The Last Thylacine

This is a combined reel showing all the film footage that exists of the last Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger.

The Thylacine was a marsupial wolf which weighed 40-70 pounds.

Its skull is remarkably similar to that of the modern wolf (click on picture at right to make bigger), though its lifestyle was quite a bit different, and it was generally lighter in weight as well.

Unlike the wolf, the Thylacine did not have a very good sense of smell, and seems to have relied on sight and sound to locate prey, most of which it caught by stealth and ambush.

In addition, the Thylacine was not nearly as fast a mover as the wolf, as its long stiff tail gave it a somewhat truncated gait.

Unlike wolves, Thylacines do not vocalize much -- a few growls and hisses are all that were ever heard, nor did they hold territory against other Thylacine interlopers. In short, the Thylacine may have looked a bit like a wolf, but it very much acted like a huge possum.

The Thylacine once lived on the Australian mainland, but went extinct there 2,000 years before European settlement due to hunting by humans and their feral dogs (dingoes).

The Thylacine hung on in more remote Tasmania until a decline in the Tasmanian Emu population (a major food source for the Tasmanian Tiger) helped push their numbers down. A general decline in Thylacine number was coupled with an intensive hunting program largely fueled by the misinformation that the Thylacine drank blood and was a threat to livestock. These twin rumors fueled a bounty-hunting campaign, which worked to reduce the Thylacine population to a mere handful.

The last few Thylacines were scooped up by zoos, but the animals were successfully bred only once, and the last living Thylacine died in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Australia in 1936.

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