as its final refuge. Sometime in the last few thousand years, however, the animal disappeared from New Guinea and the Australian mainland, likely due to human hunting and competition with the dingo, which was brought to Australia from Asia some 4,000 years ago. Semi-nocturnal and mostly solitary, thylacine was likely an ambush predator, hunting small- to medium-size prey at night. It roamed the Earth for millions of years, likely since the early Pleistocene epoch, ranging across much of Australia and New Guinea. The animal was nicknamed the Tasmanian tiger for its characteristic striped lower back. The thylacine ( Thylacinus cynocephalus) was a marsupial, carrying its young in a pouch just like a kangaroo- Thylacinus comes from the Greek word thulakos meaning pouch-but it looked more like a slim dog with a stiff, thick tail. Thylacine de-extinction has been a topic in Australia for at least 20 years, and it’s gone nowhere.” A lost Australian predator There’s a space still waiting for the thylacine,” says Chris Johnson, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania who studies extinction. “I don’t see any difficulty in slotting the thylacine back into modern ecosystems. The ethics of bringing back an extinct creature are also hotly debated. The work could also help develop technology, such as genetic engineering tools and artificial wombs, that could support other conservation work.īut skeptics argue that the genetic engineering challenges that have thwarted previous attempts to bring back the thylacine still present significant barriers, and that de-extinction work could distract from other conservation efforts to help the animals facing extinction now. The scientists behind the project believe that bringing the creature back would restore ecological balance to the island of Tasmania by re-introducing a top predator that kept other animals in check. “We’ve been working on for about 10 years in my lab, but by partnering with Colossal, they have this incredible wealth of knowledge, this incredible amount of technology that they can bring to the table with the work that we’ve been doing,” says Andrew Pask, head of the thylacine restoration lab at the University of Melbourne. ![]() This Australian marsupial predator went extinct less than a century ago. Today Colossal announced that it has partnered with a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne to work on the de-extinction of another animal: the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. The work has been a longtime project of Harvard geneticist George Church, who recently co-founded the bioscience company Colossal, with $75 million in private funding, to accelerate the research. The most well-known de-extinction project is an effort to bring back a version of the woolly mammoth by splicing its genome with Asian elephant DNA. The lab-created animals would not be the exact species that went extinct, but hybrids of those species with their DNA filled in by living relatives. Proponents of “de-extinction” argue that by returning species that played an important ecological role to their old habitats, entire regions could benefit. A radical idea to support the recovery of damaged ecosystems has been gathering steam: resurrect species that have gone extinct and reintroduce them to the wild.
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