I gotta admit I'm not at all familiar with the Tasmanian tiger, but I suppose now I may, at some point in the future, have a chance to become acquainted with it in a zoo or something:
The last known thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus, or Tasmanian tiger) died in Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. Now, a genetic engineering company that last year announced plans to put thousands of woolly mammoths back on the Siberian steppe has added the lost marsupial wolf to its de-extinction docket. ...
Woolly mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago — the last ones were still alive when the Great Pyramids were being constructed in Egypt. The thylacine, which lived on the island of Tasmania, south of Australia, is a much more recent victim of extinction. Humans started hunting these striped marsupials once they were seen as a threat to settlers' livestock (which they by and large weren't), and the Tasmanian government put a price on their wolf-like heads.
You can picture the Tasmanian government's reaction when it found out that it helped drive the thylacine out of existence by making it profitable to kill them:
Let's be honest, though, this thing sounds like it was a pretty weird animal:
Despite its name and black stripes, the Tasmanian tiger was not closely related to big cats. It looked much like a dog, though it wasn't related to canids, either. The thylacine was the largest marsupial carnivore when it went extinct; it was an animal that hunted in the brush and bore live young prematurely, rearing them in a pouch on its belly.
The "largest carnivore marsupial," huh? So like a gigantic possum, basically.
Yeah if something like that stayed extinct...I'm not sure I'd mind.
You can read about the ambitious undertaking – and the environmental benefits of bringing the Tasmanian tiger back – here in full detail.
Now if only they could bring me, Harambe, fully back in all my glory...
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