On the Matter of Thylacines

 Growing up, I had a profound interest in thylacines. Everyone reading this should know already what they are. They are also known as Tasmanian tigers and Tasmanian wolves, and in decades past were called also hyena-opossums, Tasmanian dingos and Zebra-wolves among others. 

The above beautiful painting is from my copy of Rare and Beautiful Animals, a 70s book of then-endangered species, with a few extinct ones like the aurochs and bleubok thrown in (the thylacine was still in the endangered realm). The painting depicts a thylacine with a freshly killed pademelon. It was one of my favorite books, that I got for Christmas in the third grade. I remember asking for it at a mall, and my dad coming back with the book hidden inside his coat! I supposed it had sold out, and it such a surprise to find it under the tree! 

It was THIS pic that was my favorite though, and you can still see the mustard stains that got on the page, when I was eating sardine-and-mustard sandwiches, which went so well with reading about Australian wildlife. 

And yeah, that's me holding my favorite picture of a thylacine, and again with a picture I drew for a report I did for fifth grade on Australian marsupials. It shows a family group of thylacines at a kill, and  Tasmanian devils waiting their turn to scavenge the carcass. According to most reports, thylacines did sometimes gather in family groups, but more typically they hunted singly or in pairs. Tasmanian devils, did, however, often follow thylacines to feed off their kills. Or so I'd read. 

(Another slight error here is that the animal they're feasting on I drew as a ring-tailed rock wallaby. They're found only in the deep interior of the Australian mainland, around Ars Rock. Certainly not Tasmania! Unless this was on the mainland thousands of years past)

Then there was folkloric notion that thylacines were literally bloodthristy, which is why I drew one lapping the blood. Not accurate at all, though it seemed "cool" to my pre-teen mind. This, I learned later was merely a rumor spread by the exterminators themselves to make the thylacine hated as a predatory pest. 

  I used to draw pictures of them in colored marker all the time, often hunting wallabies and opening their mouths, which I'd read they could do to nearly 180 degrees. This was much to the consternation of Sunday school teachers who didn't know what to make of it. North American Opossums are also known for their wide jaw-gap, in which you can see the family kinship. Opossums are sometimes described as "kin to the kangaroo, but as American as cornpone". More accurately, they're kin to the thylacine, Tasmanian devil, and tiger quoll. All have the same "jaws like a steel trap," though the devil has the strongest bite-force, and it's fairly easy to tell they're all the same family, the dasyurids. Yes, some scientist might disagree, and class the Opossums of the Americas in their own family, which is related to the larger, thylacine-like borhyenids of prehistoric South America. But the kinship between them is closer than any of them to other marsupial groups. 

The borhyenas of S. America (which included the infamous facsimile saber-tooth thylacosmilus), were, in fact, descended from prothylacinus, an animal that looked, in fact, part way between an opossum and a thylacine! The true thylacines of Australia were undoubtedly, descended from a similar type of animal. Throughout the Miocene, when Australia became isolated, there was an entire family of thylacines, including smaller forest-dwelling species, and a larger, more muscular species called the "powerful thylacine" or thylacine potens. I sometimes call this prehistoric thylacine the "tiger thylacine", because modern reconstructions sometimes depict them as being striped all over like a genuine tiger (below). 

Thylacines lived clear across Australia and New Guinea until the arrival of dingo, which is blamed for the disappearance of both the thylacine and the devil from the Australian mainland, presumably from competition over prey. And anyone familiar with thylacines knows the sad story of their extinction at the hands of Tasmanian sheep ranchers and a government bounty. It was believed, with some reason, that some might have still survived up until the 1980s, and it was listed as endangered throughout this time. By the late eighties, they had given it up as extinct. Before then, I often dreamed of seeking them out as an adult, and saving them. And so, it turned out, did many others! And I still might not have given that dream up, if only there was some substantial evidence they still lived. I'm certain, from tracks and hair reports, that a few did indeed survive into my own lifetime. In 1978 or 82, there was a report in the Guiness book of World records, stating that two policemen had spotted one. 

