Could science really resurrect the Tasmanian tiger?
Recent developments in genetic science mean ‘de-extinction is becoming a possibility.
It was an unusually cold night in September 1936 when a zookeeper at Beaumaris Zoo in Tasmania found Benjamin dead. Intense heat had struck the small Australian island during the day and now temperatures had plummeted to frigid lows. Lying slumped in the corner of his enclosure, the world’s last captive Tasmanian tiger had succumbed to exposure by-way-of neglect — he had been locked out of his sheltered sleeping quarters for bad behaviour.
For five years, Benjamin had thrilled and terrified crowds at the zoo in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart — a former penal colony established by the British in 1804. A marsupial, much like many of the mammals found on the Australian continent, the Tasmanian tiger was capable of performing a limited bipedal hop like a kangaroo and its stiff tail would assist it in standing upright for short periods of time. Residents of nearby ports and settlements flocked to the capital to see the intriguing Tasmanian native.
Benjamin had come to Beaumaris after being captured in 1931 by two daughters of a sheep farmer, the most vocal class of belligerent in the ongoing war that raged against the animal inside Tasmania. By this time, sightings of Tasmanian tigers in the wild had become exceptionally rare. It was this specimen that would ultimately be captured on video by Australian naturalist David Fleay during a visit to the zoo in 1933.
The grainy black-and-white video shot by Fleay runs for a total of forty-five seconds and remains the last known motion picture depicting a living Tasmanian tiger. In the footage, we see the traits of the animal that scientists today recognise as distinctive: jaws which opened to an almost 90-degree angle; an awkward and timid gait; and of course the trademark stripes on the back-end of its body. We see it wander around its barren cement enclosure looking rather bored: an apex predator behind bars. Despite an observation of general shyness around humans, Fleay was reportedly bitten in the buttocks during filming — perhaps the best anecdotal evidence of the frustration the animal harboured towards its imprisonment.
The eventual death of Benjamin was not widely reported in newspapers at the time. Officials at Beaumaris Zoo expected it would quickly be able to source a replacement for its deceased crowd-pleaser. Tasmanian tigers had been displayed in zoos from London to Los Angeles and demand had only grown as the species dwindled into minuscule numbers. Management disposed of the animal’s remains without a second thought. However, it would not take long for the gravity of the situation to hit.
All subsequent efforts to capture a live specimen were unsuccessful. In fact, no Tasmanian tigers would ever be definitively identified in the wild again. When Benjamin died, his entire race died along with him.
Now, more than 85 years following the death of the final tiger, science is ready to intervene. After huge developments in gene technology, a growing number of voices are advocating for the ‘de-extinction’ of species that have been lost. But is that a truly viable idea?
The Fall of an Apex Predator
Unlike their name suggests, Tasmanian tigers were not exclusive to the island of Tasmania and cannot really be considered tigers. The more precise name of thylacine can be used to relinquish any notion that these nocturnal hunters have much in common, if anything at all, with their big cat counterparts.
As far back as 1000BC, thylacines roamed most of Australasia. Aboriginal tribespeople encountered them on their hunts and etched their likeness into cave walls, warning others of a fearsome beast that roamed the plains. By the time European settlers arrived on the continent, thylacines had become extinct on the Australian mainland and pushed back to their final stronghold of Tasmania.
A variety of reasons have been presented for the species’ demise in Australia — dingoes, with their more powerful jaws and agile bodies, proved to be fierce competition for thylacines for both food and territory. As technology quickly developed, the human population on the continent exploded which added further pressure to the species. A combination of these factors, as well as unpredictable changes to the climate, were sufficient to reduce thylacines from apex predator to whimpering mutt in the span of a few hundred years.
Tasmania was originally a land of plenty — many of the island’s unique flora and fauna thrived in an environment that only had to deal with a limited population of indigenous residents. Thylacines persisted in the segregated ecosystem of Tasmania, separated from their Australian cousins by about 250 miles of sea now known as the Bass Strait. And then the settlers came.
Following the first landings in 1803, European settlements rapidly expanded into the rainforests of Tasmania, swelling the population of the island from its original 5,000 to around 170,000 by the turn of the 20th century. More people meant more hungry mouths, resulting in an increase of farmers rearing livestock and poultry — a somewhat ideal prey for the ambush hunting tactics of the Tasmanian tiger. Its awkward gait meant it could not run particularly quickly and was quite incapable of chasing down fleeing prey, instead opting to tire them out with relentless pursuit.
