A group of scientists from the University of Melbourne in Australia are seeking to resurrect the extinct marsupial over 90 years after the last one died.
Thylacines, popularly known as Tasmanian tigers (despite being a marsupial with a stripy back and looking nothing like a tiger), are assumed to have gone extinct in 1936, when Benjamin, the last known member of the species, died in captivity at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo.
Long after Benjamin died, reports of thylacine sightings in the wild remained, with many people hoping that they were still living someplace (stranger things have happened; this giant tortoise was rediscovered ambling on an island in the Galapagos in 2019, 113 years after it had last been sighted).
The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water, and Environment in Tasmania produced a paper in September 2019 detailing eight suspected (but unsubstantiated) sightings over the preceding three years. The Thylacine Awareness Group says the species is still roaming Australia’s mainland.
However, so far, only sporadic blurry footage has been given as proof. One research in 2017 estimated that the animal’s chances of survival were 1.6 trillion to one, while another in 2018 disagreed with the math but still concluded that it was likely extinct, albeit “there is enough uncertainty to at least leave this open as a tiny possibility.”
Despite surviving until the 1930s in Tasmania, the species is thought to have been extinct on mainland Australia some 3,000 years ago.
Scientists have since sequenced the animal’s genome, and the Melbourne team hopes to use it to “de-extinct” the species. A $5 million charity grant has been given to the lab to aid them in their search.
Professor Pask of the University of Melbourne’s School of BioSciences said in a press release that “thanks to this generous funding, we’re at a turning point where we can develop the technologies to potentially bring back a species from extinction and help safeguard other marsupials on the verge of extinction.”
“Three crucial pathways to thylacine extinction have been proposed by our research.” The decoding of the thylacine genome, which provided a complete blueprint on how to essentially make a thylacine, was one of our most significant achievements.”
“The funding will allow our lab to move forward and focus on three key areas: improving our understanding of the thylacine genome, developing techniques to make an embryo using marsupial stem cells, and successfully transferring the embryo into a host surrogate uterus, such as a dunnart or Tasmanian devil.””
The researchers believe that reintroducing the species would benefit not just the resurrected species, but also entire ecosystems.
“Of all the threatened animals, the thylacine has possibly the most convincing argument,” says the author “Pask went on to say. “The Tasmanian habitat has largely stayed constant, giving the ideal condition for reintroducing the thylacine, and its reintroduction is quite likely to be beneficial to the entire ecosystem.”