But the most startling report of all, was one I only found as an adult, long after there was an Internet: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSLRWr6vDP0

https://youtu.be/njB2qAit0Qs

Now this certainly looks like the real thing to me. No dog has a tail like this, they hind legs are carried exactly as a thylacine, and the stripes are even visible in a few flashes of frame. The ears, build and the way it moves all scream thylacine! Not convincing are the more recent films that are unmistakably foxes with wet or denuded tails taken sometime in the 2000s. One gent even tried to pass off a pademelon as a thylacine!

The one caught on camera running through  a trailer was probably descended from a few captive animals brought to the mainland. But its doubtful any could survive until now, or we'd have better evidence than we do. Then again, if any do survive, perhaps the mainland is the place to look!

One of the books I read as a child that had an extensive coverage of the thylacine was Bernard Grzimek's Four-Legged Australians. Grzimek, author of the famous encyclopedia of wildlife was of the then-current opinion that there were still survivors, and even thought they could be saved.

 Only that the problem was that they would not be.  

In his chapter on the Tasmanian tiger, he compared saving them to the renovation of the crumbling Egyptian statues of one of the dynastic pharaohs, adding that the statues had been created through unethical means, namely slave labor. It would take merely a fraction of money, he argued, to save the thylacine, but that it just was not considered to be of enough importance. Perhaps if it were in the United States or some more prominent nation. But "not in Australia." A huge reverse had, by then, been created for the thylacine's preservation. The fine for killing one was seven times that of the original bounty. "But even this effort won't save them now," according to him. The only real way of saving them, Grzimek writes, would be to set aside some open land, and stock it with enough kangaroos and wallabies for their needs." That didn't happen of course, and by now Grzimek's grim prophecy has almost certainly come to pass. 

Thylacines, as evidenced by their striped coats, favored "if not steppes, at least open country" according to Grzimek. The species was completely unadapted to the dense mountain forests where they were forced to take refuge. The above entry in Rare and Beautiful Animals notes that they frequented "spare woods" and "woody savanna where there were kangaroos and sheep." 

Even back in the days when the thylacine was being eradicated, though, some people opposed its persecution. The bill supporting a bounty against it passed only by a small margin. Still, there was allegedly one gentlemen who infamously wanted to declare war on all of Tasmania's native marsupials, devils, quolls, and everything. Why stop with the Tasmanian tiger? 

And as Grzimek said both in Four-Legged Australians, and again in the section on marsupials in his wildlife encyclodpedia, "why go to such trouble [of saving them], for the sake of a "predatory pest"?

Here's an opinion.

If thylacines were halfway as cute as koalas they'd never been wiped out. Koalas nearly were, in fact, as thousands were slaughtered by the fur trade. But the outrage, as one might imagine, as deafening, even back then, as it was when when Teddy Roosevelt's sons shot a couple of adorable giant pandas. 

The Tasmanian devil, too, would have surely perished back in the day, had the facial tumor scourge have happened back during the early twentieth century or before. Now, fortunately, we're way more wildlife-conscious, and the devil's Warner Bros. cartoon counterpart was even used to gain awareness for the species plight. 

The thylacine, too, is far more celebrated today, and is nearly a Tasmanian icon itself (even appearing on Tasmania's coat of arms!). But that recognition is too late to save it, of course. 

There is now, though, the matter of thylacine cloning. But that is another story. 

Below is the inside cover of Grzimek's Four-Legged Australians, showing a variety of Australian wildlife stamps.  Notice the stamp of the purple thylacine!

More recently, there have been books specially devoted to the thylacine. here are two that I own: 

There is now with the age of the Internet, a site called the Thylacine Museum, which by far the most comprehensive source on the natural history of thylacines you'll ever see, including rare photos, films of last living specimens, anatomy, history of extinction, cloning and more: 

http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/