Farmers and other agricultural workers soon began to perpetuate a stigma of the thylacine being a blood-thirsty beast. Attacks on livestock became such a nuisance that the Tasmanian government began offering bounties for the culling of adult thylacines and their pups. A total of 2,184 bounties were paid out between the years of 1888 and 1909, but it is believed that many more thylacines were killed than were claimed for considering their reputation as fearsome killers.
By the late 1920s, thylacines had become extremely rare in the wild. Only a few sightings were reported each year, and the increasing rarity of the species had led to increased demand for captive specimens to be displayed in zoos around the world. The 1931 capture of Benjamin, the final thylacine to exist in human captivity, would signal the beginning of the end for a species decimated by hunters and stigmatised by self-serving agriculturists.
Official protection of the species would be mandated in July 1936 following lobbying by the scientific and zoological communities, and public opinion would ultimately shift in favour of protecting thylacines. This protection, however, would come far too late to save the species from eradication, and a mere 59 days before Benjamin would die in captivity in Beaumaris Zoo.
My Eyesight Isn’t That Great, But…
It would not be until February 10, 1937, that a writer for the Launceston Examiner publicly posited the idea of extinction. “Has anybody seen a Tasmanian tiger lately?” they wrote in a matter-of-fact tone. “Fears exist that this unique specimen of fauna may now be extinct. […] A sub-committee… was appointed to take steps to ascertain if… any T’asmanian tiger had been seen lately.”
Despite the newspaper’s plea, few reliable sightings would come. A thylacine was apparently shot and photographed on the island in 1938 but the evidence has never seen the light of day. In 1957, a pilot reported seeing a striped animal resembling a Tasmanian tiger roaming the island’s west coast, but no ground team could confirm the sighting.
One of the most notable sightings occurred in 1961 when a night fisherman apparently encountered one of the elusive animals, which subsequently attacked him. He reportedly bashed its skull in and realised in the harsh daylight that he had in fact killed a thylacine, which at the time carried a hefty fine of £100 despite their apparent extinction. He disposed of the body but took blood and hair samples to a local university, where they were tentatively identified as having come from the lost species. However, further tests were deemed inconclusive.
Ever since, the legacy of the elusive thylacine has taken a turn. Alleged sightings akin to those of Bigfoot crop up regularly; blurry or staged photos that act as the punchline to some cryptozoological joke. In stark opposition to the notion of ‘de-extinction’ are those who believe the Tasmanian tiger never left. Passionate expedition projects run by such individuals genuinely seek to find the thylacine alive and well somewhere on the continent.
With no government agency willing to accept reports, a website run by Murray McMcAllister, a former physical education teacher, seems to be the main rendezvous point for many public sightings. McAllister has been involved in thylacine hunting since the late 1990s and has led a number of expeditions into the Australian bush, cataloguing evidence such as muddy footprints and half-eaten kangaroo carcasses.
In an interview for this story, Mr. McAllister explained that he set up his website TassieTiger so tiger spotters could find a place to “have their stories told without scrutinisation or… public ridicule.” An email address provided on the homepage encourages those who claim to have seen a Tasmanian tiger to reach out Mr. McAllister — of course, this falls under a stark image of the website’s proprietor reaching out and appearing to stroke the back of an illustrated thylacine.
One report featured on the website is dated as recently as July 27, 2021 and reads:
“I was at Bear Gully Campground today… and out of nowhere what I thought was a dog ran out of the bushes across the road into some more bushes.”
“The first thing I thought was it’s a greyhound… Then it hit me, it could have been a Tiger. I want to say I saw faint stripes on its back but it happened earlier today. And I’ve been looking at heaps of tiger pics so that maybe messing with my memory.”
Many of the reports seem to share this sense of uncertainty— a shape spotted in the bushes, or a blur seen rapidly darting across a darkened road. Another entry from February of the same year echoes this style of confusion, with the reporter saying: “From right to left it crossed in front of me… It happened so fast I couldn’t say if the coat was golden, I believe it may have been a bit darker than golden but not sure.”
It is difficult to take these sightings seriously when correspondents begin with statements like “my eyesight isn’t that great but…” before proclaiming with unadulterated certainty that what they saw was a thylacine. Yet the website documents hundreds of reports from all over Australia, many peppered with just enough intriguing detail to evoke a whispered ‘what if?’ in the most skeptical of skeptics.
Despite the questionable nature of some of the reports, Mr. McAllister says he reads without judgement. “I treat every sighting report with an open mind,” he explained. “The people contacting me with their sightings are giving up their time and energy to convey the intricate details of their encounter and there is a certain level of trust associated with that.”
“If the sighting details are vague, lacking substance, irrational…” he explained, “then I may not pursue them with the same vigor as I might with a more detailed report.”
And pursuit is the name of the game for Mr. McAllister. When credible reports come in, he investigates the locations personally in order to advance his research. To prevent rival studies in high-value areas, Mr. McAllister says he is prone to publishing details of sightings only after he has exhausted his own tracking methods. With numerous sightings being reported each year, Mr. McAllister seems to have his work cut out for him.
Although each claim is ardently checked, no report has ever been verified nor led to a capture. But it seems evident that one thing that has been captured securely is the imagination of curious Australians everywhere. Despite evidence to the contrary, projects like those of Mr. McAllister continue on — doggedly determined to prove that thylacines still dwell in the Land Down Under.
The Future of the Thylacine
Last month, American bioscience company Colossal announced that it had raised $15 million in initial funding. It’s goal? Bring the woolly mammoth back from the dead. Some critics balked at this story of ‘de-extinction’ and doubted its success considering the intricacies of such genetic tampering. But for others, it has provided hope that perhaps a species such as the thylacine could one day be cloned and reintroduced to its native home of Tasmania.
For a time before Colossal’s publicised drive for de-extinction, it had been proposed that the thylacine should be the first eradicated animal to undergo this form of extremely complex (and expensive) gene manipulation and cloning. However the notion of such has provoked much controversy, as well as moral questions on whether it is right for humans to participate in what is essentially science-based necromancy.
There are a few success stories involving species that have been extinct in the wild and subsequently reintroduced with breeding programmes, like the California condor or grey wolves. That said, it would be a world-first for a species deemed universally extinct to be brought back to roam the Earth once again. The sheer idea of it sounds like science fiction, but the Tasmanian tiger has been proposed as the perfect candidate thanks to the abundance of specimens held in museums around the world.
The most important puzzle piece in ‘de-extincting’ a species is acquiring full DNA sequence. In pelts and bones, DNA is usually degraded meaning sequencing an entire profile is often not viable. The best option for scientists is to acquire a well-preserved specimen, such as those encased in ice, therefore preventing severe degradation of the DNA profile. Scientists hoping to revive the Tasmanian tiger have already secured such a genome profile, striking lucky with a thylacine pup taken from its mothers womb and preserved in ethanol. Experts claim this offers the best chance yet at recreating this lost species, by combining and recalibrating its DNA alongside that of a canine.
This type of gene editing is how Dr. George Church, renowned geneticist at Harvard University and one of the founding members of Colossal, seeks to revive the wooly mammoth. By editing elephant DNA, the company hopes to add genes for mammoth traits like dense hair and thick fat for withstanding freezing temperatures. The researchers hope to produce embryos of these mammoth-like elephants in a few years, and ultimately produce entire populations of the animals.
It is hoped that if successful, Tasmanian tigers might be next in line for a comeback. A few issues stand in the way of a thylacine resurrection however: genetic weakness, for one, has oft been cited as one of the contributing factors to the species’ initial extinction. Whether it could survive in a modern eco-system is a question that has been asked aloud.
However, supporters of the mission are quick to claim that the Tasmanian wilderness has not changed much in the last hundred years. “The animals that it ate are still mostly there and it could slot right back into its ecological niche,” said Dr. Andrew Pask, an associate professor from the University of Melbourne who was part of the original team who sequenced the thylacine genome.
With arguments on both sides, one thing that is certain is that concept of ‘de-extinction’ seems to have slotted firmly into the agenda of mainstream science. To some, the notion of reviving a lost species may be unconscionable — a pushing of the ethical boundaries that exist within modern technology. Others have contended that extinct species are better off dead, acting as a hard lesson for future generations to learn about conservation of Earth’s most vulnerable.
Regardless of opinion, it is undoubtedly a thought that provokes awe in all. Whether we cheer or cower is personal choice. Either way, it may not be long before we see Tasmanian tigers on more than just t-shirts and postcards, but back in the wild, comfortably enjoying an existence that humans once so ignorantly destroyed.
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